Kennesong Contest is coming up!
Aug0
There I am... Sponsored by RecordYourMusicNOW.com!
The billboards for the Kennesong vocal competition just went up on Monday, 8/9. This is the one featuring my link – RecordYourMusicNow.com Catchy, huh? It takes you right to my web site. It’s hard to see with the small pic, but click on it and you can see it full size.
Information about the competition is on the front page of my site. It will link you to the Kennesaw WiFi site where you can register for a time slot to sing. Cost is just $10. I’m giving away five hours of recording time, so sing purty! 
Songwriting – the big picture
Jul1
I’ve given a course on songwriting and presented a few talks on aspects of it to various groups. While I haven’t published anything formally, I wanted to use this blog to at least give the main points of my approach. Whenever a songwriter comes in the studio with a song that may need a bit of work, I always use these principles to guide my suggestions on improvement.
- The purpose of a song is to convey an emotion to the listener.
Ask yourself what emotion you want someone to feel after hearing your song. If you get that emotion back from your listener, you have succeeded as a songwriter. I’m not talking about deep, heavy emotions necessarily. It may be that all you want someone to feel is light and carefree. Maybe you want them to be amused. There is a huge range of feeling and emotion between happy and sad, so try to be as specific as you can. - Lyrically, a song should be about one moment in time from an emotional point of view.
Without getting into a lot of lyric writing technique, this principle alone should keep you on target. This is not to say you can’t change scenes and go from one point in your life to another in one song. It’s that, if you do, each of those scenes should still be about the same moment, even though they occurred at different points in time. - Musically, a song should have a balance of repetition and surprise.
Too much repetition creates boredom. Too much surprise creates confusion. We need repetition to remember the song after it’s over. We need surprise to create a pleasant excitement for our ears.
Remember, there are no rules in songwriting, only expectations. We are used to hearing things presented in a certain way; however, the three-minute verse-chorus song is not the only way that a song can be done. No matter how you choose to write your song, if you adhere to these three overriding principles, you should be able to keep your listeners’ interest, deliver the emotion you were feeling when you wrote it, and connect.
Prince: The Internet Is Over
Jul0
Read all about it here. I don’t think I can go as far as Prince, but I see his point. If the internet has rendered the law of supply and demand so lopsided that you have such an abundance of supply, then how do you create demand? In his case, by withdrawing.
His official web site is shut down. He refuses to allow his music to be posted to YouTube, iTunes, rhapsody.. What is left? Personal appearances?
His latest work is his 27th CD – 20TEN – which will be included as a freebie in the London Daily Mirror. This is the second time he’s taken this approach with a CD release.
Everyone else is talking about openness, context vs content, integrated virtual living, digital apps. This is the guy who changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol to be legally free of the controlling recording contract he had with Warner Brothers. Here’s the guy who outsmarted SoundScan by including CDs in the price of his live concerts so that they counted as sales, putting his album at the top of the Billboard charts in the early 2000′s. He can clearly think outside of the box and doesn’t mind enduring some pain for his beliefs.
Maybe he’s ahead of the curve again. Or maybe this time Prince has “left the (virtual) building.”
Terry McBride Presentation from Nov 2009 – Must Watch
Jun0
Excellent video presentation by Terry McBride on basic concepts of the new music business models: content/context, selling access rather than copies, the subscription based music model that is coming soon.
Limewire Loses
May0
The RIAA just won the lawsuit against file sharing service Limewire. While this is necessary and meaningful, noone believes file sharing will stop. There was a good comment I read today on Jeremy Silver’s blog.
Worldwide expenditure on anti-piracy measures is out of all proportion to the worldwide investment in new digital content business models. More importantly the investment in new ways to invest in content is not coming from the music industry. It’s coming from new entrants who are faced with the prospect of rights holders who make it difficult and expensive to try new things out. Rights holding companies typically demand advances and even equity in companies that dare to enter their sector with a new idea for creating economic growth.
This will be a long struggle to find methods of digital distribution of music where artists are compensated fairly. It will have to happen, however. It’s not just the music business that is affected. It’s any creative content producing entity that releases their product in a digital form: software developers, print publishers, news outlets, mobile app creators, television and movies, etc.
More to follow…
Errors and Such
Mar0
Whenever someone finishes a project with me, they get a data DVD as well as the audio CD master. The data DVD contains all of the files of the session – all tracks, no edits, all starting from the beginning of the project. Also included in separate folders are the WAV mixes and the WAV masters. This is not just so that you can return to the studio at a later time and be able to pull up the project to change a vocal line, although that’s handy. It’s also not just to have the tracks in case you want to take them to another studio on another audio platform, although that’s handy, too. It’s also about avoiding errors.
When you burn an audio CD on your computer, you also burn errors onto the disc. It’s unavoidable. The faster your burn speed, the more errors you introduce onto your audio CD. The only reason we are even able to play an audio CD is because the players have error correction circuitry built into the device. Some are better than others. That’s why your CD will play on your stereo at home but stutters when you put it in your car.
So if you put your audio CD in your computer and iTunes rips it onto your hard drive as a streaming media file (MP3, M4P, etc), you’ve even degraded it more because it’s now lost up to 90 percent of the audio content.
Copying data from a CD or DVD is another thing entirely. Error correction is built into the process. So if you take the data DVD I’ve given you, navigate to the Master folder, and copy the mastered WAV files that you find there over to your computer, they will be bit for bit identical to what was on the disc and what was on my computer. That means when you burn a CD using those WAV files, you are starting with the best quality of data you have available.
If you are selling CD’s that you’re burning from your home computer, this should go a long way towards preventing returns on CD’s that won’t play.
Fun With Grooveshark
Jan0
A friend of mine shared his Grooveshark playlist with me a few months ago. I spent about an hour with it just finding great music and adding it to my current song selections. Last night I signed up and started putting together one for me and my wife to listen to while playing our nightly ping pong game. Well, easily another hour went by. I would find a song I like, then find versions I’d never heard of by artists I’d never heard of, then I’d find artists that had a similar style to the ones I had found, and it just kept going. I’m sure these kinds of experiences will only be more frequent as time goes on.
The artists that the site chose were well known. I wonder if something like that could be done for indie artists as well? Hmmm, now that would be a pretty nice business model for someone.
Virtual Gigs
Dec0
The movie Avatar was released last Friday. Haven’t seen it yet, but I plan on getting the 3-D glasses and experiencing it in a movie theater very soon. Critics say it revolutionalizes the way animation will be done in film. It reminds me of my experience a couple of years ago with Second Life.
Second Life is a virtual online world. You can join for free, but to really get the most out of it requires spending some money. The first thing you do is create an alter ego for yourself – an avatar. You decide how it looks, how it is dressed, how it moves, what vehicle it drives, where it lives, what it does. Some things are already made for you, but the good stuff is scripted and created by experts who charge for their services. The currency is Linden Dollars, which actually have a real monetary conversion rate. 5,000 Linden Dollars is currently worth about $20.00 US.
You can buy “land” – even own your own island. You can open up a business with a storefront on a main street in one of the cities. By spending a little real money, you can have a great virtual second life!
What about entertainment? It’s there, too. In real time – streaming to you live from someone’s desktop computer. Yesterday, I met one of the more popular Second Life entertainers – Noma Falta – in the flesh. She’s been “gigging” online now for the past two years and has built up a great reputation as one of the best blues singers in the online community. There’s a fee to watch and hear her perform, and it’s enabled her to bring in a steady stream of revenue to the point that this is pretty much all that she does.
You have to know that this wasn’t an instant thing. It took a long time for her to get the skills to not only control her avatar in real time but also stream a live performance over the internet and interact with the paying customers in the virtual room. She’s running an 8-core Mac, if that gives you an idea of how serious this is.
She also plays blues with a couple of guys in other countries in real time using NINJAM. She plays bass and sings from her location in the US, the drummer is in Japan, and the guitarist is in Germany. Sometimes they join her at the gig in Second Life.
It’s just nice to know that in this day and age where brick-and-mortar clubs are expecting free entertainment or even charging musicians to play, that the virtual online world offers a way to earn a living.
Read This
Nov0
Gerd Leonhard’s open letter to the music industry . There are some very good points here.
Off The Grid
Nov0
I was watching Al Gore promote his new book on television (yes I still watch it), and it got me to thinking about the current trend of moving toward decentralization.
He was speaking of alternative sources of energy and used as an example the possibility of creating a “super grid” of solar cell panels to provide electricity. According to Al, the earth receives enough energy from the sun within a short length of time (I think he said “a day”) to satisfy the needs of the world for a year. And that the science is at a point where it could happen. And that the obstacle to all of this is the companies who make their profit from our traditional energy sources.
A friend of mine, Ted Hatfield, is preparing to bulldoze his property in order to build a new home in its place that will be energy self-sufficient. His will be the model that his company will use to install these types of systems into new homes. He’s got it figured out. No more dependence on Georgia Power for electricity.
A small percentage of the country who live in the sunny areas of the country like Arizona and southern California have done this same thing. I know that right now the conversion rate for energy from one of those solar panels is ridiculously low. But that will change. So, if the trend continues and science makes it possible for the homeowner to own a home that doesn’t need outside assistance for electricity, that means no dependence on a central provider for electricity. We all have our little energy independent houses.
So it may be possible to extend the catastrophic events that have happened to our music industry to other industries who have depended on a centralized structure of distribution. My head hurts just thinking about it….