Links

Bands

In general. Most of the bands have a website where you can read the latest news about the band, its list of awards, touring schedule, listen to its music, purchase CDs, join its fan club, view pictures, etc. These websites range from simple down to earth to elegant and sophisticated. Each website is distinctly different, reflecting the character of the band, and all are worth a visit.

Alan Munde Gazette: website.
Bonham Revue: website, mp3 downloads.
Heartland Express: review.
Jeanette Williams Band: website, myspace, youtube, klipperstittmusic, artist direct.
Jim Blair and City Moon: website, myspace, tribute website.
Klondike 5: myspace.
Robert Hale and Wildfire: website, klipperstittmusic.
Tall Cotton String Band: website (under construction), myspace.
Zoo Grass Boys: website.

Buy and download music

There are countless websites where you can listen to a cd, all or in part, before you buy it. A few of them are:

cdbaby
nexthit
groupietunes
audiolunchbox
cmt
amazon.com
reverbnation

Skiatook and Green Country

These two travel guides are excellent websites. Both provide search capabilities that will let you discover all that Green Country has to offer in short order.

Green Country Travel Guide.
Oklahoma Travel Guide.

http://www.skiatookchamber.com/
http://www.skiatook.com/skiatook/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skiatook,_Oklahoma
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Country_(Oklahoma)

Local Music Festivals

Woody Fest. July 8-12, 2009, Okema, OK.
Walnut Valley Festival. September 16-20, 2009, Winfield, KS.
Oklahoma International Bluegrass Festival. October 1-3, 2009, Guthrie, OK

Festival Friends

http://www.bluegrasstymes.com. Run by Dan Scott, presents a variety of bluegrass material of interest: news, music, and a list of festivals across the US.

Should have/must have/gotta have Freeware

Audacity. Good music recording and editing program. Use it to make your band's first recording, capture streaming audio off the internet, digitize your old LPs and tapes, convert between sound formats, etc. Plugins are available for special effects. Make sure you download the LAME MP3 encoder as well.

Pacemaker Plugin for Winamp. The Pacemaker plugin lets you change pitch and tempo independently. Works great if you need to change keys or slow down to play along with your favorite mp3.

TEFview. Sort of like midi on steroids. It displays the sheet music, the tablature, and the fretboard (of the instrument for which the file was written) and then highlights the notes as the song is played. Can also alter the tempo and add special effects. Great for practicing. Takes special .tef files of which there are thousands available on the internet. Examples: single tef files, entire collections.

Finale Notepad. Music notation software.

Irfanview. Probably the best photo viewer around and the Swiss army knife of multimedia players. There are very few graphic, audio, or video formats Irfanview won't handle. Plus much much more! I've been using it for 10 years. It's a gem.

Firefox Browser. A good browser can make the internet a lot more fun. Firefox is standards compliant, much more secure than IE, and has a huge number of addons that greatly expand the capabilities of the browser. Very highly recommended.

Youtube capture. Youtube is a great place to find tons of old songs that you've half forgotten and can't remember all of the melody. A slick Firefox addon called DownloadHelper will let you save these videos to your hard drive. The videos are in Flash video format (.flv). Free Flash video player.