It's been a while since my last post. In the interim I've been moving countries, an adventure in itself..
Here's something I made shortly before the move; just a sketch really, again emphasising spontaneity over polish. It's not inspired by the change of scene, although the title has some relevance to my new surroundings :)
I wrote it years ago as a tribute to the wonderful jazz guitarist Emily Remler, and felt like recording a guitar-only version, just for fun. I prioritised spontaneity over perfection, as you might hear.
OK, I'll try and think of something more widely useful for my next post.
It's almost a year now since I set up this website and started taking online promotion semi-seriously. I thought I'd set out a few thoughts about how I think it's gone, to see if my experiences chime with anyone else's, and also in case it's useful to musicians just starting out on the same path.
There's a huge amount of advice of varying quality for musicians who want to promote themselves online, and I followed a lot of it, for better or worse. I put my music in as many online places as I could think of; I blogged; I commented on other people's blogs and engaged in discussions; I tweeted; I got tracks included on podcasts.
Before I write down some thoughts about how last year went, and how I hope this year's going to go, I wanted to tie up a musical loose end. In a previous post I mentioned a track made in collaboration with the Berlin-based producer me raabenstein, and said then that I hoped it would see the light of day at some point. Well, the light of day has now shone upon it!
Imagine that you’re in a city and you’re standing in a large public square. You remember that some years ago the square was surrounded by concert halls, some grand and ornate, some small and simple. Music was performed in the halls, and to hear the music you had to pay.
It was the dream of most musicians to be able to play in the halls. To be sure, some musicians were happy to busk in the public square. Some of them became very good at this, and made a decent living from it, but the vast majority of musicians spent their time trying to get the concert hall owners to hear their music, even though they knew that only a tiny number of them would be selected to play.
“What’s your business model?” asked the bloke I’d just been introduced to in the bar, when it came up in conversation that I was a musician. The question took me a little by surprise, not because I didn’t have a ready answer, but because I felt it was perhaps the least interesting thing he could have asked me.
I politely answered that my model was to make my music as widely and freely available as possible, to engage with people through online and face-to-face conversations, a side-effect of which might be to interest them in me and my music, and to make it clear how people could pay for the music if they wanted to.
As I said, it seemed an uninteresting question to me, and I doubt it would have been the first question he’d have asked a painter or a poet, a writer or a photographer. I don’t say it’s an uninteresting question because it’s unimportant; I just don’t feel it’s anywhere near central to what being a musician is.
He asked a few people to remix the tracks, and I was delighted to be included in that number. The resulting album "RAW:Mixed" will be released on 17th August on Freestyle Records, available as a digital download only.
To those of you who read this blog from time to time, this is just a quick note to apologise for the break and to say that normal service will be resumed soon!
I’ve been entertaining a very welcome string of visitors to Helsinki over the past month or so, and generally trying to make the most of the sunshine - I’ve lived in Finland for long enough now to understand the importance of extracting every ounce of sunny goodness from the brief summer in order to withstand the climatic horrors ahead!
Don’t worry, I haven’t really. (This isn’t the first instalment of one of those terminal-disease blogs.) The title will make sense when you’ve listened to the track below.
The past ten days have been extremely varied guitar playing-wise. At the beginning of last week I dusted down my jazz chops to record a video for YouTube, and a few days later I found myself at the other end of the spectrum attempting some fennesz-style guitar soundscapes.
I got a Flip Ultra HD camera and have been playing around with it for the past few days trying to figure out what I needed to do technically to get the best results on YouTube. (I had previously thought a Codec was a headache tablet, but as it turns out it’s quite the opposite.)
Gigs are expensive here in Helsinki. Touring bands routinely charge €80 for tickets, and if you want a good view of Elton John’s upcoming concerts you’ll need to pay him €109. (Well, hair doesn’t transplant itself, you know..)
For me, that’s a high price for an evening which may fade from memory pretty quickly. This got me thinking; out of all the gigs I’ve been to, which ones would have been worth that kind of money?
I’m hardly the first to say that myspace is now a busted flush, but to give it its due there was a time when it was a good place to find new music and make connections with interesting people.
During the time I was using it I was lucky enough to discover the music made by me raabenstein. He’s a Berlin-based musician and producer, involved in numerous individual and collaborative projects, and the man behind nonine recordings.
A few days ago I saw an article on TechCrunch about Stupeflix. They have an API that allows you to edit videos, photos and music and, being at a loose end, I thought I’d try using it to make a basic music video.
I had a track I’d made a while back called Parhelion. It’s quite different from my other stuff, but I thought it would lend itself to an abstract, meditative treatment. (See, I’ve started using film-terms already.) The name was just a word I liked, but it has to do with a bright spot appearing at the side of the sun, so I took that as my inspiration for the video.
If you read this article at a fairly average speed it’ll take you around three and a half minutes to finish, including this sentence. (And this one :) At a normal breathing rate, that’s forty-two breaths. It’s not much time is it? I can tell you want to be away though – perhaps you’ve got email waiting, or a friend might have updated their Facebook page, or maybe a tweetdeck notification’s just popped up. (If you’re like me you probably speed-read your tweets – after all, who’s got time to give their full attention to all 140 characters?)
I know it’s hardly a new idea to say that a short attention span is one of the characteristics of the modern world; I just want to say I think music is particularly affected by this. I don’t think people base their decisions about films or books or plays or exhibitions on the first couple of seconds of the experience, but many people’s judgements about music are based on exactly that. I think this has negative effects on us both as listeners and as musicians.
This is the third in an occasional series of articles on jazz harmony. This time I thought I’d take a look at a chord/scale relationship that we can make use of when improvising over major chords.
When we’re playing over changes, we seem to have quite a few scale options when it comes to dominant 7 and minor chords, but fewer to choose from when it comes to major chords. There’s the major scale based on the root of the chord (so for Gmaj7 we use the G major scale), there’s the Lydian scale (i.e. the 4th mode of the major scale - so for Gmaj7 we play the D major scale starting on G) and there’s the Lydian augmented scale (i.e. the 3rd mode of the melodic minor scale - so for Gmaj7 we play the E melodic minor scale starting on G).
The Lydian scale gives us the #4, and the Lydian augmented the #4 and #5, both of which can add tension and texture to our playing over maj7 chords. To my ears, there’s another good and less commonly mentioned chord/scale relationship which we can use to add even more interest.
I’ve been suffering with a nasty Finnish cold-bug this week so I’ve been looking at other people’s creative efforts rather than doing much creating of my own.
I managed to stop coughing and sniffing long enough to respond to a couple of very good blog posts from Steve Lawson, in one of which he drew on Andrew Dubber’s experiences of the “Is This It?” conference in Helsinki, while in the other he looked at the role of record companies in the current musical climate. In both posts he claimed that musicians were better placed than ever before to get their music heard.
Sorry for the slight delay in posts – I got distracted last week by Twitter. I’m not going to blog about it, as I think it’s pretty much been done to death, but I am of course going to say that you can follow me here.
So while everyone else has been blogging and writing articles about Twitter I thought I’d be unoriginal in another direction and return to the subject of Last.fm. I wrote about them a few weeks ago, comparing them with Spotify, and at that point I didn’t touch on the costs of both, because I was mainly interested in the different ways I was using them to listen to music.
Last week though Last.fm announced that as of Monday 30th March it would now be charging users outside of the UK, the US and Germany to access its radio players. (As I type this at midday on the 30th it’s still working here in Helsinki, but I don’t know for how much longer..) Their reasoning is that they’re not making enough advertising revenue outside of these areas to continue to provide the service for free. I’m not going to go into the ins and outs of the decision, I'm just going to say that the way they’ve handled this issue has been a complete public relations disaster!
I had a miserable experience a few days ago in a Finnish language class. It wasn’t the learning of Finnish itself that caused the misery, (although it’s not something I’d recommend you doing, unless you really, really have to), but rather the way it was taught on that particular day. After my initial irritation (OK, more like borderline psychotic rage) wore off, it made me think more generally about the right and wrong ways of sharing knowledge.
At the beginning of this year my album was all finished, mastered and ready to go so I made a list of all the things I needed to do to get it out there and promote it. I had to set up a website (check), write a regular blog (check), get myself on some more social networking and music recommendation sites (I’m now on myspace, facebook, facebook pages, Last.fm, iLike, ReverbNation, and imeem, so check!) and apply for a grant (check, but unfortunately no cheque). I also had to read loads of articles about online marketing, digital networking strategies, and flipping the fan funnel (which I had previously thought was just something Mötley Crüe did after gigs).
I used to think that largesse was just something Superman had on his shirt, but then a while ago I read this blog by Andrew Dubber and became convinced that for a musician in my position giving away music was a necessary part of a successful promotion strategy.
I set up a Last.fm profile a month or so ago (I know, I’m a late starter) and had been listening to my library fairly regularly until about a week ago, when I managed to get a Spotify login, since when I’ve definitely been using Spotify more. I’m not going to compare the two in terms of technology (although Spotify’s sound quality and streaming are better), but I was interested to find that I’m using them both in different ways, and I think these reflect the different ways we add meaning to music at a time of musical superabundance.
This time I thought I’d take a look at how we can use quartal harmony to add interest to our playing in a jazz context.
Generally speaking the chords that most western music is based on are built on thirds. This means that there’s an interval of a third between each of the notes of the chord and its nearest neighbour.
When I was looking for a digital distributor to get my album “Mix A” online, I came across RouteNote as being one possible option. I googled them, (as you do), but couldn’t find much in the way of user reviews. So, for what it’s worth, here’s my opinion of them so far.
In an effort to re-focus my mind away from Joomla (see my previous blog) and back towards music, I thought I'd write the first in what may become an occasional series of articles about jazz harmony. This time I'm going to look at how we can add tension and interest to our playing over minor chords by using major triads based on the diminished scale. (Those of you of a non-theoretical disposition may want to look away now :)
A little less than two weeks ago, despite having absolutely no programming skills whatsoever, I decided that I wanted to build my own website. (Yeah, I know, what was I thinking?!) After doing a bit of research I decided that I wanted to use Joomla, because it seemed to offer what I wanted (the ability to create a simple but good looking site) and because it was free!
The following is a general, non-technical overview of how I went about things, with a couple of concepts that were helpful to me when I was hacking my way through the Joomla jungle.
