Here’s one for the audiophiles among us who love our vinyl and are tired of MP3s!

PRESS RELEASE

UNIVERSAL MUSIC GROUP DISTRIBUTION (UMGD) LAUNCHES GROOVETOWN VINYL (www.groovetownvinyl.com)

Premiere Online Destination for Bundled Vinyl & Lossless FLAC Products

Universal City, CA, Tuesday, April 5, 2011 – Universal Music Group Distribution (UMGD), the award-winning sales, marketing, and distribution arm of Universal Music Group (UMG), the world’s leading music company, today announced the launch of Groovetown Vinyl (www.groovetownvinyl.com), an exciting new online storefront specializing in high-quality audio products for the discerning music fan. For the first time, visitors to the site will be able to purchase “lossless” audio FLAC files bundled with collectible high quality vinyl at a discounted price.

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PRESS RELEASE

New Album Dedicated To The Rolling Stones Pianist and Stalwart, Featuring A Host Of Guest Stars

Eagle Rock Entertainment, through its subsidiary Eagle Records, is delighted to release Boogie 4 Stu on April 19, 2011. A tribute to pianist Ian Stewart, a founding member of the Rolling Stones who went on to serve as their long-term road manager, this album will be released near the 25th anniversary of his passing. Sales from Boogie 4 Stu will benefit the British Heart Foundation.

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Rock! This track is from Dep Leppard’s new album Mirrorball, which is a mostly-live-but-with-three-new-studio-tracks affair due out soon. Read more here and check out my brief interview with guitarist Phil Collen here.

I’ve revisited this idea for my latest Gibson.com feature. This time things take a slightly different turn, focusing on tracks that include some kind of mistake or random element that was incorporated into the songwriting.

Here’s the first entry. Go to Gibson.com to see the rest!

Van Halen, “Eruption”

“Eruption,” with its blistering licks and innovative techniques, launched a million shredders, but the technique-redefining tapping section includes – by Eddie Van Halen’s own admission – a little mistake. Van Halen told Guitar Player, “I took one pass at it and they put it on the record. I didn’t even play it right. There’s a mistake at the top end of it. To this day whenever I hear it I always think, ‘Man, I could’ve played it better.’” But where is it? It sounds like a mistake can be heard at about 1:01 – listen for a tiny stutter which breaks up the flow of the tapping pattern. However, there are those of us who believe EVH’s playing to be utterly infallible and will not accept that he can make mistakes, even by his own admission.

 

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Can’t wait to check out the new SIXX A.M. album and Nikki’s forthcoming book. Both are titled This Is Gonna Hurt. The single “Lies Of The Beautiful People” is going to radio on April 18 (check out the official video below) and the album is out here in Oz on May 6. Here’s a press release:

NIKKI SIXX TO RELEASE NEW ALBUM WITH SIXX A.M
‘THIS IS GONNA HURT’
SINGLE ‘LIES OF THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE’ TO RADIO MONDAY APRIL 18TH

Sony Music is excited to announce the forthcoming album from Nikki Sixx and SIXX A.M, ‘This Is Gonna Hurt’, which will be released in Australia on May 6th, 2011. The follow up to ‘The Heroin Diaries’, ‘This Is Gonna Hurt’ delivers aggressive and sweeping guitars, twisted and dark lyrics and incredible musicianship and song-writing synonymous with the band.

SIXX A.M is comprised of musical Icon and Motley Crue bassist Nikki Sixx, Guns and Roses guitarist, DJ Ashba and James Michael. The band released their debut album ‘The Heroin Diaries’ in 2007 which successfully sold almost 350,000 copies in the United States and spawned the biggest rock track of 2008 “Life Is Beautiful” which was a #1 hit overseas.

The first single from the forthcoming album “Lies of the Beautiful People,” heads to radio on Monday April 18th; the track introduces the overriding themes of the album which tackles contradictions in society with Sixx urging listeners to look beneath the skin.

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Tony MacAlpine’s new self-titled album is being released on June 21 through Favored Nations worldwide and King Records in Japan, Korea and Taiwan.

Drums are courtesy of the incredible Virgil Donati on three tracks, the amazing Marco Minnemann on four, and the very handy Toontracks on the other three.

MacAlpine has been dropping info about the album on his Facebook over the last few weeks. It’s mixed by Ulrich Wild, who has produced or engineered albums for Dethklok, Pantera, Static-X, Stabbing Westward, Powerman 5000, Deftones, Seether, Bleeding Through and more.

Like Tony on Facebook here.

Here’s the track listing.

01. Serpens Cauda
02. Ölüdeniz
03. Fire Mountain
04. Dream Mechanism
05. Ten Seconds to Mercury
06. Flowers For Monday
07. Angel of Twilight
08. Pyrokinesis
09. Blue Maserati
10. Summer Palace
11. Salar de Uyuni
12. The Dedication
13. Donostia (Japan Bonus Track)

Mastodon drummer Brann Dailor says the band’s next album will veer closer to the stripped-down blueprint of Leviathan rather than the proggier moments of Crack The Skye.

Speaking to Noisecreep, Dailor said of the material, “It doesn’t seem as proggy. There’s moments, but it seems more riff-oriented. It seems a little more stripped down. Leviathan was a little more stripped down, and it feels like that to me. Everything always changes once you go in the studio, but at the moment it seems like a really super-heavy Led Zeppelin or something. It has a lot of that [John] Bonham-esque groove to it, but really heavy and dark. I really like playing like that, and when it goes into those parts, I’m psyched.”

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PRESS RELEASE
GOO GOO DOLLS CONFIRM TOUR DATES FOR SUMMER 2011
MICHELLE BRANCH AND PARACHUTE TO SUPPORT

April 11 , 2011 — (Burbank, CA) – GOO GOO DOLLS have extended their American tour with dates that will take the band across the U.S. through late August including cities that they have not played in some time. The band’s current album, SOMETHING FOR THE REST OF US, continues to garner global critical praise:

“’Something For The Rest of Us’ flows with emotional rock anthems” – USA Today

“Anthemic rock really doesn’t come much better than that of the Goo Goo Dolls. Twelve soaring radio anthems to make you smile” – KERRANG! (U.K.)

“’Something For The Rest of Us’ displays both emotional and musical heft and dynamic ebbs and flows” – Billboard

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Check out this great site. In need of a tuner but don’t have anything at hand? Go to ultimate-guitar-tuner.com for an automatic chromatic tuner built right into the website. There are other sites that purport to be online turners but they just play a tone which you have to match with your ears – great for ear training, but not so great if you need to accurately tune your guitar with no guesswork.

Head to ultimate-guitar-tuner.com to check it out.