Improve Your Music

We are very excited to announce the release of our first eBook, “Taking Your Music Online.” It is a collection of some of our best articles as well as some exclusive new material. We take the “business of music” very seriously here as this is the area where most musicians fall down. Time after time we receive questions about how to become a successful independent musician or band. This eBook is the first step in understanding what it takes to take your music online.

Chapters include:

1. Building an Effective Press Kit for your Band
2. Why Most Band’s Web Sites Are A Complete Waste Of Time And Money
3. How To Get Your Music On The Radio
4. Selling Your Music Online
5. Do You Really Need A Record Company?
6. Raising Finance For An Album

Get your FREE copy right now. Just put your name and email into the box below and we’ll send you the link to download the book immediately.

Once you’ve read it, I’d love to hear your thoughts, comments and suggestions. Just scroll down to the comments section below.

Cheers, Mark Gibson.

Do you really know the name of the notes on your guitar fretboard? You can learn the notes well and in a short time if you put a little energy into the project!

It will really help you as a guitarist if you know the names of the notes on your guitar. Let’s see some of the benefits you reap from learning to know your guitar:

1. It will be much easier to learn to play sheet music notation as you already know where to find the notes on your guitar. The only remaining task is to learn the names of the notes on the sheet music staff.

2. You will find it much easier to understand chords and remember chords as you easily can see where to put your fingers to play the required notes.

3. It will be easier for you to understand guitar lessons on the net or in guitar instructional books as you understand an important part of the language used in guitar instruction.

We will start with something you can learn as your first task if don’t already know this. It is to know the names of the notes on the open strings of your guitar. An open string is a string not pressed down by a left hand finger. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Here is another fantastic video by Bob Gatzen, this time on tuning bass drums. I’ve tried his tuning method recently and had great results. If you’ve got any drum tuning hints then why not share them in the comments section below. I hope to hear from you soon.

I just wanted to give you folks a heads up on a brand new website for musicians and bands. This project is still in the design stage so this is a very unique opportunity to find out what’s going on before the general public does.

Head over to www.musicbusinessmasterclass.com/sneak-peek and be sure to leave your thoughts in the comments section.

We’ve spent quite a lot of time lately looking at ways to promote yourself and your music. Arjun over at The Good Musician has a great article on just this subject called 100 Free & Affordable High & Low Tech Ways To Promote Music. It might sound like a tired old cliche but good marketing and promotion really does make a phenomenal difference when trying to make money out of your music.

It starts off with:

1. Never leave promotion to the other guy. Depending on your point of view don’t count on the label, band or publicist to do their jobs. Do it yourself or it may not get done.
2. Know your niche market(s) or hire/befriend someone who does.
3. Always think of the fans first when making decisions.
4. Start early. Pre-promote. It allows time for viral buzz (aka free promotion) to build and ensures you’ll get you a larger share of a discretionary spending.
5. Take the time and spend the money to get a great publicist to get free media.
6. Produce great promotional material and send it out early and often. Don’t wait until they need it.
7. Email lists must be your new religion. Make sign up simple and easy to find. Put it visibly on the top half of the front page and watch it grow.
8. Segment your email lists (genre, location) to fight email burnout.
9. Produce and send great e-cards. The best ones get forwarded to others
10. Make your web site a destination by keeping it updated and including news, giveaways, polls and things to make it worth visiting.

Read 11-100 here.

Music is undoubtedly a form of communication and/or expression. Coincidently, the skills of improvisation are certainly related to the dexterity and formalities that are imperative to accomplishing your role as a communicator. Therefore, as you are preparing to become a musician, improvising will firmly assists with your development of the overall perception and understanding of musicianship.

Improvisation often focuses on the recognition of one’s personal awareness, into the present moment. The skill also enables the development of a profound understanding of the action that one is currently displaying. Once you are aware and understand the concept, you will be provided as the practitioner with a sense of belief and accomplishment.

As a practitioner you will display pure confidence in which you are able to execute with a range of options that best conforms to the current situation regardless of previous successes or failures. Quite frankly, the practice of improvisation symbolizes acting and reacting, making and creating of “in the moment” response to the stimulus of one’s immediate environment.

In music, specifically, improvisation is spontaneous composition. The performer is challenged by performing music that is composed at the spur-of-the-moment. This is usually achieved through solo or cadenza. Improvisation has actually dominated in Jazz musicals. The challenge of improvisation is not to be confused or compared with technique. The two concepts are different in that improvisation is described as a creative performance art.

On the other hand, technique or sight reading is a reconstructive process. It is noted, however, that as both technique and improvisation require that you react immediately to any changes needed to the music in response to stimuli, they do demonstrate primary differences. Namely, the process is executed externally for successful sight- reading and internally to execute improvisation. Furthermore, they both are greatly enhanced by a strong musical knowledge base. [Read the rest of this entry...]

One of my hobbies is running an internet radio station and consequently I deal with bands and musicians trying to get airplay on a regular basis. The thing that strikes me most of all is not the variance in the quality of music, but the variance in the quality of the correspondence I receive. To be quite blunt, most of it is crap.

Luckily for most bands this is my hobby and not my job so I tend to be a bit forgiving and listen to the music anyway. If this was my full-time job most of the material I get would go straight in the bin. Again, most of the music is great but it simply wouldn’t get listened to because of the lack of quality in the written materials. I’ve received hand written scrawl on a scrap of paper through to very professional printed press kits and everything in between. Having a professional quality press kit doesn’t have to cost you the earth though. Most fall down due to the quality of the info presented and not just the presentation quality although both are important. In a lot of cases a simple tidy up would improve the band’s chances enormously.

So what should be in a press kit for a start? A press kit can contain any or all of the following components depending on your audience. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Over recent times we have looked at alternative ways of selling your music online. The internet has been an amazing tool for musicians and has leveled the playing field enormously. Once upon a time if you weren’t with a record company you had no hope of ever releasing an album. While the internet has done wonders for the distribution of music there is still the age old problem of how to pay for the recording in the first place. As we all know, recording can be a very expensive business. Sure, the introduction of cheap technology has meant that some people can record quite decent quality tracks in their own home. But at the end of the day, recording is a specialised field and being a good musician doesn’t necessarily mean you are a good recording engineer. So the age-old problem still exists. How do you raise what can be a large amount of money in order to do a professional recording? Once again, the internet has come to our rescue in the form of Slice The Pie.

Slice The Pie is an amazing concept that combines a number of very unique factors into an overall package that seems to work very well. [Read the rest of this entry...]

Our ongoing series on drum tuning continues today with this gem of a video by the amazing Dave Weckl.
Dave is one of the world’s most respected jazz-fusion drummers and has played for such acts as: Paul Simon, Madonna, George Benson, Michel Camilo, Anthony Jackson and most famously the Chick Corea Elektric Band. In this video Dave demonstrates some great basic tuning techniques that can benefit all drummers.

Just as a little bonus… here’s Dave Weckl performing one of his trademark solo’s. Enjoy!

We have recently looked at a number of online services that can help the “less famous” bands and artists release their own music to the paying public. Services like Tunecore and CD Baby allow you to distribute your music to a very widespread marketplace and to completely bypass the whole record company thing. But is this what you really want? Wouldn’t it be better to have some record company to throw a heap of cash at you and to look after all the “details”? Maybe, but before you decide to go down that route have a read of what Steve Albini, Producer of Nirvana’s “In Utero”, has to say on the subject in his brilliant article entitled “The Problem With Music“.

“Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed. Nobody can see what’s printed on the contract. It’s too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody’s eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there’s only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says “Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim again, please. Backstroke”. And he does of course. “

Steve goes on to show a comprehensive budget of what a “real” album costs to release & promote and shines a little light on what the band might end up with once it’s all done. The figures are a little dated but you’ll certainly get the idea. [Read the rest of this entry...]