My CDs have arrived and the EP is out!

I am very excited that today my CDs for 'Beyond The Glass Sky' have arrived! They look great. 

I created the artwork myself, using one of my pictures and combining it with layers of royalty free stock images found on the internet.

This is what they look like:

I have written a newsletter using mailchimp.com and sent it to my subscribers. This time I remembered to add all the subscribers I have on my ReverbNation list, which counted over 400 email addresses, so now my list of subscribers has grown significantly. It's interesting to see in the future if this makes a difference, because my original subscribers all came from people signing up at gigs or from Bandcamp sales, while ReverbNation is more of a social website for musicians, driven by a 'follow for follow', 'like for like' policy.

The EP is now available on Bandcamp and I can now also fulfil my pre-orders.

Since I'm on the subject of publishing, I would like to describe how I do it and talk a bit about the main platforms I use.

Bandcamp is the main platform I use to sell my music, and the only place people can buy my CDs in hard copy. In addition, I put my music in digital form on iTunes, Spotify and Amazon, but these don't accept submissions from individuals, so the submission would need to go through a service such as TuneCore or CdBaby. Even ReverbNation offers now this feature. Last year, when I released my first EP, 'Monsters', I did some research into companies offering publishing services and decided to go through DistroKid. This online distributor sends music to the main online retailers, for a yearly fee.

This answer on the DistroKid FAQ page for the question: 'How is DistroKid better than TuneCore?' seems relevant in helping you understand my choice:

'Both services upload your music to stores and give you 100% of your royalties.

DistroKid is a lot less expensive, and has a better user interface. 

TuneCore charges $49.99 per year per album. $29.99 for the first year.

DistroKid charges $19.99 per year and lets you upload unlimited songs and albums.' (Distrokid.com)


DistroKid's yearly fee was particularly useful for me, as I wanted to be able to release as many singles as I wanted without worrying about money.

Bandcamp is similar, in the sense that one can publish an unlimited number of albums or singles, but the company keeps 15% of the sales. The great feature of Bandcamp though is that it supports pay-what-you-wish, meaning that an artist can set a minimum price for their album, but the buyers can pay more if they want to.

Here is an excerpt from an article comparing Spotify to Bandcamp, which refers to the pay-what-you-wish function on Bandcamp:

'Jason Shanley, an independent artist who records as Cinchel, says he went through TuneCore, a third-party distributor, to get his music on Spotify. TuneCore, however, requires a yearly subscription, the cheapest of which starts at $9.99 per year, not including other fees for setup. Other than the lag time, he says the payout was too low. "I’m losing too much money with an account there. I think I made $2 from it this year or something.” 

Instead, Shanley opts to put most of his discography on Bandcamp. Even though he prices most of his albums at $1 or free, Shanley points to Bandcamp’s name-your-price model as an opportunity for profit from enthusiastic fans. "Maybe about 25% of buyers paid more than the minimum,” he estimates.

"I think there’s a psychology where if you don’t charge anything for it, people don’t think it’s worth anything," he says "But there’s a point where if you charge too much for it, then they don’t feel like it’s justifying that much of a cost.”

Josh Brechner, also an independent artist, notes that Bandcamp helps artists in giving their albums an optimal price. He says Bandcamp recommends charging around $4 for a five-track album. "But they’ll pay more if they like it,” says Brechner, who records under the moniker Visager. "In a way, that’s sort of like, ‘We believe in you.’

My personal experience confirmed the above, as I repeatedly had buyers pay a much higher price than the minimum. In fact, for 'Beyond The Glass Sky', from selling 2 CDs on Bandcamp (one for £100, one for £30 - with a set minimum price of £7.99) I managed to cover the production costs of the 50 CDs I printed. 

This seems to confirm some of the opinions I read in books and articles (such as Amanda Palmer's 'The Art of Asking', Kusek's 'The Future of Music', Kevin Kelly's '1000 True Fans' (http://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans) and gives me hope that it is possible in the digital age, with a lot of work, not necessarily music-related, to make a living relying on a small number of dedicated fans.

EP-related work: Summer Breeze video

In the past few days I've been working on a video for one of the songs on the EP, 'Summer Breeze', as part of my promotion strategies.
I know it's a strange time (beginning of November) to be promoting a song about summer, but I'm trying to sell it as a nostalgic track, the longing for summer feeling one has when it gets cold outside.
I was meant to have a proper promotional video for another song, 'Fall in Love', combining footage of me singing with clips from a short film a friend agreed to let me use, but he changed his mind and now,  even though the video has been edited, I cannot use it.

Here is a short excerpt of what it would have looked like:


It's been a while since I have decided to publish at least a video every month. Looking at all the popular Youtube channels, it seems like a key factor in achieving and maintaining popularity is to constantly create content and put it out there. A Youtube channel such as https://www.youtube.com/user/DanielaSings (Daniela Andrade) updates with a new performance video every month, while Tiffany Alvord, another Youtube singer (https://www.youtube.com/user/TiffanyAlvord) posts 3 to 5 videos a months, which can be a mixture of music videos, vloggs (video-blog) and lyric videos.

I have several videos filmed ready to be edited, but they are all for tracks which will be on my future album. Right now I am promoting the EP, so I have to publish a video for a song on the EP.
'Lotus Flower' already has a video on Youtube, 'Cosmic Latte' has a video scheduled to be filmed at the end of the month at University of Surrey, 'Fall in Love' can't be used, with 'Let Go' I'm not quite happy. This only leaves 'Summer Breeze' as the video for this month.

Video editing took me 2 days, with a break and then another day for colour grading. I edit in Final Cut Pro X on my Macbook and use only the effects available within the software. As a future objective, it would be useful to look through the variety of plugins available for Final Cut and try out some of them, especially for the slow motion effect (Twixtor seems to be very well regarded on the internet, but I haven't tried it yet).

The video was put together from short clips of my summer holiday in Mallorca, this September. Not only I feel like it fits the song very well, but I think it's nice that I'll be able to look back and have some memories connected to it.


Before publishing the video, I had to design an eye-catching thumbnail for the video; I have noticed that videos tend to have more views since I've started using custom thumbnails for them. This feature is only visible though if your channel has the status of Youtube partner, which mine has had for a while. I am also trying out a new format for the title. Usually I do 'artist name hyphen song name'. This time I'll be using double dash and see if it makes any difference.
I have drafted a newsletter on mailchimp.com which I will be sending out tonight.

For the next video I will record myself playing piano and singing my song off the EP called 'Cosmic Latte' at University of Surrey. Since it's the university I graduated from this summer, I am used to the facilities there and I love their beautifully sounding Steinway piano in studio 1.

Musicians building a brand and finding a niche: Steam Powered Giraffe and the steampunk subculture

When the major labels developed the star system (in which the revenue was provided by a small number of artists, affecting choices regarding which artists should be released and promoted to the public) lots of musicians on the roster did not benefit from the amount  of exposure the stars did. The model certainly did not favour niche musicians (Anderton, 2013, p. 5). Nowadays, the Internet enables people with common interests from all over the world to gather in a virtual place, giving a chance to niche musicians to reach their specific audiences. Wall and Dubber (2010) observed, with application to the niche of jazz music, the surprising amount of attention accorded to this genre online, compared to the small amount of time dedicated to it in mainstream media. This comes to support the democratic nature of online activity for both musicians and music consumers.

Steam Powered Giraffe are an American band who combine music with theatricals and mime to create a performance associated with the steampunk culture. There are a number of other self-proclaimed steampunk bands, such as Abney Park, Vernian Process and The Cog is Dead. Although they label themselves ‘steampunk’, their music tends to be mutually divergent and lack the stylistic coherence of other subcultural genres such as goth or punk (Ferguson, 2001, pg. 67). They have in common the aesthetics of steampunk subculture, the fashion, preoccupation with creating personas, and the DIY ethos. 

Even though the music in itself does not have anything particularly ‘steampunk’ in it, it is the branding and association with an online community that allowed Steam Powered Giraffe to gather an audience. If an artist combines talent, imagination and brand with good social and networking skills and manages to find his or her niche, the amount of support they receive might prove surprising. This is also recognised by Kusek (2005, p.28) who argues that success in the an overcrowded music landscape can be reached ‘if and when musicians can define their niche, they differentiate themselves and reach people who are interested in their uniqueness’.

Steam Powered Giraffe Logo (www.steampoweredgiraffe.com)

Steam Powered Giraffe have an elaborate brand, maintained both in performances and online,
involving the creation of personas with a complex fictional backstory (the band members pretend to be automatons created in 1896), elaborate make-up, steampunk clothing and a fitting logo. This brand is extended to a whole fictional universe, reflected in the band’s merchandise, a comic containing fictional adventures of the robots and a card game based on the same characters. These are all created by the band members, who also run the website; the band’s sound engineer is considered part of the band and appears frequently in the band’s webcomic stories and video blogs - yet another example of musicians understanding the importance of being self-sufficient.

The band’s Facebook page shows continuous engagement with their fans - from sharing live streams of rehearsals to the ‘Fan Art Fridays’ - a weekly updated Facebook album containing fan art. They also post pictures and videos of the band offstage, such as videos of them doing their make-up; this does not ruin their personas, but adds authenticity and familiarity, creating the illusion of intimacy referred to above (p.35). The band runs a pay-what-you-wish website subscription, which offers extra material and allows the fans to become ‘Engineer-eteers’ and support the maintenance of the ‘robots’. Music is released through iTunes and TuneCore and physical CDs can be ordered on the website; the website store also contains various merchandise based on the band’s concept and artwork.

Steam Powered Giraffe is a great example of an independent band employing entrepreneurial skills to target, build and maintain an audience. In the age of internet, reaching out to people is easier than ever; the difficult the job for a musician is to find their niche audience and to create a distinguishable identity. 

References:

Anderton, C., Dubber, A, and James, M (2013) Understanding The Music Industries. London: Sage Publications.

Steam Powered Giraffe, (2012). Steam Powered Giraffe - Honeybee. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojYK6CW8gdw (Accessed 1.11.2015).

Wall, T., and Dubber, A. (2010) Experimenting With Fandom, Live Music, And The Internet: Applying Insights From Music Fan Culture To New Media Production". Journal of New Music Research 39.2 (2010): 159-169.

EP-related work: rearranging, re-mixing and re-mastering an old track

As part of my new EP, I am including and older track (published last year on Youtube), which received good feedback from my online followers and was not included on any other release.
The track is called 'Lotus Flower' and its theme is social inequity - it explores the relationship between the less fortunate and the ordinary people, the main idea being the fact that usually we all pretend to care while at the same we are happy that we are not the miserable ones.

This is the track in its original version:

In this version, the track has quite an unusual structure for a song; I believe it is the longest song I have written, going over six minutes. 

What is specific to this song is that instead of the traditional alternation between verse and chorus, there is a constant switch between vocals and violin, the two leads having balanced importance. The timbre of the real violin adds a lot to the overall vibe and to the quality of the mix, providing an interesting contrast to the synths and drum sounds in Logic that form the rest of the backing. 

The intro is extended to about a minute and a half and it starts with a violin solo in 4/4; I wrote this part in the high register of the instrument to make it sound more wailing and emotional.  When the beat comes in, the drums and bass are in 5/4, while the violin and the piano are still in 4/4. There is also an arpeggiated synth/pad with a 6/8 pattern, which is present almost all throughout the song. 

The bass line constructs a melody in 5/4, while following the drumbeat in a way that makes the irregular rhythm feel almost natural.

                                 sample bassline:

The first verse is followed by a beautiful violin solo section, which leads into the second verse. An 8-bar interlude bar that allows a house beat to creep in, with a fade in; the house beat stays until the end of the section. The reversed piano that was introduced before, as a prefiguration of the second section, makes a second appearance and links between the two big sections of the song. The violin takes the piano line from the very intro and plays it, then dubs it up a third; this becomes the main motif around which the whole second half of the song is built. The rhythm changes to 12/8, matching the same piano pattern.  

                                           this piano motif:

is quantized in triplets and becomes this, in 12/8:

Maintaining the dialogue, the vocals imitate the violin, by singing these same notes and then dubbing the melody a major third up. To provide symmetry to the track, the drums add an extra 'beat' of 3/8, turning the rhythm into 15/8, an equivalent for the 5/4 we encountered at the beginning of the song.  There is symmetry in terms of melody as well; first we come back to the melody of the first verse, basically finishing the song with a third 'verse' which is followed by the violin playing the exact same melody that was played in the intro, with the same accompaniment and background. 

         Structure diagram of 'Lotus Flower' - original version:

The main influences for this track come from my past experience of listening Cafe del Mar and 'Absolute Relax' albums, the sort of chilled tracks with a solo violin playing the melody. I was particularly thinking of the Enigma - Secret Garden track and replicating that sort of sound, which I did by adding lots of reverb, also by boosting mids and lows on the EQ, because my raw sound was very screechy and thin. The piano responses to the violin in the second violin section solo were inspired by Moby's Porcelain and they are played in the same free manner, humanized in Logic around the beat. However, my track is not that 'chilled'; the vocals are in a pop-rock style, other influences come from acid house tracks and the shuffle beat is an influence from rock bands (song like Muse's 'Uprising' or Kasabian's 'Fire' come to mind).

                                             EQ on violin:

To make the track fit with the rest of the EP, I decided to re-arrange it; the mix could also be improved and, of course, if I was changing these things, I had to master it again.

I decided that the initial length was too much so I immediately decided to get rid of the long intro. In order to make the track more easy-listening, I got rid of all the unusual time signatures and transformed them all in 4/4 in the first half and 6/8, in the second half of the song. 

Because the mix was too cluttered, I got rid of some of the layers (particularly pads) and turned others down, keeping them in just to add texture. I turned the drums up and spent some time working on the drum sound with compression and EQ. I also worked on the vocal sound and added some pitch correction where needed.

For the mastering, I used a combination of Waves Multi Maximizer and FabFilter ProL (Limiter), which is a new plugin that I'm trying out. I found Pro-L very useful, as it has different templates which can work for different things - for example limiting or adding simulated tape saturation to the audio.

My mastering project for 'Lotus Flower':

I am very satisfied with my work of the last few days (and especially yesterday) because there is a massive difference between the two mixes. I have also managed to make the latest master as loud as some other commercial releases, which I couldn't in the past without making it sound over-compressed.

And this is the final result, which will be on my self-produced, self-published EP:

The 'social' artist: Amanda Palmer and 'The Art of Asking'

I bought 'The Art of Asking' online in the summer and never got to it until recently. The book is an autobiography of the American singer-songwriter Amanda Palmer, former part of the Dresden Dolls duo, and it offers great insight into the experiences of a musician who started as independent, later got signed to a major record label only to break the contract and go back to being independent and rely solely on the support of the fans.

Some of the experiences Amanda Palmer writes about in her book are condensed into a TED talk, which reached over 4 million views on Youtube.

In April 2012 Amanda Palmer she started a Kickstarter campaign to finance a new album after breaking up with Roadrunner Records and managed to raise in 31 days over a million dollars (ten times the aimed amount of 100 000 dollars). It is still the biggest amount ever raised for a music campaign on Kickstarter. The thumbnail picture of the promotional video of the campaign shows Amanda Palmer holding a card saying: ‘This is the future of music’.

After parting ways with Roadrunner Records, Palmer resorted to fan-funding to replace the financial support the label had offered in the past, while maintaining her creative freedom. There had been several incidents between her and the management of the label, but the conflict aggravated with a discussion of the ‘Leeds United’ video, in which certain shots of the musician’s belly were to be cut or altered to look ‘more flattering’. Palmer refused to change the video and wrote about it on her blog, stirring a strong reaction among her fans. The incident turned into a social media phenomenon, with fans creating a whole campaign over Tumblr and Twitter and a fan-created website called ‘The Rebellyon’, where hundreds of fans posted pictures of the bellies in solidarity. Following the ‘Rebellyon', Palmer had another meeting with the owner of Roadrunner, where she was told that her previous album had no commercial viability; however, she was bound with a four-album contract, where the label could drop her at any time, but she couldn’t drop the label. She didn’t hesitate to make the whole situation known to her fans and even wrote and performed a song addressed to the label in which she asked to be dropped. In 2010, Roadrunner released her from the contract after 6 years of collaboration and four albums.

In a post on her personal blog, Amanda Palmer wrote to express her happiness of being again in control of her creative outcomes: 

’A lot of people have asked me if i have any regrets about signing with a major label. the answer: no. Now that i’m unshackled, I plan on doing a lot of really awesome and creative things with my songs and how people can pay for them – or, better yet, donate – now that I have control over my stuff.’

 In the same post she announces a webcast in which she’d ‘toast with the team’ and invites everyone to ‘come over for a drink’ - in the virtual world, to celebrate the newly-achieved freedom and discuss with her fans the implications of it.

Clearly, in taking such a radical decision, Palmer trusted that her fan-base would support her music-making in the future - as it turned out to be the case. 

In an interview dating from 2009, Palmer states: ‘I can connect with my fans without the label. That was not the case in 1990: back then, if the record label tied your hands, your hands were truly tied. My fans are so much more powerful than the media or the label because they're spreading the music around’ (Dombal, 2009).

There has been quite a lot of press coverage after the successful campaign and voices asking how she’d done it. The answer was: years and years of connecting with the fans, of establishing meaningful relationships, so special the audience that they would pay hundred, even thousand of pounds to support the artist. 

Palmer tweets and updates her Facebook status several times a day; before Facebook and Twitter, together with Brian Viglione, the other half of the Dresden Dolls duo, she used to administrate a forum on the band’s website where she would engage in online discussions with the fan community. She shares fan artwork, asks for advice, voices her opinions about the current issues in the world and when she needs it, asks ‘shamelessly’ (in her own words) for help. This can range from crowdfunding a new album, to finding a place to crash in a fan’s house when on tour or asking for some recommendations of new music to listen on a late night. It seems like being social on the internet has unlimited benefits, but as she admits in an interview, ‘you have to actually LIKE it, otherwise you'll be miserable’.

There is a big difference between being famous and having a following. Talking about Palmer’s campaign, Yancey Trickler, a founder of Kickstarter. said: ‘It’s not about fame. Fame is a lot o people caring about you a little. What Amanda has is something different. It’s a few people caring about her a lot.’ (Sisario, 2012)

That would explain how she was able to raise such a huge amount of money, even though Roadrunner thought her album a flop for not selling enough copies. Both ‘Yes Virginia’, the second Dresden Dolls album and ‘Who killed Amanda Palmer’ (her first solo record) sold little over 30 000 copies. The numbers are not great for a major record label artist and the return profit wasn’t able meet expectations in the conditions of selling the albums at the standard price of a record. But if we imagine 30 000 people given the opportunity of pay-what-you-wish for the album of a band or artist they highly appreciate, we can get a glimpse of what happened with Palmer’s Kickstarter campaign. Interestingly enough, the number of backers was around 25 000 people (just around how many people bought her albums), out of which more than half pledged over £25, over 11 000 people pledged over £100, 100 people pledged £1000, 34 were rewarded with a concert in their house in exchange for contributions of £5000 each and 2 backers earn a whole afternoon and dinner with Amanda Palmer for their support of £10.000 each.

20 of the 34 house parties costing £5000 were funded by communities of fans, who gathered together and contributed £100 each. Such practices were encouraged by Palmer, who, throughout her book, ‘The Art of Asking’, stresses the role of the artist of not only creating a connection with the fans, but of nurturing connection between the fans to create a community built around their common interest (Palmer, 2014, p. 122).

This only supports some ideas that Kusek puts forward in his book 'The Future of Music', especially thw idea of music going through a change from being a product to being a service. Connection with an artist means experiences and feelings that become valuable to the individual. People buy more than the music, they create personal ties with their favourite artists and, even in the age of file-sharing and digital piracy, if a performance ‘touches people’s lives, it will have rewards for that artist.’ (Kusek, 2005, p. 53). We are now talking about more than purchasing music as a commodity or about music as mere entertainment; if an artist combines talent, imagination and brand with good social and networking skills and manages to find his or her niche, the amount of support they receive might prove surprising. And in the age of internet, reaching out to people is easier than ever. For artists, the hard part of the job is to define the niche and find a way to differentiate themselves. 

‘Success being equaled to selling more than 500 000 albums is a myth’ says Kusek (2005, p.23) and Amanda Palmer’s Kickstarter campaign stands proof. But the fact that it is possible, doesn’t mean that everyone can do it. In the age of the ‘social artist’, as Palmer coins it, what happens to the artists who are not social? What happens to those who don’t know how to, or don’t want to connect with their fans in this way? Of course, there are always people who can do it for them - but, at their early careers, artists cannot normally afford to pay for their online presence to be taken care of, and not everybody has a friend or a partner willing to do it for them - I know from my own experience.

References:

Dombal, R. (2009). Amanda Palmer Tells Roadrunner Records: "Please Drop Me". Available at: http://pitchfork.com/news/34979-amanda-palmer-tells-roadrunner-records-please-drop-me/ (Accessed 9.10.2015)

Kusek, D.and Gerd, L. (2005) The Future of Music: Manifesto for the Digital Music Revolution. Boston, MA: Berklee Press.

Palmer, A. (2012). How Amanda Palmer Built An Army Of Supporters: Connecting Each And Every Day, Person By Person Available at: https://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/articles/20120502/15324918745/how-amanda-palmer-built-army-supporters-connecting-each-every-day-person-person.shtml (Accessed: 9.10.2015)

Palmer, Amanda (2014) The Art Of Asking, Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Let People Help. London: Piatkus

Sisario, B. (2012). Amanda Palmer Takes Connecting With Her Fans to a New Level. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/arts/music/amanda-palmer-takes-connecting-with-her-fans-to-a-new-level.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1 (Accessed 9.10.2015)

TED, (2013). Amanda Palmer: The art of asking. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMj_P_6H69g (Accessed 16.10.2015)

The Musician as Producer

According to Homer (2009, p.86), many more people nowadays create music simply because the tools are much more accessible. The growing market of home recording studios leads to professionals losing some of their power, and to an ongoing process of changing expectations towards sound quality (Persson, 2006, pg. 18). Before the democratisation of technology, artists, who often had no other means to record than through a record label, often had creative and locative limitations imposed upon them (Hracs, 2009, p. 444). Often these limitations on creativity happened in the studio, as the place of creation of the sonic artefact, with the involvement of people undertaking different roles (sound engineers, songwriters, producers, session musicians, etc.).

In a study on musicians and their experiences with producers and sound engineers (Pras and Guastavino, 2011), it was found that when reporting positive studio experiences, musicians appreciated a lot of input from the producer; but when reporting negative experiences, they commented on producers being too intrusive. It is definitely a fine line between having an input in someone else’s music and controlling the musicians.

The producer Howard Benson recalls an experience in his early career of observing a ‘heavyweight’ of the industry produce the record of a band:  

'He made songwriters come and background singers come and the band that thought they were going to get more now saw that it was now his record. […] He had a room called the ‘intimidation room’. When conflicts came up, he would bring people into this room, with gold records literally from wall to wall, and then he would say ‘But what do I know?’ It was hardcore' (Grierson, Kimpel, 2009, pg. 82).

The role of a producer is to mediate between all the factors affecting the resulting production (the artist, the engineer and the record company, as financial facilitator) and to make creative choices based on critical evaluation (such as performance evaluation, mix, choice of microphones, etc.) which would lead to an outcome that will satisfy commercial aspirations (of the label, that has an interest to amortise investment and make a profit) (Howlett, 2012, unpag.). This will inevitably influence the creative decisions of the producer and of the artists. Of course, even without a label, artists can seek to appease to the general taste, which leads to them creating so-called ‘commercial’ music. But undoubtedly, when dealing with one’s own resources, the external pressure is much diminished and merging the producer with the artist into one entity will help bring the music to life with more fidelity to the initial creative idea. 

This ‘do-it-yourself’ philosophy is not new; the 1970s punk culture used it to define itself against the ‘mainstream pop and rock’ of the period and, in the same decade, it could be found in the New York hip-hop scene (Homer, 2009, pp. 86-87). 

The musique concrète experiments of Schaeffer, Stockhausen and Varèse were facilitated by technology and by a desire to interact with technology in innovative ways. Brian Eno described the studio as a musical instrument, arguing that high cost of studio time deters from the engagement in experimental activities and focuses one’s attention to tried and tested techniques (Cunningham, 1998, p. 335). Not only does technology enable musicians to record themselves, but it allows them to translate creative ideas into practice with close to no limit but their imagination; it is now possible to reproduce through virtual instruments and samples the sound of real instruments (with a sample library like Vienna Symphonic library one has a whole orchestra at the one’s fingertips), but also to manipulate sound in infinite ways to create ‘the impossible’.

Musicians who have gone down the self-production route include Moby, who describes himself as ‘a little bald guy who makes music in his bedroom’ (Cook, 2015). Moby’s multi-million selling album Play (1999) was recorded at his home using Cubase software and a traditional studio mixing desk (Sound on Sound, 2000). Similarly, DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing album (1996) was self-produced using ‘an Akai MPC 6011 sampling workstation’ and ‘a Technics turntable’ (Berk, 2000, quoted in Homer, 2009, p. 92). 

Homer (2009, p. 94) quotes from an interview with Roger McGuinn of The Byrds, published in Tara Brabazon’s text Thinking Popular Culture (2008): ‘Now, you can just get a laptop, get some software, put a microphone on it and make a record. You have to know how to do it.’  McGuinn emphasises the potential of home-recording technologies, but also the importance of know-how, of acquiring the necessary skills and literacies to use technology at a professional standard.

Self-producing one’s music removes the middle man and encourages limitless creativity, but often in the detriment of another type of creativity stimulated by the interaction with other people in the studio environment. On the other hand, it can be problematic for artists to critique their own work. It is interesting to note how the Internet encourages musicians to network and socialise, while the development of recording technology pushes the musician into a solitary environment. This observation is confirmed by Sexton (2009, p. 94), who notes the isolation of the musician-producer and the fragmentation of musical production in this context. 

I believe that the biggest challenge of being a musician and self-producer is the ability to stay fresh. When there are no other people involved, one can become anchored in the same processes and practices; As a songwriter, I normally write songs at the piano; I perform them by singing and playing the piano, and, if there is a backing, it is usually an arrangement of real instruments (most likely standard band set-up, with occasional synths or other acoustic instruments, such as violin or cello). Recently I tried to change this practice by incorporating electronic elements into my songwriting and trying out different different approaches to songwriting through the prism of creating music with computers. These approaches were mainly:
arranging a song from an acoustic version to a a more complex version, incorporating electronic elements in the arrangement - so starting from the melody, lyrics and chords and fleshing them up;

writing the instrumental first, then the melody and lyrics, in the style of a top line writer;

writing the arrangement and the melody and lyrics at the same time, building the song gradually in sections, with these elements constantly influencing each other. 

I found that alternating these processes helped; the new EP that I'm working on is significantly different in style to 'Monsters', the EP I released last year. The main difference is that it incorporates more electronic elements; but because the style is so different, I am forced to experiment different genre-appropriate, production techniques.

References:

Homer, M. (2009) ‘Beyond the Studio: The Impact of Home Recording Technologies on Music Creation and Consumption’.Nebula 6.3 pp.85-99. Available at: http://www.nobleworld.biz/images/Homer.pdf (Accessed: 20.10.2015)

Hracs, B. (2012) 'A Creative Industry In Transition: The Rise Of Digitally Driven Independent Music Production’ in Growth Change 43.3 (2012): pp.442-461. Available at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-2257.2012.00593.x/pdf (Accessed 19.10.2015)

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My work as a musician: Introducing the new EP

My interest in Music and Music Technology arose at an early age; I was five when I asked my parents to buy for me the piano I had seen through the window of a music shop, because 'I wanted to play it'. They bought me a small Yamaha keyboard, which, on my 12th birthday, was replaced by a Korg PA80 Professional Arranger. I used the PA80's built- in sequencer to arrange my first original songs and recorded myself using an old version of Cubasis VST. By the age of 16 I had written, arranged, recorded and mixed over 50 songs and uploaded them online, getting favourable reactions (one of my songs had 80,000 free downloads on last.fm). I started playing with bands, performing live, collaborating with musicians and working part-time in a studio; all these made me experience creativity in different settings and helped develop as a better musician and writer. I attended in parallel the Conservatoire in Bucharest and, at my parents' suggestion, Law School. I finished first year with scholarships for good results in both, but realised that none of them was what I wanted to do in life, so I moved to the UK to study Music Technology; this decision was motivated by my long time home-recording activities and by my work experience in a studio. The Creative Music Technology course at Surrey, which I finished with a First Class Honours degree, helped me gain appreciation for music across many genres, as I composed and mixed tracks in different styles, from glitch, dance, electronic, ambient or jazz to film music and I understood the aesthetics of different genres from both a compositional and production perspective. This reflected directly into my songwriting, which became more complex and started to incorporate elements of different genres. 

I would describe my music as a combination of art pop, alternative, neo-classical and electronica, with a slight influence of dark cabaret. In August 2014 I released my debut EP entitled 'Monsters', which was recorded at University at Surrey and produced in collaboration with Andy Denyer.

I am currently working on a second EP, called 'Beyond The Glass Sky', entirely self-produced and containing 6 tracks with electronic and synth pop influences -  a completely different style to what I have done before.

This blog will also track the evolution of this EP; at the moment all tracks have been arranged and recorded and I am in the process of adjusting the final mixes and starting the mastering. I will also be working on some promotional strategies, which include use of social media, the creation of promotional performance music videos, building a mailing list, and others, some of which might be mentioned in this blog, as part of my proffessional practice.