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Pete McRae (born Robert F. McRae Jr., 1955) is an American rock guitarist.
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Pete McRae (born Robert F. McRae Jr., 1955) is an American rock guitarist.
Born in Austin, Texas in 1955, [1] McRae and his family moved to California when he was aged ten. Pete graduated from Terra Linda High School, in Marin County, in 1973. He began serious guitar studies with Paul Miller, in Terra Linda, and with Dave Smith, in San Francisco. He went on to study with Jerry Hahn, David Creamer, and Barry Finnerty in the Bay Area. He got his first real performing experience in a Sonoma County band called Synergy (not to be confused with the Larry Fast projects under that name).
In the fall of 1976, he migrated to Los Angeles. There he performed in original and cover bands with many soon-to-be illustrious artists and musicians, and early on became a founding member of The Kats. When The Kats big record deal fizzled terribly, McRae took offers to be a "guitar-slinger for hire", and seemed to be on track for a successful session career. In fact, prior to joining The Kats, he had some national exposure touring and recording with Cory Wells, from Three Dog Night.
In 1982, disenchanted by what seemed like 'type-casting' in the work he was getting, McRae sought training and artistic growth in the Music Department at USC. There, he met and worked with Dr. Robert S. Moore, in composition, and with William Kanengiser, in guitar, for a brief period. (Dr. Moore also inspired McRae to take an interest in martial arts training, albeit from a pacifistic, meditative standpoint.) He was very pleased to be on the roster of the great Ted Greene's jazz guitar students, for a time. It was at USC that his interest in Harry Partch and a comprehensive art form including music, dance, drama, poetry, and visual design took hold, and he left school, convinced -perhaps erroneously- that the only meaningful way to continue his studies was outside the academy.
From 1984 to 1993, he resumed his "guitar-slinging" while pursuing his own songwriting, singing, and composition. In the late 1980s he finally tracked down Danlee Mitchell, who set him on the path that led to Kraig Grady, and his mentor Erv Wilson. Mr. Mitchell was kind enough, too, to loan Pete one of Harry Partch's own instruments. From c. 1988 to 1993 Pete performed all over the Los Angeles area with Kraig Grady, playing a purely acoustic music in just intonation. But it seemed like every time Kraig set down to record, Pete went on tour. So it was not until Kraig's fourth CD, The Stolen Stars, that he is actually credited as a performer.
In 1993, he returned to the Bay Area, performing and recording with Boris Dig, East Of Eden, Gary Claxton, Brandi Shearer, and Ted Savarese. It was during this period of career questioning that Pete became interested in teaching, inspired by the work of Rudolf Steiner. This led to a broadening and deepening of his interest in literature and language, as well as providing training courses in painting, drawing, sculpture, movement, and speech.
In 2000, he went again to Los Angeles, where he renewed his interests in microtonal music and instrument construction, with Kraig Grady. He also worked and trained with some of the technicians he had met as a rock performer, with an eye towards original instrument creations.
In 2001, following the death of his father, he moved back to Northern California, where he completed his undergraduate studies, with a degree in Music Education from Sonoma State University.
He is currently living and working in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he has recorded and performed with Gina Ferrera, Rented Mule, and Todd Horton's ROMP.
He has been known – from his LA days – to have worked with: Roach and the White Boys, Josie Cotton, Billy Rankin, Bobbyzio, The Kat Club, Connie Stevens, Eddie Jobson (Roxy Music; Zappa), Mr. Mister, Peter Kingsbery (Cock Robin), David Baerwald, and Stan Ridgway. He also toured with The Rembrandts, playing Cello and Mandolin and with the Tom Petty tribute band, Petty Theft.
Harry Partch was an American composer, music theorist, and creator of unique musical instruments. He composed using scales of unequal intervals in just intonation, and was one of the first 20th-century composers in the West to work systematically with microtonal scales, alongside Lou Harrison. He built his own instruments in these tunings on which to play his compositions, and described the method behind his theory and practice in his book Genesis of a Music (1947).
The Leslie speaker is a combined amplifier and loudspeaker that projects the signal from an electric or electronic instrument and modifies the sound by rotating a baffle chamber ("drum") in front of the loudspeakers. A similar effect is provided by a rotating system of horns in front of the treble driver. It is most commonly associated with the Hammond organ, though it was later used for the electric guitar and other instruments. A typical Leslie speaker contains an amplifier, a treble horn and a bass speaker—though specific components depend upon the model. A musician controls the Leslie speaker by either an external switch or pedal that alternates between a slow and fast speed setting, known as "chorale" and "tremolo".
John Schneider is a Grammy® Award winning and 4-time Grammy® nominated American classical guitarist. He performs in just intonation and various well-temperaments, including Pythagorean tuning, including works by Lou Harrison, LaMonte Young, John Cage, and Harry Partch. He often arranges pieces for guitar and other instruments such as harp or percussion.
Stanard "Stan" Ridgway is an American singer-songwriter, and film and television composer known for his distinctive voice, dramatic lyrical narratives, and eclectic solo albums. He was the original lead singer and a founding member of the band Wall of Voodoo.
Kraig Grady is a US-Australian composer/sound artist. He has composed and performed with an ensemble of microtonal instruments of his own design and also worked as a shadow puppeteer, tuning theorist, filmmaker, world music radio DJ and concert promoter. His works feature his own ensembles of acoustic instruments, including metallophones, marimbas, hammered dulcimers and reed organs tuned to microtonal just intonation scales. His compositions include accompaniments for silent films and shadow plays. An important influence in the development of Grady's music was Harry Partch, like Grady, a musician from the Southwest, and a composer of theatrical works in Just Intonation for self-built instruments. Many of his compositions use unusual meters of very extended lengths.
Peter Michael Thomas is an English rock drummer best known for his collaboration with singer Elvis Costello, both as a member of his band the Attractions and with Costello as a solo artist. Besides his lengthy career as a studio musician and touring drummer, he has been a member of the band Squeeze during the 1990s and a member of the supergroup Works Progress Administration during the early 2000s.
Loup Garou is an album released in 1995 by Willy DeVille. First released in Europe in 1995 on the EastWest label, it was released the following year in the United States on the Discovery label. It was recorded in Los Angeles and produced by John Philip Shenale, who also produced DeVille’s Backstreets of Desire album.
Frederick George Moore was an American musician best known for his 1980 song "It's Not a Rumour", which he co-wrote with his ex-wife Demi Moore, and recorded with his band The Nu-Kats. The song was not a chart hit, but the video did receive airplay on MTV in the early 1980s. Moore's career spanned decades and included teaching himself to play guitar, writing the lyrics to 1,000 original songs, forming multiple bands, and even starring in a few film roles. Moore's bands performed at legendary Los Angeles clubs, including Whisky a Go Go, The Troubadour, and Starwood, and headlined alongside The Police, The Knack, and The Motels. His memoir, It's Not a Rumour, published in 2021, chronicles his unorthodox story of making it big in music and life without ever making any money.
Ervin Wilson was a Mexican/American music theorist.
David Allen "Davey" Faragher is an American bass guitarist from Redlands, California. Faragher's career took off and received critical notice as a founding member of the nineties band Cracker, and his subsequent work with John Hiatt's band, and The Imposters, the backing band for Elvis Costello since 2001. In 2015, Faragher joined Richard Thompson's Electric Trio for Thompson's Still album and US tour.
Steve Weisberg is an American composer, pianist, recording artist, and producer. In the 1980s, after studying with Michael Gibbs at Berklee College in Boston, Massachusetts, he recorded the XtraWatt/ECM release "I Can't Stand Another Night Alone ," produced by Carla Bley and Steve Swallow, recorded and performed with Karen Mantler and her Cat Arnold, and contributed arrangements for Hal Willner's Lost in the Stars: The Music of Kurt Weill (A&M). He was also a member of infamous Boston band Sons of Sappho. In addition, he has contributed music to the films Atlas Shrugged - Part 1,Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead, Don't Say a Word, Impostor, Runaway Jury, Bewitched, the 2006 documentary The Ground Truth, Step Brothers, The Express: The Ernie Davis Story, and the documentary Banner On The Moon.
Newband is a contemporary music ensemble devoted to the performance of microtonal music. The group was founded in 1977 by musicians Stefani Starin and Dean Drummond. As a youth, Drummond performed with maverick composer Harry Partch in a unique ensemble of microtonal instruments that Partch designed and built himself; Drummond performed in the premieres of Partch’s Daphne of the Dunes, And on the Seventh Day Petals Fell in Petaluma, and Delusion of the Fury, as well as on both Partch Columbia Masterworks recordings made during the late 1960s.
Peter Kingsbery is an American singer-songwriter who co-founded the band Cock Robin in the 1980s. He grew up in Austin (Texas) where he studied classical music. He moved to Nashville (Tennessee) where he began his career as a musician and then to Los Angeles at the end of the '70s where he began a career as a singer-songwriter. He composed a few songs for Smokey Robinson, and one of his compositions, Pilot Error, sung by Stephanie Mills, had some success in the dance charts in 1983. At the beginning of the 80s, he founded the group Cock Robin with Anna LaCazio, Clive Wright and Lou Molino III which enjoyed great success in Western Europe mainly. Failing to break their native country with a first self-titled album in 1985, the quartet became a duo of Kingsbery and LaCazio when they released their second album in 1987. After the band split up in the early 1990s after their third album, Kingsbery enjoyed a fairly successful solo career, releasing four albums over a decade, and scoring a major hit in France with the song "Only the Very Best." With his fourth album he tried his luck singing in French, the language of his adopted country.
Douglas Allen Woody was an American bass guitarist best known for his eight-year tenure in the Allman Brothers Band and as a co-founder of Gov't Mule.
Dean Drummond was an American composer, arranger, conductor and musician. His music featured microtonality, electronics, and a variety of percussion. He invented a 31-tone instrument called the zoomoozophone in 1978. From 1990 to his death he was the conservator of the Harry Partch instrumentarium.
Convertible Music is the 1982 new wave debut album by pop rock artist Josie Cotton, released on Elektra Records.
Thank You Camellia is the third studio album and second major-label album by American singer-songwriter Kris Allen. It was released on May 18, 2012.
The Euclidean rhythm in music was discovered by Godfried Toussaint in 2004 and is described in a 2005 paper "The Euclidean Algorithm Generates Traditional Musical Rhythms". The greatest common divisor of two numbers is used rhythmically giving the number of beats and silences, generating almost all of the most important world music rhythms, except some Indian talas. The beats in the resulting rhythms are as equidistant as possible; the same results can be obtained from the Bresenham algorithm.
Jon Catler is an American composer and guitarist specially known for playing microtonal guitars like 31-tone equal tempered guitar, a 62-tone just intonation guitar, and a fretless neck. He is the member of Catler Bros and Willie McBlind bands.
Jim French is an American avant-garde jazz saxophonist. He has performed with Diamanda Galás and Henry Kaiser as well as frequently collaborated with post-hardcore group Three Mile Pilot. Recognized for his virtuoso saxophone playing, French is also known to have created most of the instruments he plays, such as the "Frenchophone," and for crafting custom mouthpieces for prominent artists such as Pharoah Sanders.
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