john

Hey Voice: Regularly do my vocal exercise to keep my range transitions smooth. Continue developing my conversational vocal phrasing Improve my Soul vocal fills Guitar: Improve my Jazz lead Work more on my lead/rhythm combination playing for blues, funk and folk Return to developing acoustic Delta Blues Piano/Keyboard: Improve my left hand chords and arpeggio Improve synchopation by learning more ragtime Exapand my classical repertoire Mandolin: Buy a new one (it's broken ) Violin: Buy a new one (sold them when I was broke) Improve my bow technique. It used to be very good, but it's been so long it'll sound like I'm slowly strangling a cat! Bagpipes: Buy a set of uilean pipes Didgeridoo: Perfect circular breathing Bass: Buy one. I can play but I've never had my own, just loans. Drums: Learn to play tabla drums get a few Bhodran lessons That should be more than enough for 2005! Probably 2006 as well... Cheers John

Hey It's a great idea Finn. That's why, in the site members area, I ask members with other sites and pages to link to their Songstuff page. Basically it's simple. Here's some guidelines: 1. If you have sites, or pages on sites, cross link. This means that each site you have should link to every other site you have. 2. You should add links to your sites on each forum you post on. The easiest way to do this is to add the links to your forum signature as this is attached to every post. 3. Link text should be meaningful, and related to the page content, and hopefully the URL. 4. If you can affect your page description and keywords, some search engines use these for ranking, these should also contain some targeted link words. (btw your artist name and location are used in the Songstuff artist page, and your artist description is basically your artist description is used as the description for the search engines). 5. If your really want to got to town, use targeted keywords in your site/page keywords, title and text. Get lists of the most popular search terms, and insert the most popular terms that apply to you and your page. 6. To target Google specifically, Google Page Rank measures relevancy. It scans pages for target phrases, keywords etc. It checks for frequency of the words and phrases on your page, and your site. This includes link text, urls, and image "Alt" text. It weights occurances at the top and bottom of a page more than those found in the middle, and other weightings too (for urls, images etc). It calculates the Keyword Density for each word, ie. if the word music occurs 5 times in a text of 1000 words, your keyword density for Music is 0.5%. If it is 5 in 100, that's 5%. A high keyword density is desirable for your targeted keywords. All this gives an value for each word and phrase. It compares these values with other sites you link to (outgoing links) and who link to you (incoming links). It checks for the occurance of the main keywords and phrases on your site, with those on the incoming and outgoing links. It also counts the number of incoming and outgoing links. Google then uses all these figures (especially the incoming links) to assign your pages a Page Rank. All these figures (and more I'm sure) determine your position in Search Results. This full process, known as the Google Dance, happens about every 3 months. Depending on your site popularity, Google will visit your site every few days to recalculate your individual page keyword occurances, and pick up new pages. New values are then used to adjust the values calculated during the Google Dance. Alistair, you should think about promoting your Songstuff page too. Songstuff has a higher site ranking than either IC or Ampcast, and it's rising too! If you have set up your Song links properly, they should transparently play your tracks on IC, without them even visiting your IC page. The plays will still count towards your plays, and the charts. I hope this helps! Cheers John

Great stuff Finn. Do I detect an interest in writing about Music? I could swear that looks like an article in the making;) Cheers John

Thanks Nigel! I'm off to check it out....

Hey Finn Have you heard back from any more of the labels? Cheers John

Very good. I won't need to eat until 2005.

Hey Wendy Thanks for the info. I'll drop by and check it out. Did you have a good Christmas? Cheers John

Hey Wendy Sounds interesting! Is this a song plugging service. or deal brokers or something like that? I guess I wondered how the songs/artists are presented to the labels. Do you know what labels they pitch to? Labels in US, UK or elsewhere? Cheers John

Hey The SM57 can work with or without phantom power. It depends on the output connectors from your mixer, and the input to your soundcard. Assuming a standard set of connectors, your mixer outputs are 'phono' connectors, and your soundcard intputs will either be two phono left and right connectors or a stereo mini-jack (more common). In the first case you just need a phono cable. In the second case you need a phono cable and a phono to stereo mini-jack converter. Cheers John

My guess is that dumbblond is studying music technology in some form..... muisc science, not rocket science : unless of course you mean making a sound like a rocket.

Thanks Tim! I'm off for a look...

To be honest you are lucky they responded at all. Maybe I should write a new article on options, and strategies that artists could follow. As for a manager or producer, at this stage I wouldn't be too keen on giving away 10 - 20%. Just a thought. Cheers John

Finn Come on dude, what happened? Cheers John

Hi What is your favourite effect / processor, and which could you not do without? (They don't need to be the same!) Cheers John

Unlucky John I suppose at least your older material is there. In the days before CDR, and you could basically back up to floppies, I lost 3 years worth of work when my hard disk fried. I was gutted. I know I could have used the floppies, but to be honest I would have need about 300 of them, and I didn't have the cash! Or I thought the time... A sad tale I'm sure but losing you work is REALLY frustrating. Olggu, sorry you had to re-format. I feel responsible for the whole sad sorry hacking thing, after all, I coded the site (Ok not the forum, but there you go). I know there's feck all I could have done, but I still feel responsible. Obviously I'm glad you're up and running again (I believe Rudi's machine is still offline). John I hope you get your material back soon! Cheers John

Hi I found this article, which discusses wether piracy is responsible for the digital music boom... Digital Music Boom Cheers John

John Aren't PC's fun? Hope you get it sorted soon! Cheers John

Hey Katie For me it's digital. I recorded in analogue for many years, and there are aspects I miss, but the quality and flexibility of digital wins out. At the end of the day most distribution media is digital, so a digital conversion will happen anyway. The main thing I miss about analogue, in my current set up, is the tactile interface. Because many parts of the modern digital signal chain can use the same common knobs, buttons and displays as their interface, the lack of immediacy of dedicated interfaces slows down the creative flow. At least for me it does. Cheers John

Hey What about Photoshop Elements? (I think that's what it is called...) A cut down version of photoshop. BS, I use linux as a test web server, and I have soundblaster live card that I've never tried with it. Can you recommend any music applications to use in Linux? Cheers John

Woah Well spotted Nigel! I've contacted my service providers and locked down the domains. Cheers John

Hey Finn Good luck! Have you done your homework on the labels? i.e. checked the type of material they are accepting, are they accepting material at all, got the name of people in the A&R dept, tried to make an appointment? It's worth making the effort, and all it takes is a few phone calls. It could save you the cost of some promo packs and some leg work... Cheers john

The guide for me is simply, it's the end result that matters. Someone can write great songs, and still not be a great singer (Bob Dylan springs to mind...). Now if they can't sing and the end result still sucks (William Shatner :wink: ) then the humilation is usually enough to finish them off! Cheers John

Hey Just a quick post to ask how you're getting on? 'Backed up' the software yet? I think you'll be suprised at just how much you can do. Cheers John

Bong What set up are you going to go for? Cheers John

Hey Chris Dave gas made some great points but I've never had a problem playing PC tracks, and recording a live instrument to the PC. In saying that, since getting my creamware cards I've had no latency issues. Dave also mentions that they can't run VST instruments, there are however lots of synths, samplers, mixers and effects designed for creamware (a fair amount of which you get with the card), and this frees up your CPU for other tasks, including VST instruments. All in all this gives you far more scope. The only reason I mentioned the 3 DSP card is that it would give you an idea of what they can do, without the massive outlay for the larger dsp farm cards. That and if you get one of these cards, you will still be able to link it directly to your 3 dsp card. With Creamware, you can use XLink to hook 3 cards up in the same PC. I believe that also covers 3 of the 15 dsp cards! Although be aware, the more dsps, the more ventilation will be needed, which means more fan noise, so you'll need to invest in an ultra quiet cpu fan and possibly a 2 fan PC case using ultra quiet fans. Cheers John