Interlude 1: Downloading Aebersold playalong tracks from iTunes

We’re going to take a little interlude from our sessions on jazz in order to look at downloading Aebersold playalong tracks from iTunes and using Audacity to manipulate these tracks. If you know about it already then great, but if you don’t then I am going to try and show you something which I hope helps although one must take into account that it will be different for different computers. This is an Apple computer that I am using, whereas many of you will have PCs, no doubt, but the general principles are the same. The first thing I do is to wake up my web browser which is called Safari and then in the Google search box I type “iTunes”.

I have a rather slow internet connection I am afraid, but the very first thing that comes up is Apple in the United Kingdom - Download iTunes Now, and that is what we want.

So there’s a couple of tick boxes that we don’t want, an email address that we don’t heed to give, “Download Now” and the download will start.

It’s going to take a long time because I have a very slow response rate at the moment, but let me finish that because I did it already before and here’s something where I downloaded it before.

You get a little icon like that. Let’s try and install it.

There’s some general introduction, do you want to continue, some stuff about the new version. We want it on our hard drive. It doesn’t take up that much space. We want to install it. I have to give it my administrator’s name and password and it will take a few minutes to install it. While that is happening perhaps we will have a look at this. It tells you that iTunes includes the iTunes Store and that’s where we need to go in order to get our Aebersold tracks. It’s also got a New MiniPlayer, Improved Songs View, Multi-Disk Albums and Performance when searching and sorting larger iTunes libraries has been improved.

It tells you a bit about the hardware requirements and the software requirements and a bit about copyright.

We don’t need that and we don’t need that. iTunes is very shortly going to be installed. Then we are going to have a look on our Mac at the Applications folder - on a PC the programs folder - to find iTunes and then to wake it up. The installation was successful.

If we go to Applications, which is where all the programs live, and we have a look for iTunes. iTunes - here we go - double click on that, then this will wake up iTunes. Then we want to go to the iTunes Store. I actually have two screens and it woke up on the other screen. Never mind. Let’s see - iTunes Store is there, so let’s click on that.

What we are going to search for is a playalong track for the F blues in Aebersold.

So it’s accessing the iTunes store at the moment.

So in here we are going to type Aebersold: “Aebersold F Blues.” It’s usually a bit better than this. It’s got a series of tracks down here and you can play them. Now the one I recommend is the first one that’s come up on my browser which is from something called “Volume 54”. If I were to only purchase one volume of Aebersold playalong tracks then I would purchase Volume 54, I think, because all the tracks are good. If we play it then what you have is the bass and drums on the left and the piano on the right for a medium tempo F blues. We want to stop it and then we want to purchase it.

The problem is that I have already purchased it, but if you look at this F sharp blues here and click on it. It’s 79p and then you have to have an Apple ID and a password and it tells you how to create a new one if you don’t have it already. So I have in fact paid for this and downloaded it. In the next section we will have a look at downloading Audacity and using that to play our F blues.