OTHER
MEETINGS

The Meeting for Thursday, January 21, 2010, will be a presentation by: Erik Von Halle

Come to the January meeting of the ORPCUG and learn more than you ever wanted to about computerized electric guitars. Erik Von Halle will be presenting the program with his Aria electric guitar plugged into his iBook G4 using a LightSnake cable from SoundTech. The presentation will start with the popular GarageBand application from Apple.

Erik also has a couple of the popular "Learn to play the Guitar" boxed sets from the book stores. These are really nice eBooks designed to run on computers as guitar lessons. We will play one or two lessons at the meeting so people can see what a multimedia lesson looks like.

The rest of the program will include composing music using PrintMusic. This suite of programs from www.finalemusic.com is excellent and runs on both Macs and PCs. You may remember Erik's demo from two years ago where he played his synthesizer and the computer displayed the sheet music? and the Midi demonstration? Now Erik has PrintMusic working with Micnotator and will demonstrate how playing his flute into the microphone will generate sheet music. Visit the www.finalemusic.com website and you can get the thirty day Free demos of PrintMusic and the Free version of Reader that lets you read the Finale Music files (.mus files) and then you can try downloading and playing with some of the shared music files.

If you get really ambitious you can find songs that you like in midi format on the Web and download them. Play them in your web-browser then use the free demo of PrintMusic to generate the sheet music by importing the Midi file. This was part of Erik's demo from two years ago.

Then Erik's finale will be a demonstration of playing along with the computer music he's downloaded and created to be a one man band singer songwriter. Earplugs optional.

We will also have a Question and Answer session, as usual, at the beginning of the meeting.

SPECIAL PRESENTATION ON WINDOWS 7 It is quite probable that any PC that you recently purchased will have some version of the Microsoft WINDOWS 7 Operating System. To help members of both ORPCUG and the community become familiar with this system, presentations will be provided beginning at 7:00 p.m. on January 14, 2010, in Room 35A, which is the "Arts and Crafts" room, of the Senior Citizens Center on Emory Valley Road. WINDOWS 7 comes in three different versions, and the presentation will help you select the version and hardware that will best fill your needs. Windows, as Vista, also permits you to adopt a different method of storing and retrieving your files; and it will be helpful to understand this option before you start using the system. The presentation will be based on the "Professor Teaches" series marketed by Individual Software. The overall presentation is divided into sessions that emphasize various aspects of the subject. The sessions begin with an explanation and demonstration and then present five questions to help you anchor the important points in your mind. It is possible to cover two sessions during one meeting, and the meetings will be spaced on Thursdays (skipping those that coincide with regular meetings) until all sessions are complete.

$ DUES ARE DUE $ Dues for 2010 are $20 per member or per household if two or more members share the same address. Please pay these to our Treasurer, Edward Von Halle, at the meeting or mail them to him at our Post Office Box 4241, Oak Ridge, TN 37831. Thank you.