A bit buggy but good results, and you can’t beat the price: that pretty much sums up my experience with MuseScore, a free music notation software that I found online a few days ago.

Since this happens to be not only my first encounter with MuseScore but also with music transcription programs in general, I have nothing with which to compare this software. I much doubt that it can compete with Sibelius or Finale, but then, neither does it cost $600. You can’t get more budget-friendly than “free.” And, shortcomings aside, this software is getting the job done for me as I work on my “Giant Steps” e-book.

So what are the shortcomings whereof I speak? Here are a few that have made my notation process a bit frustrating:

* Various items that I’m supposed to be able to drag and drop, don’t.

* Text settings: I customize them, hit apply, and nothing happens. Or something happens, but it wasn’t what I ordered. Kind of like telling the waitress to bring you coffee and you wind up with a cup of tea instead.

* The instruction manual leaves out some key information. It’ll get you up and running, but sooner or later–and my money is on sooner–you’ll encounter an issue that the manual doesn’t address. At that point, it’s a matter of guesswork.

* The program is prone to shut down if you try to make it perform too fast, or what it considers to be too fast. For instance, don’t make the mistake of hitting the “undo” button multiple times very quickly.

So much for the negatives. Those aside, MuseScore is doing what I need it to do for me, and while the going is slow (which could be at least partially due to my own inexperience), I’m pleased with the results overall. Moreover, as the first open source transcription program available, the possibilities for MuseScore are expansive. As has been pointed out in another review, this program could become to Finale and Sibelius what Open Office is to Microsoft Office.

Bottom line: If your needs for music transcription software are fairly straightforward and you don’t have a gob of cash to spend on the brand-name stuff, then give MuseScore a try. The advantages of this software easily outweigh its snags, and I have to say, the results look great! MuseScore is clearly a labor of love, and I think you’ll come to value this free, useful music composition tool.

Intellectually, all saxophonists understand that Charlie Parker had to pay his dues just like anyone else. We’ve heard the stories about a high-school-age Parker learning to play on a clunky old artifact of an alto saxophone held together by rubber bands; about his mortification when drummer Jo Jones “gonged” him by skittering a cymbal across the floor at a jam session; about Parker woodshedding for 13-hour stints in the Ozarks, developing his formidable technique. In theory at least, we know that Bird wasn’t born with an alto sax in his hands. He had a learning curve just like the rest of us mere mortals. There was even–and I realize this will leave many of you in a state of shock and denial, but it’s nevertheless true–a time when Bird sucked.

We know these things. Personally, though, I still find the idea of Charlie Parker as a novice hard to wrap my mind around.

So reading the book “Charlie Parker: His Music and Life”* by Carl Woideck has proved not only enlightening, but also reassuring. Musical genius though he was, Bird was still just a very human, flawed possessor of a God-given gift that he worked hard to develop. Seen in that light, Parker represents not an unattainable ideal, but a waymaker, a teacher, and an inspiration who encourages the rest of us to keep at it; to push past our personal limitations; to practice, practice, and practice some more.

A number of excellent biographies have been written on Charlie Parker, providing fascinating glimpses into his quirky personality, immense talent, and tragic excesses. Rather than merely adding one more book to the firmament of Charlie Parker life stories, Woideck has taken a different approach, focusing on the development of Bird as a musician. Woideck’s tome offers eye-opening and profitable insights into the different phases of Charlie Parker’s music, from Parker’s apprenticeship with Kansas City saxophonist Buster Smith, to his tenures with the Jay McShann and Fletcher Henderson big bands, to his co-development of new musical concepts with trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, to his peak playing years in the late 40s, to his latter period in the 50s, when Parker’s sense that he had taken the bebop approach as far as he could left him groping for a new direction even as his addictions increasingly took their toll.

A glance at the table of contents reveals the book’s logical, easy-to-follow organization. Part one offers a brief biographical sketch of Bird, creating a context for the examination of his musicianship that follows. Part two explores Parker’s music in four different periods: 1940-43, 1944-46, 1947-49, and 1950-55.

Woideck substantiates his discussion of Parker’s musical trajectory and playing style with copious analyses of Bird solos, using excerpts from such tunes as “Honey and Body,” “Embraceable You,” “Ko Ko,” “I’ve Found a New Baby,” “Body and Soul,” “Swingmatism,” and many more to illustrate Bird’s changing palette of nuances and techniques.

This is easily the most comprehensive exploration of Parker’s music that I’ve come across, made all the more so by appendices that provide a select discography and four complete solo transcriptions: “Honey and Body,” “Oh, Lady Be Good!” “Parker’s Mood (take 5), and “Just Friends.” Being myself an alto sax man like Bird, I could wish that the solos had been transcribed in the Eb alto key that Parker played them in. However, from a standpoint of general usefulness to all musicians, it’s understandable that the transcriptions and discussion examples appear in concert pitch.

Painstakingly researched and written with clarity and crispness, “Charlie Parker: His Music and Life” is a fascinating and enriching book for any musician, and a must-read for alto saxophonists.

__________________________

* (C)1996 by the University of Michigan, pub. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI.

I had crossed the world to meet this cloud, and, finally, here we were, face to face. I held my hand to shield my eyes from the brilliant rays, now that the sun was well off the northeastern horizon. And these cascaded down the cloud’s face, casting long, warm shadows along the ripples of its surface. The undulations gently rose up with the progress of the wave, before disappearing over the crest.

In so many words, Gavin Pretor-Pinney describes his first encounter with an unusual and wonderful cloud called the Morning Glory. The setting is Burketown, south of the Gulf of Carpenteria, halfway between nowhere and oblivion in the hinterlands of northern Queensland, Australia. To this tiny community, a growing number of glider pilots make annual pilgrimage, convening to take advantage of the ultimate gliding experience: surfing the Morning Glory. While this wave-like cloud formation–and it is a wave, the product of a rolling current of air advancing linearly across the sky–occurs elsewhere in the world, the Queensland Morning Glory is its finest example. And little, nowheresville Burketown is the Morning Glory Capital.

Surfing the Morning Glory is just one of the fascinating, warmly written, often humorous accounts you’ll find in The Cloudspotter’s Guide: The Science, History, and Culture of Clouds. Who better to write such a book than Gavin Pretor-Pinney, founder of The Cloud Appreciation Society. A lover and student of clouds since his childhood, the author takes you for a look at clouds from many angles. Working his way up from the atmosphere’s lower levels, he not only provides an excellent, well-organized introduction to cloud nomenclature, including the various species and varieties of each cloud genus, but he also shares personal and informative bits and pieces that render the richness of his subject in an imaginative, often funny, and sometimes off-the-wall manner. Through it all, Gavin’s passion for clouds shines like sun pillars in a sheen of stratocumulus.

In The Cloudspotter’s Guide you’ll revisit the terrifying experience of Lt. Col William Rankin, who in 1959, having jettisoned his crippled aircraft in the midst of a thunderstorm, became a human hailstone and lived to tell the tale.

You’ll also set foot inside the strangest “structure” ever designed–the Blur Building of the 2002 Swiss National Expo, made entirely out of cloud. And you’ll join Gavin in an amusing and educational fantasy trip backstage at a Frankie Lymon concert, as Gavin holds up the event in an effort to explain to the singer why the rain falls from up above.

There’s plenty more to this little book, named one of the Best Books of 2006 by The Economist. I spotted it a few weeks ago on the shelf at Schuler Books & Music while looking for some weather-related reading and decided to give it a try. Good choice. The Cloudspotter’s Guide is a whimsical, informative, and heartfelt read, written in a popular tone that will engage pretty much anyone who has ever looked up at the sky with a sense of childlike wonder and adult curiosity. Weather nerds, stick this one in your library. You’ll reach for it more than once, not just to refresh yourself on cloud nomenclature, but also to remind yourself why you’re doing so.

Next time I’m in Hays, Kansas, I hope to sample the India Pale Ale at the Lb. Brewing Company. Here’s what one reviewer had to say:

A very impressive establishment and such a nice draw (pun intended) for a town like Hays. I would highly recommend this pub to anyone looking for the best beer and food around. Gerald and his wife are to be commended for running an outstanding operation. The beer was fresh and it’s hard to believe that they can keep over 6 different types of beer flowing in a place like Hays. I tried the Pale Ale, the IPA, and the stout. All were top-notch but the IPA in the large Lb glass was simply outstanding! This is a unique but yummy IPA (hops were not as strong as traditional IPA and color was darker too). Great crafting here!

I had no idea such an establishment existed in Hays. For that matter, a nagging question these past couple of years has been, where can I go to get a decent beer in Tornado Alley?

It turns out that there are more options than I realized. Thanks to my sweetheart, Lisa–who knows that my love for fine ales runs, if not a close second to my passion for storm chasing, certainly no more than a stone’s throw away–I am now aware of an online resource that can help craft brewaphiles slake their thirst all across the nation, including places in the American heartland that I’d never have expected.

If you, like me, like to crown a successful chase with something more than a Bud with your steak, then check out this link to PubCrawler.com and bookmark it. Lisa forwarded it to me, and I quickly concluded that it’s a goldmine for road warriors who love beer. You’ll be delighted with what you find. No need for me to say more since the site is self-explanatory. You can thank me later.

This post is a continuation off of the previous one. Last night was the final night of the stage musical “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” in Hastings. The show enjoyed a decent and enthusiastic turnout. Today, as I reflect on it, I want to say what a truly impressive job the young actors turned out. These small-town high school kids rendered an absolutely stellar performance, and it was a privilege for me to have played a small part in making it happen.

What I saw onstage clearly reflected a lot of talent, dedication, focus, hard work, enthusiasm, and friendship and mutual supportiveness among the cast. The result was not merely a superb production, but also a joyous one, and, frankly, a touching one as I consider the network of human relationships that lay behind it.

To any of the teen performers who happen to read this post: Bravo! Splendidly done! Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, Snoopy, Sally, Schroeder–each of you did a fantastic job. I’m well aware that there were plenty of others who helped make it happen–supporting cast, stage help, directors, and so on. My congratulations and appreciation goes to you all.

God bless each of you. Enjoy the afterglow of a magnificent show–and have a wonderful Christmas.

Some storm chasers pride themselves in being minimalists who have a knack for intercepting tornadoes without much in the way of gadgetry. Others are techies whose vehicles are tricked out with mobile weather stations and light bars. It’s all part of the culture of storm chasing, but the bottom line remains getting to the storms.

To my surprise, while I draw the line at gaudy externals, I’ve discovered that I lean toward the techie side. For me, storm chasing is a lot like fishing. Once you’ve bought your first rod and reel and gotten yourself a tackle box, you find that there’s no such thing as having enough lures, widgets, and whizbangs. You can take the parallels as deep as you want to. Radar software is your fish finder. F5 Data, Digital Atmosphere, and all the gazillion free, online weather maps from NOAA, UCAR, COD, TwisterData, and other sources are your topos. And so it goes.

A couple years ago I spent $300 on a Kestrel 4500 weather meter. It’s a compact little unit that I wear on a lanyard when I’m chasing. It weighs maybe twice as much as a bluebird feather, but it will give me temperature, dewpoint, wind speed, headwinds, crosswinds, wind direction, relative humidity, wet bulb temperature, barometric pressure, heat index, wind chill, altitude, and more, and will record trends of all of the above.

I use it mostly to measure the dewpoint and temperature.

Could I have gotten something that would give me that same basic information for a third of the cost, minus all the other features that I rarely or never use? Heck yes. Nevertheless, I need to have the rest of that data handy. Why? Never mind. I just do, okay? I need it for the same reason that an elderly, retired CEO needs a Ferrari in order to drive 55 miles an hour for thirty miles in the passing lane of an interstate highway. I just never know when I might need the extra informational muscle–when, for instance, knowing the speed of crosswinds might become crucial for pinpointing storm initiation.

If I lived on the Great Plains, with Tornado Alley as my backyard, I might feel differently. But here in Michigan, I can’t afford to head out after every slight-risk day in Oklahoma. Selectivity is important. I guess that’s my rationale for my preoccupation with weather forecasting tools, along with a certain vicarious impulse that wants to at least be involved with the weather three states away even when I can’t chase it. Maybe I can’t always learn directly from the environment, but I can sharpen my skills in other ways.

Does having all this stuff make me a better storm chaser? No, of course not. Knowledge and experience are what make a good storm chaser, and no amount of technology can replace them. Put a $300 Loomis rod in the hands of a novice fisherman and chances are he’ll still come home empty-handed; put a cane pole in the hands of a bass master and he’ll return with a stringer full of fish. On the other hand, there’s something to be said for that same Loomis rod in the hands of a pro, and it’s not going to damage a beginner, even if he’s not capable of understanding and harnessing its full potential. Moreover, somewhere along the learning curve between rookie and veteran, the powers of the Loomis begin to become apparent and increasingly useful.

Now, I said all of that so I can brag to you about my latest addition to my forecasting tackle box: RAOB (RAwinsonde OBservation program). This neat little piece of software is to atmospheric soundings what LASIK is to eye glasses. The only thing I’ve seen that approaches it is the venerable BUFKIT, and in fact, the basic RAOB program is able to process BUFKIT data. But I find BUFKIT difficult to use to the point of impracticality, while RAOB is much easier in application, and, once you start adding on its various modules, it offers so much more.

RAOB is the world’s most powerful and innovative sounding software. Automatically decodes data from 35 different formats and plots data on 10 interactive displays including skew-Ts, hodographs, & cross-sections. Produces displays of over 100 atmospheric parameters including icing, turbulence, wind shear, clouds, inversions and much more. Its modular design permits tailored functionality to customers from 60 countries. Vista compatible.

–From the RAOB home page

The basic RAOB software arrived in my box a couple weeks ago courtesy of Weather Graphics. It cost me $99.95 and included everything needed to customize a graphic display of sounding data from all over the world.

I quickly realized, though, that in order to get the kind of information I want for storm chasing, I would also need to purchase the analytic module. Another $50 bought me the file, sent via email directly from RAOB. I downloaded it last night, and I have to say, I am absolutely thrilled with the information that is now at my disposal.

Here is an example of the RAOB display, including skew-T/log-P diagram with lifted parcel, cloud layers, hodograph, and tables containing ancillary information. Click on the image to enlarge it. The display shown is the severe weather mode, with the graphs on the left depicting storm character, dry microburst potential, and storm category.

The sounding shown is the October 13, 2009, 12Z for Miami, Florida–a place that’s not exactly the Zion of storm chasing, but it will do for an example. Note that the negative area–that is, the CIN–is shaded in dark blue. The light blue shading depicts the region most conducive to hail formation. Both are among the many available functions of the analytic module.

The black background was my choice. RAOB is hugely customizable, and its impressive suite of modules lets you tailor-make a sounding program that will fit your needs beautifully. Storm chasers will want to start with the basic and analytic modules. With that setup, your $150 gets you a wealth of sounding data on an easy-to-use graphic interface. It’s probably all you’ll ever need and more–though if you’re like me, at some point you’ll no doubt want to add on the interactive and hodo module.

And the special data decoders module.

Oh yeah, and the turbulence and mountain wave module. Gotta have that one.

Why?

Never mind. You just do, okay?

Are good things worth the wait? Absolutely. I submit the new upgrade of F5 Data as a glowing case in point. Rough as it was in some respects in its prior incarnation, I”ve nevertheless really liked this outstanding forecast product. So maybe I”m just favorably predisposed to begin with, but I have to say, version two is fabulous.\r\n\r\nThis is no minor tweaking. Drawing on client feedback and his own considerable experience as a storm chaser, meteorologist, and software designer, Andrew Revering has offered a significant upgrade. Here are some key changes that have taken F5 Data for a quantum leap as a forecasting tool:\r\n\r\n* Addition of GFS to the suite of forecasting models (every three hours out to 180 hours, then every twelve hours out to 384 hours)\r\n* All 160 F5 parameters calculated from GFS data, as well as from RUC and NAM-WRF\r\n* Beautiful, smooth, professional-grade color shading and contouring\r\n* Historical event browser–ideal for case studies\r\n* Calculator for instant conversion of centigrade to Fahrenheit and Kelvin, meters per second to knots or miles per hour, statute miles to kilometers, and so forth\r\n\r\nThe above is just the tip of the iceberg. You”ll also find all the handy, previously existing features such as clickable Skew-T model soundings.\r\n\r\nRegarding the inclusion of GFS, Revering says, “I”m really excited about GFS…Having it every three hours is something you can”t get anywhere else, and then calculating 160 parameters against the raw data really makes it an awesome model to work with, even for convective forecasting.”\r\n\r\nWell conceived and eminently useful, the new, upgraded F5 Data is a tremendous resource for storm chasers, weather buffs, meteorologists, and anyone with an interest in the atmosphere. It”s as close as I”ve found to a one-stop weather tool, and the price of a subscription is very reasonable.\r\n\r\nDoes it sound like I”m shamelessly promoting this product? You bet I am. This is my blog and I can say whatever I want in it, particularly since I”m not making a dime for doing so. Try out F5 Data yourself and you”ll see why I consider it to be an invaluable asset for storm chasing. Be careful, though–it doesn”t take long to get hooked.