and then things fall together, all at once

[solarbird]

For about a year now, I've slowly, slowly, slowly been figuring out recording, and working on mic discipline, and learning how to put things together, and working on my vocals, particularly for recording purposes, and it's been excruciatingly slow and I've felt for a long time like I was never, ever going to get anywhere, ever, because every time I'd get something a bit better I'd discover something else was a mess, and so I've been having to build about a dozen skills all together in parallel, and all of them slowly as I've discovered more shit what's wrong.

Frankly, it has sucked. It's been depressing, and slow, and horrible.

But it turns out that if you do it this way then eventually you kind of hit critical mass at a bunch of different skills all at the same time, and then suddenly the sky is made of fire and awesome. And you throw out months of work because you can and you make better versions of everything in a day. And it actually is that much better, and you sit in front of the DAW and listen and realise that you don't hate any of this. It still needs work, sure, and you have some ideas for effects and processing that would be nice and you need to balance things about and you want to re-record the bodhran track and there's plenty of room still for improvement, gods know, but most of the seven tracks for this song, four of which you've recorded today, are just fine, thanks.

Today was that day.

I need to get a proper music website. Myspace Music? What do all the cool kids use now, anyway?

Comments

[corvi]

I think cool kids still use myspace, not that I've ever met any. Juli uses jango and last.fm to get her music into circulation and get feedback on which ones people liked, and what percentage of people hearing things became fans of it, and what other music they also like, and that sort of thing.

[sunfell.livejournal.com]

That is always wonderful when it happens. Let my query my musician friends on Twitter as to a good music site. I've decided that this is going to be my Year of the Involved Listener. I am not a musician- but I am a damn good listener and writer, and have decided to use those two skills to find and promote musical artists I find and enjoy. My tastes are eclectic, so you might consider getting a Twitter account (part of the 'attention stack' every performer really needs) and start promoting your work when it is ready. People will 're-tweet' it, and the ripples will spread out. It's surprisingly effective.

[solarbird]

Thanks! A lot of the local venues around here are still using (har) Myspace Music, and the one thing I can say for it is that it does include a little mini storefront. (I need to find out what a couple of people on my friendslist are using...)

[sunfell.livejournal.com]

Chris Dallman uses "Sprout" to embed his music on his website:

http://sproutinc.com/solution/sprout-builder/

It's a flash-based plug-in. There are probably other tools like this one.

[nimbrethil.livejournal.com]

Congratulations! It's so awesome when things work out that way.

[solarbird]

Thanks. ^_^ I was so wiped out yesterday morning, too. But by evening I was wanting to get back to it! And started practicing this stupidly fast - not complex, just fast - mandolin bit that gets played behind the bouzouki main line in Outbirds. I'm going to get that recorded today, I hope.

[westrider.livejournal.com]

I love those moments when everything you've been working on finally just clicks, and you suddenly jump up to a new level. Wonderful feeling. Congratulations!

[solarbird]

Gods, I know. It was just kind of amazing. HELLO ALL THIS WORKS NOW WHAT?!

[phillipalden.livejournal.com]

Congratulations!

[solarbird]

Thanks! There's plenty of room for improvement still, of course. But I no longer feel like it's going to go on forever before I get something competent.

[batyatoon]

WIN.

I'm so happy for you, sweet.

[solarbird]

Oh, it's totally out of hand now. I'm thinking I could put together a few copies of a three-song EP of compete-if-not-truly finished songs for Conflikt next weekend. (I've even got a name for it, which means it's real: Sketchy Characters.) Just to have something, you know?

[quen-elf.livejournal.com]

Yay!

I've never used it, so this is just an observation; the BBC does lots of stuff to promote unsigned musicians on some of the radio shows I listen to, and at present, they still almost universally have a MySpace site (even though the entire rest of the world, except musicians, stopped using MySpace years back).

I don't imagine it would hurt to have a different one though! (Or just make your own, unless you're expecting hideous bandwidth usage - flash mp3 players are easy to come by and that's the only technology you really need. At work we use a customised JW Player, although that one is not free for commercial use.)

[sunfell.livejournal.com]

Check out SoundCloud. One of my musician friends uses this site to privately preview tracks with his friends.

Http://soundcloud.com