On February 10th, the University of Iowa Organ Department hosted an amazing feat of organ playing by Kevin Bowyer of Glasgow University. Kevin played the entire Sorabji’s Second Organ Symphony as the inaugural performance on the university’s new Klais organ. Kevin played using Power Music from Cambron Software and said afterwards – “Power Music performed flawlessly throughout, as I knew it would.”
One of the most common questions we get asked on our support desk and at exhibitions is “What is a good source of worship song chord sheets?”
There are many websites out there that let you download chord sheets, but people tell us that quite often there are errors in the lyrics and the chords used are not the original ones. Also it is important that the websites pay royalties to the copyright holders of the songs you download – not all websites do!!
Recently we worked with Integrity Music Ltd, AKA WeAreWorship to create a free songbook of chord sheets that we were giving away at Mission Worship 2016. Integrity Music let you download chord sheets from their website WeAreWorship.com. All you need to do is open a free account with them. I have created a short tutorial video on importing chord sheets from WeAreWorship.
A couple of weeks ago we headed off to Eastbourne to exhibit at the 2016 Mission Worship Conference.
While preparing for this exhibition I started reflecting on the exhibitions Cambron have attended over the last 9 years and the exhibitions I went to back in the 1980’s when I had a small computer company specialising in hardware and software for the Acorn BBC Micro computer. How life has changed!
Today’s guest blog comes from long-time user of Power Music Alun McCarthy. Alun leads worship at St Peter’s Shared Church in Guildford and has been previously featured in this blog as a featured musician. Here, Alun shares some tips and tricks he’s learned using Power Music:
As a musician and worship leader, what I’m doing is far more important than how I’m doing it. If a congregation is distracted by the machinery of the music group this can defeat the purpose of a service. I’ve found several ways of using technology and software (Power Music) that help me to achieve a flow of worship without being noticeable to a congregation.
Since the launch of Power Music many years ago (actually way back in 2007) Cambron have always offered users who purchase the software the option of download or buying it as a physical copy on CD.
As from Friday 23rd September, we will no longer be supplying CD copies of Power Music Professional or Power Music Mac.
Of course, the important thing is not the CD but the Product Key which is used to register and activate Power Music.
There are several reasons why we are doing this:
For the second time Cambron Software will be exhibiting at the huge Music Austria exhibition in Messe Ried in Upper Austria. This 2-yearly
event brings together musicians of all styles from all over Austria, southern Germany and other parts of Europe to see the latest instruments and music technology, attend concerts, as well as take part in competitions and of course drink beer, eat sausages and socialise!
Some time ago, we got an interesting request from one of our long-time Power Music users. Kevin Bowyer is a world famous organist and now an author with six novels under his belt (find out more). He uses Power Music on a number of organs and turned the pages by tapping the touchscreen. He recently has got an impressive new 4 manual organ installed in his house.
His problem is that his arms are too short!!
The distance to the touchscreen is 35 inches so he was looking for an alternative page turner – obviously not a foot pedal as his feet are very busy on the organ pedals!
So after a bit of research we have found a company that produces a USB button which works perfectly with Power Music and hundreds of other apps.
At the start of August, Microsoft began to offer users what they are calling the “Windows 10 Anniversary Update”. The name comes from the fact the Windows 10 was released on 29th July last year.
The Anniversary Update updates Windows 10 from version 1511 to 1607. This is the second major update for Windows 10 since its launch. The previous update to 1511, known as the “November Update” was like a reinstall of Windows 10 on your PC. The “Anniversary Update” is the same. It appears to basically install a new version of Windows 10 on your PC. The previous version is still available to roll-back to if you “don’t like” 1607.
One of our featured musicians, Mike Baldwin, is keen to share his songs with other Power Music users and we have made them available on Power Music Store as a FREE virtual songbook of all the chord charts from his latest album “Go and Tell”.
Get your free songbook here: Power Music Box – Go and Tell
The album is available on Amazon and iTunes.
You can read Mike’s full story in the blog post here: Mike Baldwin
This album features many powerful and thought-provoking lyrics and Mike sent us a very interesting detailed description which deserves a blog post of its own, so here it is!
This blog post deals with digitizing your library of paper music.
Whatever your reason you are faced with quite a task. You need to digitize your music. Let’s say you have chosen Power Music Professional as your music management system. So how should you go about this task? Assuming you don’t have electronic copies of the music already in the form of PDF files, then you are faced with scanning the paper music.