Tips and tools for musicians

Save Internet Radio!

2007-06-26T19:01:00.000-07:00

The future of Internet radio is in immediate danger. Royalty rates for webcasters have been drastically increased by a recent ruling and are due to go into effect on July 15 (retroactive to Jan 1, 2006!).

Follow this link and call your representatives in Washington. It'll only take a few minutes. We CAN drown out the corporate lobbyists if we all work together. Help save Internet Radio!

http://www.savenetradio.org/index.html

Support Low Power FM Radio - Power to the People

2007-06-25T16:05:00.000-07:00

Help democratize the airwaves! Support low power FM radio!

http://www.freepress.net/lpfm/

How to Soundproof an Apartment

2007-06-21T16:53:00.000-07:00

Having a sound proof room has always been and still is a dream of mine. Here's a great article from Wired about soundproofing a room.

http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2007/06/soundproofing

You'll need, among other things, this stuff called green glue. From their FAQ:

1. What is Green Glue and how does it work?

Sound travels as a wave through the air. It’s an airborne vibration. The waves hit a wall or ceiling and the energy becomes structure-borne. Unless the wall or ceiling material is damped, the vibration will travel through the building framing and exit somewhere else as sound again.

2. How does Green Glue Work?

In a constrained layer damping system, sometimes referred to as CLD, a damping material is sandwiched between two other (usually stiff/center of the "sandwich" is sheared rigid) materials. For example, Green Glue sandwiched between two layers of drywall. Damping occurs when the viscoelastic center of the "sandwich" is sheared (see left).

When bent, shear forces pull and stretch on the damping material. Under these conditions, the unique polymeric construction of Green Glue very efficiently converts this mechanical energy to heat. The vibration energy is not isolated, it's dissipated and gone.

http://www.greengluecompany.com/

Album Art

2007-06-20T13:42:00.000-07:00

One challenge of the DIY musician is creating album art. Unless you're graphic designer or other type of visual artist, making album art is one of those necessary evils we all have to deal with. You could wait for that million dollar record deal and let the label take care of all that, or you could do it yourself. Here's some tips on that:

Get public domain images from the web. Wikipedia has a great list of websites that are repositories for images that can be used for personal AND COMMERCIAL purposes. Here's that page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Public_domain_image_resources

Take your own pictures. Get your camera or borrow one from a friend and get off your lazy ass. Take high res pictures of your pretty face, your cool guitar, tress, flowers, of anything, take lots and lots of pictures. It costs you nothing but time.

Tweak your public domain pictures and the photos you took with Picasa. Picasa is a superb photo editing program provided for free by Google. It allows you to make fast changes to pictures. I recommend cropping, straightening and definitely look into focal blur and focal black and white. Picasa can be downloaded here: http://picasa.google.com/

Get Photoshop. If you can't afford it, or aren't morally flexible enough to 'borrow' it, get GIMP. GIMP is a FREE photoshop-like program. It may not be as good as Photoshop but it does enough for what we need to do here. Take the photos you edited with Picasa and layer them on top of one another. Mess with how the photos sit on top of one another. Add your clever band name here too, and your songs titles.

Well, that's all I got for now. Add your own tips and image editing glory stories in the comments below.

kunaki.com

2007-06-18T18:42:00.001-07:00

Kunaki

This website is the best I have found so far for Indie and DIY muscians to publish their own CDs. $1.60 per CD and NO MINIMUM! If you just want to order 5 CDs and have them available for when you play open mic night or whatever, go for it. Kunaki understands and wants to be integrated into other websites, such as CDBaby. I plan on using this site then writing a review once I have a self published CD out there. But for now, check out the site yourself, especially if you have some songs already recorded.

Gestalt Song Writing

2007-04-14T17:28:00.000-07:00

Gestalt Song Writing is a term I have coined in having many arguments/discussions with my friend Tom who is majoring in music.

Gestalt: a perceived, whole pattern/a series of such patterns "Gestalt is a German word that does not translate easily. It means a complete pattern or configuration. The catch is the word 'complete.' There are three parts to a definition of gestalt: a thing, its context or environment, and the relationship between them." Wymore, 2002
www.g-gej.org/7-1/d-f.html

A song is merely a system of patterns, and in order to have a song flow and 'make sense' one has to step back and see the set of patterns as a whole. Too many times I have come up with a cool riff, or lyric, and forced a song around that great piece. Great songs aren't forced. Great songs flow from one pattern to the next.

Gestalt writing would be blurring your focus of one specific point in the song in order to bring the entirety of the song into focus. If you don't understand the full meaning of this term that's good, because I don't fully understand it either. My friend Tom has tried again and again to explain this process to me, but I've never felt as if I've fully understood what he's trying to tell me.

If anyone is interested in learning more about this style of song writing please contact me and I will put you in touch with my friend Tom. He also teaches guitar in Sacramento, California and the surrounding areas if anyone is interested in taking guitar or music theory lessons.

Some other tips I have encoutered in song writing are:

Two forms of KISS: Keep it simple, stupid, and Keep it short, stupid. Keeping it simple will ring true with anyone who has learned how to play a great song. More often than not a great song will sound complicated but really be composed of only a few simple patterns. Complexity doesn't make a song great, rather the opposite. The second KISS, keep it short, stupid is to force the writer to write more. Shorter songs mean more songs mean more writing. More writing means more experience. Not to mention, if you're just starting out and your song writing is lousy, shorter songs will mean less suffering by your listeners. :-)

Knowledge is your friend. Too many times I've heard too many excuses for not learning music theory. Learn it. Even if the style you're going for is to break all the rules. You need to know what the rules are, to know that you are breaking them. Also learn your music history, what may be a new cutting edge sound to you, could be old hat to someone who has heard band X from decade Y. Know your stuff.

I know much about music and songwriting, but what I know pales in comparison to my friend Tom who is finishing up his degree in music as a guitar major. If anyone would like to know more about songwriting theory, or found what I had to say a little too obvious, contact me at dsakima {at} gmail and I will be glad to put you in touch with my friend Tom. He also is available for guitar lessons, classical/acoustic/electric, in the Sacramento and surrounding areas if you're interested in learning.

Thanks for reading, feedback appreciated.

The 20 Worst Lyrics In History

2007-04-08T02:16:00.001-07:00

Sometimes it's hard writing lyrics. But don't get discouraged, lyrics don't have to be meaningful to make a great popular song, or in many of these cases, a bad popular song.

read more | digg story

How musicians can use RSS to view changes on websites.

2006-09-19T20:14:00.000-07:00

This tip will show you how to quickly view the changes in webpages using RSS. A simple button can display the changes is sites like your local musicians craigslist post or your musical instrument on eBay.

RSS stands for really simple syndication and is denoted by the symbol in the upper right. RSS organizes the changes in websites, such as craigslist, eBay, and blogs, such as the one your reading now. To quickly view the changes in a webpage you'll need an RSS reader which is either a program or a plug-in if you're using the Firefox web browser.

I use Sage, a Firefox plug-in for subscribing to my RSS feeds. Sage can be found here http://sage.mozdev.org/. If you're using Internet Explorer you'll have to download a separate program as IE does not yet support RSS. (Edit: Internet Explorer version 7 and later does support RSS) A list of RSS Readers can be found here: http://www.download.com/RSS-Readers/3150-9227_4-0.html.

Each program or plugin will have its own way of handling RSS feeds but the idea is the same. Anytime you see an orange RSS button such as the one in the upper left, copy the link and paste it into your RSS reader. Once this is done you've subscribed to the RSS feed. Refreshing the feeds will give you all the new changes to your feeds.

Tip: RSS feeds and be created from a specific search for example here is a search for guitars under $150 on Craigslist http://sacramento.craigslist.org/search/sss?hasPic=1&maxAsk=150&query=guitar&format=rss

You can also use RSS to subscribe to blogs, here's a couple I'm subscribed to:
Music Thing
Bob Baker's Indie Music Promotion Blog
Online Music Blog

I also recommend subscribing to this blog too.
Fuel to the Fire