Jon MacLennan — a professional educator, artist, composer, and Los Angeles-based musician — has released “Melodic Expressions: The Art of the Line,” an interactive guitar instructional iBook for the iPad, at the iBookstore. It costs US$14.99.
“Melodic Expressions” features over 90 pages of materials, as well as 178 audio examples all embedded within the book. A wide variety of lines apply to styles encompassing blues, jazz, rock, R&B, pop, and country. “Melodic Expression” was created in iBooks Author, Apple’s new, free app that allows anyone to create and publish multi-touch textbooks for the iPad. With fast and fluid navigation, integrated audio, video, photo galleries, interactive graphics, and more, these books bring content to life in ways the printed page never could.
With a BA in jazz guitar from the internationally renowned Jazz Studies program at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), MacLennan has been mentored by guitarists such as Carl Verheyen, Tim Pierce, Kenny Burrell, Jimmy Wyble, and Wolf Marshall — a pre-eminent guitar educator who transcribed the “shred” solos of legendary rock bands for music publishing giant Hal Leonard.
MacLennan has two full-length albums “Suspicious Love” (2006) and “Dreams” (2011) under his belt, on which he wrote, arranged, produced, engineered and recorded. Career highlights include: recording with British pop-star Jamie Cullum on the gold album “The Pursuit”; performing on national television playing ukulele and guitar for Fox’s “Raising Hope”; appearing on the Disney Channel’s hit series “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody”; and debuting his single “Fallin’ Deeper” on the Twentieth Century Fox Film “Marley & Me II: The Puppy Years” motion picture soundtrack. You can watch the “Melodic Expressions” trailer at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rq6Gypr8i7U .
