Latin Percussion, a Company History

Latin Percussion, or LP as they are commonly known, were one of the first companies set up to mass manufacture percussion instruments from around the world, driven by the musical passion of Martin Cohen, a young engineer and keen photographer. In the mid 1950s Mr Cohen started to frequent New Yorks Jazz clubs and came across the famous Birdland club, which is when he first heard Latin Jazz. He soon became a regular visitor and was inspired by percussionists such as Jose Mangual, and by the early 1960s he became hooked on learning the Bongos. Due to the US trade embargo with Cuba, good quality bongos were hard to find in America, so the resourceful Cohen decided to make his own, despite having little knowledge of wood-working. After a few attempts he got the result he was looking for. Other musicians began to take notice of his drums and he started making bongos and cowbells for other percussionists, welcoming their feedback in order to fine-tune his products.

Word of his instruments spread among the Latin music community, and demand grew. He began to produce cowbells for the Rogers Drum Company, and also started to listen to advice from working drummers outside of the Latin community such as TV session player Specs Powell, who asked him to make a set of bongos that could be mounted on a stand rather than played between the players knees. Cohen came up with a solution, a mounting bracket for the drums that didn't involve drilling into the wood, and Tonight Show drummer Bob Rosengarden then asked Martin if he could produce a modern version of the traditional jawbone with rattling teeth.... quite a challenge but Cohen developed the Vibra-Slap, an effect that remains popular to this day. The Vibra-Slap was also his first patent. The next development (again originally made for Bob Rosengarden) was the Afruche-Cabasa, another robust modern version of an ancient and frail instrument. Martin Cohens skill seemed to be replacing these old traditional instruments with modern versions made of strong modern materials, but without sacrificing the tone... these new instruments had to sound as authentic as the originals. He still spent many hours hanging around the Latin music scene, gaining knowledge and gathering all the feedback that he could on his products, some coming from famous percussionists such as Carlos "patato" Valdez and Tito Puente, who both went on to become long standing family friends. It really was a case of finding out what the players wanted, and then making it happen.

In 1964, Cohen started the Latin Percussion Company, originally doing most of the work by himself in a small unheated garage. In time Cohens wife and daughter became involved in the company, and the company began to export products. Growth was rapid and LP soon became a world famous brand among percussionists. Cohen came up with the idea to make congas from fiberglass, giving the drums more volume which was well received, especially as Latin instruments were now becoming more mainstream and entering popular music. Eventually LP would become the worlds largest producer of percussion instruments, with a list of endorsers including top percussionists such as Giovanni Hildago, Jose Madera, and Armando Peraza. Many of these great players have put their names to some of LPs products such as the LP Tito Puente Timbales, and Giovanni Hildagos signature series, the LP Galaxy Giovanni Bongos and Congas.

By 2002, Latin Percussion was bought by Kaman Music Corporation, the worlds largest independent musical instrument distributor, allowing further growth of the LP brand worldwide, and Martin Cohen received a special recognition award from the International Latin Music Hall of Fame, for almost 40 years of innovation in music. Indeed its hard to imagine how all these instruments would have ever gained such popularity without the input and determination of Martin Cohen. The company continues to produce a huge catalog of congas, bongos and timbales, as well as thousands of hand percussion instruments from claves to bells, wind chimes to woodblocks, caxixis, shakers and much much more.

Nottingham Drum and Guitar Centre can help you with any enquiry regarding latin percussion instruments.

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Music Mediums - A Brief History

Consumer music mediums have come a long way since Thomas Edison recited "Mary Had a Little Lamb" onto one of the first audio recordings ever. Since then, the method of what we use to listen to music has sometimes made extremely small, slow progressions, and other times it moves almost too fast to keep up with.

A grammaphone, or vinyl record, was the music medium of choice from the early 1900's up through the mid 1960's. When your favorite artist released their new album, you'd head on down to the record store and pick it up, take it home, and play it on your own record player. Even after other mediums became the most popular medium, records never fully went away, and are still frequently sold to audiophiles and music collectors. Some of the other technology you're about to read about was popular for a little while, then faded away completely when a new medium surpassed it in popularity.

Beginning in the late 60s, some music was released on a cartridge called Stereo 8, or an 8-track tape. 8-Tracks became very popular because consumers could listen to their favorite music in their cars. The 8-track was even developed in collaboration with the Ford Motor Company. The more compact and easier to transport 8-track was a consumer favorite. The 8-track remained popular until the late 70s, when cassette tapes became the medium of choice for the music buying public.

Cassettes started to gain popular in the early-mid 1970s, and were at their peak popularity during the 1980s. A cassette had the advantage of not only being a great way to listen to your favorite band's new music release, but eventually you could buy blank tapes, and copy and share music the music you either recorded off the radio, or got from a friend (using a dual cassette boom box). Cassettes were like a musical precursor to social media, because you could record a song off the radio, and then record another song you liked later, and so on, until the tape was full. Then you could share new music with your friends by trading tapes.

CDs, or compact discs, followed cassettes, and held on to be the most popular form of listening to new music releases during the 1990s through the beginning of the 2000s. Compact discs offered by audio quality and longer play time (80 minutes vs. 60 minutes) than the average cassette. Audio equipment continued to improve, and soon cars were coming standard with CD players instead of cassette players.

Of course, following the success of compact discs and CD players is the mp3 and mp3 player. CDs are still around, and are still the second most popular format of listening to music, but with the introduction of mp3 players, the popularity of the iPod (which debuted in 2001),and the iTunes and Amazon digital music store, CDs will probably remain a second place technology.

The latest development in the music medium is the cloud movement. "The Cloud," in the context of the internet, is an offsite storage that houses data. For instance, if you saved something to the cloud, it would not reside on your machine, but on a server in a large warehouse in another state. The big three tech heavy-hitters Google, Amazon, and Apple all have a cloud based music option. The future of music could look very much like having a device that is constantly connected to the web (and thus, to the cloud), and you, the user, can stream music from a large library of music. This technology exists now, but most people still sync their mp3 player with a computer. Cloud music technology is in its infancy as far as how it relates to consumers, as cloud streaming music debuted from Amazon, Google and Apple in 2011.

Where is music headed next? Wireless headphones that connect to the cloud and stream music based solely voice commands? The possibilities are truly endless. Who, in the days of the vinyl record, could have predicted compact disc, or even cloud based music technology? It will be interesting to see where we will end up next as technology continues to mature and make leaps forward much quicker than it ever has before.

Sean Markey is a teacher and a musician in Salt Lake City, UT. He runs a website that allows users to stay up to date with every new music release and read reviews of the newest music.

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The Early History Of Blues Music

Blues music history can be traced all the way back to the nineteenth century. By far, the earliest genre of traditional blues music, comes directly from a musical technique termed the "country blues", dating back to around the 1920's. Obtaining the facts surrounding the oldest origins of blues music is something a good number of historians have focused a lot of energy and money trying to uncover (some going as far as visiting locations within west Africa in order to discover whether or not this unique music genre was created because of an influence from conventional African music). While there does actually appear to be some parallels, blues music carries a distinct and unique sound which began with the African American community inside the southern part of the U.S.

The very meaning of "blues" inside the dictionary implies "1. depression 2. melancholy kind of jazz". Musicians are accustomed to associating the blues with the typical and famous 12 bar blues. This particular type of chord progression utilizes three chords which may be played inside any key. Together with the profound vocals which most often goes along with the chords, blues music expresses and also invokes a different feeling of emotions generally in most of its listeners and supporters.

A number of well-known, early blues musicians who helped form the blues music we all know today. Some of these artists were Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Huddie Ledbetter, Willie Brown, Son House and Tommy Johnson. Many of these blues artists were born within the Mississippi delta, with the exception of a few like Blind Lemon Jefferson (who was from Texas) and Huddie Ledbetter (who was from Louisiana).

The two beginning methods associated with blues music were:

1. classic blues (composed of mainly female performers)
2. the country blues (composed of generally guy performers).

Every type of blues offered distinct variations in form and tone. Classic blues singers had a relatively stringent adherence on the 12 bar blues as the country blues performers strayed just a little out of the conventional 12 bar blues form. Furthermore, classic blues singers desired to get a band to compliment with them while a country blues performer would usually want to include only his guitar as well as voice to produce music.

Blues music actually started to take off during the early times of the 1920's, once one particular organization took their music revenue to a whole different degree. A lady singer named Mamie Smith, part of the classic blues form, served to start the blues by selling more than 1 million copies of her music within just twelve months. Figuring that each of the records were less than $ 1 (low-priced by today standard nevertheless in those days it absolutely was quite a lot for this type of music) that could have added up to a whole lot of money for a new to the scene industry.

Blues music is a special aspect of our history that is uniquely American. Not many styles of music fire up deep emotion and move us the way that the blues does.

Around the world, the best jazz and blues fests are transpiring annually. For anyone who is thinking about tracking down more schedules or more knowledge about universal jazz and blues festivals, there are a lot of different resources out there to assist in your festival planning.

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