This week I had a real musical revelation. Sometimes you take a song and you have an idea how it is going to work, play it with acoustic guitar and with a big content smile on your face pat your self in the back. Head for the rehearsals and try it out with the band, and it sounds like s**t! This is not bey get other people to help make this vision in to reality. I am different, I need that musical interaction, where different musicians bring their offerings and turn it in to one. And in this situation band forms its own identity, its own sound. Sometimes this can take long time, but in my case I was lucky enough to find a few good guys and in the third time we played together I could hear a sound, very definite sound, and a direction. The problem was that some of my innocent songs just did not work in their simple forms. But to me this was a great problem to have.
I was never a big fan of the virtual guitar amps and pods and so on, I like real valve amp, real feedback. But with the Line6 UX1 you get the Pod farm, and I found a brilliant use for this. I must say, before I go any further, the amp modelling has come light years since I last played with it. So what I did was dial in few amps and just started messing around. And soon enough I seemed to come up with sounds that inspired me to sing the songs that needed reworking, and presto! I had tracks that really pleased me and I could hear the rest of the band in them. So the next rehearsal will show if they will stand up to the rest of the tracks. I must say I am getting really exited the way the rehearsals have been going and how the music sounds. And I must warn you, the acoustic tracks I have posted so far are very different to the full band sound ;-)
I also had a real eye opening week on promotional front. Those of you, who know me, know that I do most of the promotional work and bookings for Sliotar, and have been doing this for quite some time. And it has been a learning curve, but I can safely say I know one or two things about promoting an act, booking tours and getting exposure online. But Sliotar still falls in to pretty small category of folk music, which is my expertise and as I have been looking in to much wider music market lately, the endless amount of resources and information has been flooding in. Outside of actually working on the music, I have been very busy reading most of my waking hours. And a thing I've come to realise; in music business and online marketing things change at a lightning speed. So don't bother to go to your local book shop to buy an online marketing book, most likely if it is printed on paper, it is already old information. You need to be online for the up to date stuff. So what did I come across this week? Few sites that I used in the past, but did not utilise to the best, so my own project is a perfect chance to see what I can get out of these sites. There are the usual ones that you must have as we talked about before: Myspace, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and Reverbnation. Lastfm was one that I have used in the past and will keep using in the future, also iLike is a good one. But had you heard about IndabaMusic, Flotones, Musocity, Midomi, Sellaband, Ping...? There are so many, and as an independent artist, you need to link your site to as many of these as possible and I have only scratched a surface! I am thinking of compiling a kind of ongoing list of sites to be posted on this blog, so if you know any, just email them to me, or leave here as a comment for every one to see. I'm sure I'm still missing loads.
But as you can see, with this big list of web sites, the work load keeps getting bigger. So we need to look in to how to find time for all this. Any artist, if they want to make a serious go of it, needs to have team to help them out, just like the bigger acts. But obviously this is not cheap if you hire professionals... So in the beginning you are relying on friends and family. And this is something I haven't put to practise yet. So it would be easy for me to just write about this, but that would not be the point of this blog. We need to test it out, see if it really can be done. Some of my friends will hear from me soon, as I'll be looking for a good group of people to help me on my quest. And if you want to be part of it, let me know :-)
One more thing; there is a little tip, kind of secret weapon if you like, that I do use all the time. And this is probably one of the most important tools I have used in the past, and you should too. In the music business, be nice! And I mean genuinely nice, no fake smiles. If people contact you, get back to them. If people want to talk to you, spare some of your precious time for them. Help out your fellow musicians in anyway you can. Reply to MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, twitter... wall posts. There are enough music lovers out there to be shared between all of us. You will always come across some resistance, not every one wants you to succeed. Don't let this discourage you, just smile and keep going :-)
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