Are you looking for a unique holiday gift for the musician in your life? Well, we’ve found it. It’s a gift that blends technology with fashion, for the DJ or rising star on the go. But you won’t find this t-shirt on the rack at Target…

Make beats while on the go using your iPad – or this even cooler Drum Machine t-shirt.

The wearable and washable Drum Machine T-shirt thumps out the bass. It’s a real, working and functioning drum machine – that you can wear. We found the awesome t-shirt online at one of our favorite online shopping spots, ThinkGeek. The Drum Machine t-shirt features 9 different drum kits and allows the wearer to record beats,  loop those drum patterns and layer beats for virtually unlimited tracks.

Check out all these great features:

• Real Working Wearable Drum Machine & Looper
• 9 Different Drum Kits: Rock, Retro 808, Discotek, Techno Punk, Bass Invader, Chiptune, Zapf Dingbats & Scratchy
• Create and record a beat loop (up to 3 minutes long)
• Create a loop, then build and layer beats on top with unlimited tracks
• 7-voices (you can play all 7 drum pads at once)
• Mix and match sounds from the different built-in drum kits in one loop
• Working mini amp clips on your belt and goes to 11
• Built-in analog audio output jack
• Exclusive product invented and designed by ThinkGeek (Patent Pending)
• Fully washable, electronics and drum pads easily remove from shirt
• Requires 4 x AA Batteries (not included)

Making Beats on the Go
How do guys like Jay-Z and Kayne West do it? Music and beat production done right is using state-of-the-art hardware and software like Apple’s Logic. Looking to learn how to make your own music? Why not attend a digital media academy, a music and beat production class could be just the thing to inspire the Elton John in you.

Just getting into making beats? Start your music adventure with a t-shirt! One more great thing about the Drum Machine T-shirt? It even comes with a small portable amp that clips to your belt. Check out the video below top see the shirt in action:

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The music industry has been undergoing massive change: Consumers have practically forsaken retail and physical media in favor of digital downloads and music labels still can’t understand how to embrace digital music or how its shared.

And now the Recording Industry Association of America (these are the same people that issue gold records) must wrestle with a new copyright law that will decide if the record labels – or the artists – actually own the hits and for how long.

The RIAA gives sales certifications to recording artists. This one, presented to Epic Records, is for for Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

Copyrights and Wrongs
The law was established in 1978 and will take effect in 2013. It’s a dense piece of legislation, but it comes down to a 1976 music copyright law and court ruling that says after a period of 35 years, artists could take legal action to get their master recordings back from the music labels that originally “published” them as singles or albums.

The reason, according to that ruling: Music companies are far more business-minded than artists, and have an automatic business advantage when dealing with artists. Therefore, after a set period of time, artists should get a second chance at negotiating a good deal for their creations.

As you might guess, the idea of artists regaining their original music isn’t too popular with music labels.

So what’s the big deal? After all, we’re talking about records that are 35 years old; today’s music is centered around Pop and Rap. However, that period of time produced an enormous wealth of very popular music (including Classic Rock, Punk, New Wave and Disco classics). Many of these songs are still popular today, and have seen a resurgence in popularity thanks to Rock Band, soda commercials, Glee and American Idol.

Recording artists like Bruce Springsteen may soon be able to take back ownership of their older master recordings from record labels.  

These songs become even more significant when you think that a record label may depend on them year after year for profits still generated by older albums sales, like The Eagles’ Hotel California. One label estimated that 90 percent of its current sales come from its back catalog. But many artists are ready to go after the labels very aggressively to regain the rights to their recordings.

Bruce Springsteen, spent nearly a year engaged in a similar court wrangle back in the mid-70s after he had signed away the rights to his songs to an early manager. (Springsteen’s early deal was so bad that if he had written an autobiography during the time, he wouldn’t have legally been allowed to quote lyrics from his own songs.) Springsteen was actually prevented from recording during his lengthy trial but eventually won his case. When he returned to the studio, he made one of his finest albums, Darkness on the Edge of Town. Ironically, that 1978 masterwork is one of the albums that could be affected by the new 35-year copyright rules.

The Download Dilemma
Consumers love the digital-download format. It’s incredibly accessible, and device friendly. For their part, music labels have been extremely hesitant to shift their business to the digital frontier. While it may make sense (digital songs take labels out of the costly business of manufacturing and shipping physical product), the RIAA feels digital downloads encourage file sharing or music piracy, plus they can’t directly control digital downloads like traditional retail.

The Recording Industry Association of America is leading the charge against music piracy.

Some artists are so fed up with the current state of the music biz they have taken a “vow of silence.” Pop/funk genius Prince (who’s been recording since the late 70s) recently stated he would refuse to release any new music until the industry could get a better handle on its business and how it’s fighting piracy. “The industry changed,” Prince said in an interview with The Guardian. “We [artists] made money before piracy…Nobody’s making money now except phone companies, Apple and Google.”

Sure, iTunes has revolutionized music distribution, but while the RIAA or musicians may find fault with Apple or Napster, the truth is that musicians and the industry must work together to adopt new technologies (like “the cloud”) and be at the forefront of these changes instead of being led by them. Musicians too are discovering ways to distribute their own music and get a larger slice of the pie. The RIAA also needs to understand its methods of fighting piracy are doing more to turn people off to new music than introduce them to it.

An open (and sarcastic) letter to the RIAA from Rolling Stone magazine. 

In the case of the 1978 copyright law, smart record labels will make an effort to reach out to the artists in question and cut a deal with them to continue to distribute their music. However, most industry analysts predict that each individual case will have to be determined by legal verdict, which could result in lengthy court battles between artists and music companies for years to come.

The Beat Goes On
Any time a new recording technology emerges, older technology is largely abandoned. This happened in the 80s when CDs first appeared and vinyl albums stopped being produced. This happened to the 70s relic, the 8-track tape. 8-tracks were replaced by cassette tapes, and cassettes ultimately were replaced by CDs. Some of these formats come back into fashion. For example, vinyl records have seen a comeback of sorts in recent years, but for the most part the old always gives way to the new.

Are you passionate about filling the world with the sound of music? America’s popular culture – and particularly its music – still sets the tone for the rest of the world, and that’s why the recording industry will always need creative and talented people to develop new music. Many of today’s great music producers are starting when they’re young; now there are many ways to learn music production and get into the music industry. It may remain to be determined how it’s getting on your music player, but music is here to stay.

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The Beatles were many things simultaneously: they were the most famous celebrities of their day…the best songwriters of their age…and, ultimately, the most beloved band of all time. And one more thing: The Beatles were also the most creative single force to ever hit popular music. The band influenced generations, and the group still continues to have a profound impact. The Beatles not only changed the way music was being made, they forever changed music.

The fifth Beatle: Producer George Martin (center) worked on all but one of The Beatles’ albums.

Through ceaseless inventiveness, The Beatles set musical trends that are still being followed. They never rested on their achievements, constantly stretching the boundaries of pop music. There is a chartable creative progression that begins with the first Beatle album and ends with the last. It should also be noted that The Beatles were assisted greatly by studio wizard George Martin, who produced every Beatle album (except Let it Be) and helped the band with their various sonic experiments.

Trying to list The Beatles’ various creative achievements would take forever, but we can zero in on five songs that demonstrate the band’s technical mastery.

I Feel Fine (Beatles ’65, 1964)
How It Changed Music:  The first intentional use of feedback in a pop music recording. 

Filming the video to accompany “I Feel Fine,” Ringo plays exercise bike. On the record, he employs a rhythm that can be traced to Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say.”

In 1964, the idea of musicians actually trying to get their instruments to produce distortion was radically new. And although The Beatles certainly didn’t invent feedback and weren’t the first to incorporate it into their live act (The Who or The Kinks probably have that distinction), The Beatles were the first to release a single that featured feedback.

How It Happened: It was all due to a happy accident in the studio, when John propped his Gibson acoustic/electric against a switched-on amplifier. The guitar erupted with feedback, which stopped Lennon and McCartney in their tracks. The uniqueness of the sound impressed Lennon so much, he instantly asked producer George Martin if they could somehow use feedback in the recording. The producer suggested tacking it onto the front of the song and the rest is Rock ‘n’ Roll history. On the final master, John plucks the A string on his guitar. The note at first stings, then buzzes and finally dissolves into an ear-piercing wail. A million bands may have incorporated feedback into their sound, but The Beatles were the first to put it on record.

Eleanor Rigby (Revolver, 1966)
How It Changed Music:  Rock songs don’t always need to have happy endings – or traditional drums and guitars – to become hits. 

A very real Eleanor Rigby lived and died in Liverpool. Coincidence?

Each song on the album Revolver has a unique, fully formed sound, but none more distinctive than Paul McCartney’s “Eleanor Rigby.” A grim song about alienation (“Ah…look at all the lonely people!”), “Eleanor Rigby” tells the story of a lonely woman (who eventually dies) and a lonely minister (who presides over her burial). The song was a shock to Beatle fans that were used to upbeat love songs from the Fab Four. This was a song with no happy endings. Nonetheless, despite the somber subject matter, the song spent four weeks topping the British pop charts. More than 60 pop artists have covered the song since then.

Revolver marks the point when The Beatles stopped being a live performing act and became a full-time studio band. Aside from the general exhaustion of touring, The Beatles were becoming more ambitious about their music and had already mastered conventional multi-track recording techniques. Individual songs were being crafted with more time and creative techniques. In recording “Eleanor Rigby,” McCartney’s genius was to suggest the use of an eight-piece string section. In fact, none of The Beatles actually play instruments on the recording. Instead, the song is driven by its churning cello, mournful violas and stabbing violins.

How It Happened: There was a real Eleanor Rigby, who worked as a scullery maid in a Liverpool hospital and died in 1939. As teenagers, Lennon and McCartney hung around near a cemetery bearing her tombstone. It’s been suggested that McCartney absorbed the name subconsciously and used it years later when penning the song. By the way, “Father MacKenzie” started out as “Father McCartney,” until Paul feared that people would think he was describing his own father.

Tomorrow Never Knows (Revolver, 1966)
How It Changed Music:  Experimentation is good: Part One.

Backward beats: The Beatles usher in their psychedelic period with “Tomorrow Never Knows.”

The Beatles were still a unified force in 1966, but Revolver demonstrated the individual gifts of each Beatle. Paul scored high marks with “Eleanor Rigby,” while George Harrison contributed one of his best songs (“Taxman”) and drummer Ringo Starr sang lead on the innocent anthem, “Yellow Submarine.” As for John Lennon, he added the album’s closing track – a stunning piece of early psychedelic music called “Tomorrow Never Knows.” The lyrics, inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead, were strange enough (“Listen to the color of your dreams”) but the song itself sounded like virtually nothing the band had recorded up to that point.

How It Happened: To give Lennon’s chanting vocal the desired “sound of a guru on a mountaintop,” producer Martin ran the vocal track through a Lesley spinning speaker, a type of speaker that produced an odd, wobbly sound. John’s vocals were also doubled by using an Automatic Double Tracking (ADT) system. Meanwhile, Ringo used a unique drum pattern for his rhythm tracks and his drums and cymbals were recorded and played in reverse, as was Harrison’s sitar. The Beatles also gave the song an added layer of weirdness by adding 16 six-second-long tape loops of various sounds (most of which were played in reverse), which producer Martin interspersed through the song. The resulting final track was an amazing, riveting piece of music that predicted the band’s next stage: psychedelia.

Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967)
How It Changed Music:  Experimentation is good: Part Two.

John Lennon points to the poster that inspired “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite”

Things were getting pretty crazy in groovy 1967, and that influence colors the album that many critics regard as not only The Beatles’ best album, but the best Rock album of all time. Sgt. Pepper is loaded throughout with one innovation after another, but “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” capably demonstrates the band’s daring musical experimentation. The song’s lyrics, which tell of an upcoming old-style circus event, were inspired by an antique music-hall poster that Lennon had acquired.

Lennon used direct quotes from this 124-year-old circus poster.

How It Happened: Much of Lennon’s lyric was taken word-for-word from the original handbill. For one musical passage within the song’s middle eight bars, a collection of different pieces of audio was gathered. Each tape contained a different type of carnival music. Producer George Martin, unhappy with their attempts to find one signature carnival sound, had all of the tapes cut into small pieces, which were then thrown into the air and onto the studio floor. The studio engineer then randomly picked up the pieces of tape, which were re-assembled in precisely that order to create a flowing montage of circus sounds.

I Want You (She’s So Heavy) (Abbey Road, 1969)
How It Changed Music:  Simplicity can be a lot deeper than you think.

Even though the foursome would soon part company, The Beatles were still in-step when recording the band’s final masterpiece, Abbey Road.

After the dense, multi-layered psychedelic rumble that The Beatles pioneered during the Pepper era, most of Abbey Road (which was the last Beatle album recorded, although Let it Be would be released after it) was marked by a simpler sound that didn’t seem to rely quite so much on audio “tricks.” But even at their simplest, The Beatles’ music contains multiple levels. And that was certainly the case for “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” which took a simple blues-type song and stretched it out to nearly eight minutes

How It Happened: Songwriter Lennon answered criticisms of the primitive lyric (“I want you…I want you so bad…I want you…I want you so bad it’s driving me mad”) by saying that it was an urgent love song that required a simple lyric. (Lennon used the example of a drowning man, who doesn’t scream, “Excuse me, but could you please possibly throw me that float and save me?” when “Help! I’m drowning!” is more to the point.) Then there are the song’s special effects, which were tacked onto the building instrumental that dominates the back half of the song. The bizarre sound of an increasing, howling wind (created by Lennon playing a Moog synthesizer) was grafted onto the song, with the white noise becoming louder as the song’s thundering chords repeat over and over.

The end of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” is also technically interesting, because there really is no ending, per Lennon’s idea. The instruments keep hitting the main theme over and over (with the wind SFX now up to hurricane force) and then the song just unexpectedly goes silent. No final chord or drumbeat: just pure silence. An amazing and unexpected finish to a song that was more complex than originally judged…and one of the very last Beatle songs to be mixed by the group itself.

Even The Simpsons have paid tribute to The Beatles with this Abbey Road parody.

Creativity on Tap
The Beatles’ music still shines decades later, thanks to the careful craft that went into every Beatle recording. Each member of the band quickly became a master of the audio studio arts. Their early music shows The Beatles’ progression as audio producers who were bent and determined to give the world a new kind of sound.

The Beatles’ legacy lives on. The John Lennon Educational Tour Bus can help teach you how to become a music producer. And thanks in large part to The Beatles, audio production continues to attract creative and musical people of all ages.

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Today’s instant pop phenomenon world makes it difficult to comprehend just how incredibly popular The Beatles really were.

But no musical act of any kind has ever been bigger, had such a lasting and far-reaching impact – and nobody has since generated the incredible excitement that The Beatles did during 1964, when they exploded onto the American scene. The group’s stranglehold on American musical tastes was powerful and immediate; at one point during 1964, the band charted four of the Top Ten singles being played on the radio. The Beatles were everywhere.

Innovative director Richard Lester brought “The Fab Four” to the big screen in 1964.

Music and Film
The Beatles were not only omnipresent in every form of media of the day, but they were also re-inventing every form of media – like no other artist before them. It was inevitable that The Beatles would star in a feature film. The band’s first movie, A Hard Day’s Night, was the group’s best. It was also a ground-breaking mixture of music and film and what many consider to be one of the inspirations for modern music videos. A Hard Day’s Night remains a cinematic treasure – not only because it was an inside look at early Beatlemania, but it brought music and pop star images together in an entirely unique way. This was all presented as a superb comedy loaded with fresh cinematic ideas all courtesy of director, Richard Lester.

The Beatles were huge celebrities when filming began. The crowd chasing The Beatles at the railway station at the beginning is made up of real fans actually chasing the Fab Four. The scene was recently recreated for the opening of The Beatles Rock Band videogame.

Paul McCartney greets a fan during the filming of Hard Day’s Night.

A Hard Day’s Night took the film world by surprise. No one had any idea it would be that good. Critics were stunned, and reviews almost completely positive. Critic Roger Ebert noted the film’s long-standing influence. “Today when we watch TV,” he wrote, “And see quick cutting, hand-held cameras, interviews conducted on the run with moving targets, quickly intercut snatches of dialogue, music under documentary action and all the other trademarks of the modern style, we are looking at the children of A Hard Day’s Night.” Suffice it to say that anyone interested in learning how to make music videos really must see this film.

Director Richard Lester is one “old school” director who would have probably felt right at home in today’s fast-paced cinema. His work on A Hard Day’s Night suggests he would have loved the flexibility and freedom that Final Cut Pro X offers. Many of today’s most respected filmmakers, such as the Coen brothers (True Grit) and Francis Ford Coppola (Godfather), have spent time learning how to use Final Cut Pro. Apple’s Final Cut software is both flexible and easy to use.

The Beatles have always been at the cutting edge of media, if they were still making films and videos today they’d be most likely making music videos and producing them using state-of the-art editing software like Final Cut.

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I just recently returned from a 2 1/2 week tour on board the Lennon Bus. The relationship with the Lennon Bus and Digital Media Academy is what gave birth to the idea of the Come Together: Music and Video Production Course. For a student coming into that summer course with no prior experience it can be intimidating thinking about having to write your own song and shoot a music video in just one week. But it should be anything but intimidating. Technology has made it so easy for us to have a quick turnaround with high production value. The Lennon Bus typically works on a project with students for just 8 hrs! At DMA Summer Camps you get a whole week! By the end of the week you are going to be so filled with ideas your head may just explode. Here are some projects I just worked on with students on the Lennon Bus in just an 8 hr work day. Check them out and I hope to see you in a Come Together class this summer!