Jack Cooper - Guelph, ON Musician

This year is the year I am reforging connections with childhood friends and acquaintances. I have no idea why this is so. There may very well be some astrological reason, some psychological reason or maybe just some random, elusive reason why I need to form some closure to my formative years. It [...]

I’ve been on facebook for more than a year and that has been my first real foray into web 2.0. I’ve had access to usenet for years, and have long participated in mailing lists and newsgroups. I’ve twitted a bit on twitter but it doesn’t hold any appeal to me. I’ve joined [...]

One of the popular activities among musicians is to gather and swap songs. This will happen either as an organized activity which people explicitly attend to trade and/or listen to songs, or informally at parties where the sharing of music and songs takes place alongside typical party events like mingling, arguing about politics or [...]

This website acts as a hybrid business/personal site so I don’t often know what is appropriate to share or reveal. I think it is important to me to be as authentic as possible with people I meet in either a social or a business context. So I want to write a few journal [...]

So I’m working on three projects now. Four, actually, counting a mini project wrapping up. The mini project is a small collection of songs by a London based singer named Gary Boyle. He is a very nice gentleman who I met this past summer at London’s Home County festival. A friend [...]

As I mentioned in a previous entry, I have been using lilypond as my primary tool for transcribing and formatting sheet music.  Lilypond is open source and freeware and runs on Windows, Mac and unix/linux environments.  There is no user interface with lilypond.  You simply type the markup language commands into a file or series [...]

Baseball season is almost over!
I’m about to breathe a huge sigh of relief- baseball season is almost finished.  I’m not a sports junkie in general- I have zero to little interest in professional hockey or football, although I do enjoy following basketball from time to time.  I was a horrible athlete growing up.  I was [...]

In order to create a leadsheet for a musician, I require two things– a recording of the song and a lyric sheet.  If I am including fret diagrams, I sometimes need to get more information from the musician about the tuning used and some specific chord shapes.  A fret diagram is a fancy picture found [...]

I’ve been inspired recently by a friend in Kitchener named G.K. Eckert who recently created a blog site.  G.K., like many artists and teachers I know, knows the secret of success isn’t how talented or lucky or anything else you are, but how persistent you are and how receptive you are to new or existing [...]

I received an email from an old friend today whom I served with on committee for Kitchener-Waterloo’s Black Walnut folk club (quick answer Dan- I am actively working on it..)
The Black Walnut folk club is one of those rare initiatives that has made it into its second decade. I believe it has lasted fifteen [...]