john

Awesome. We have put in a request to the coder to allow us to define board specific tags where only those tags would be allowed on that board. In the short term we are planning to pin a topic with board specific tags. We plan on a video that explains the need for tags and gives a tutorial in their use. As things stand we can either have user defined tags or staff defined tags, not both. The closest we can get is staff suggested tags which are the suggestions you describe. Once members get more into using tags in a way that helps filtering there will be a smaller set of tags. Meanwhile we will explore tags further.

Hey Lewis! Welcome to the Songstuff family! Good to have you with us.

You will be glad to see that the tag filtering we have been working on behind the scenes is now live on all the critique boards. Next stop will be the training vids, usage guidelines and board specific tags... to try and get members to not only post appropriate content for the board but give more clarity on what they have and what they are looking for. Tagging especially will help.

Hi and welcome to the Songstuff family Zachary!

Something we have been contemplating is adding producers and session people to our site shop. The only thing that has held us back is when there is a disagreement about a job... ie you do a session, they say they are not happy etc.

Hey Happy to help! I will send you a PM Cheers

Honestly, if you cannot be bothered typing more than 6 words in your post, I doubt many will offer much of a reply. Hell, even in typing this reply I have typed 34 words!

Lets see if we can improve that for you

Paying doesn't just work. Done with the wrong set up, and strategy and paid promotion just burns money. The important thing is your plan... which.is the one thing most indie artists don’t have. Setting aside paid promotion ideas, what were you doing to promote your music? When you make a release do you have a release plan? What social media did you post to? What tools do you use? What other resources / assets do you have? (Artist website, mailing list, press kit, blogs) How often did you post? What did you post about? How did you build buzz? There are are a ton of other questions but it’s a good place to start to help identify what’s not working in your set up.... although if you are just ad hoc posting... that a huge problem. Two big questions: How do you engage your existing fans? How do you reach a new audience?

What makes it hard to promote?

Just now your tasks are largely manual. While I don't suggest automated content creation, you can work smart. Automated content delivery is a different matter. It doesn't mean that all your posting duties disappear, but you can make a significant improvement. Add to that, the first time through is a lot more time consuming. Not only are you learning, but you are building from pretty well nothing. The idea is to put something in place to get started, and start improving amount, coverage and quality. True you want to hit with a splash... but this is where working collaboratively as a team makes a world of difference. That aside, doing something to a high standard is very achievable. Working to a plan with a decent strategy will still achieve far superior results to an ad hoc approach. Indeed, 9999/10000 times, an ad hoc approach is a complete waste of time, in that it gives highly disappointing results. If you put the work in, not only do you improve what you can achieve significantly, you also give yourself the opportunity of having an end package you are proud of instead of having great music and everything else is amateur hour held together by sticky tape and wishful thinking Hugely importantly, other artists are, in marketing terms, your competition... in that they are competing with you for the attention of listeners. You can either be that band who reaches 50 people, or 50,000 people. You can be that band that has a well rounded, professional standard product, or an off balance amateur product. You can be that band that has thought and worked it through, or a band who took a blind-folded swing and hoped for the best. You get the idea. It isn't about reaching number one, or working yourself into the ground for something unattainable. It is about making the most of the time you do have available to make the most from your music you can reasonably make. As to making money? The realistic position is nothing to do with getting rich, never mind getting rich quick. It's about making your money work for you, and putting things in place that give you the opportunity to recoup costs, with the hope of first breaking even and then funding the next releases and improving the standard of your work and it's possible reach. There are so many things to take care of, true, but you don't need to do them all immediately. Hopefully with some help you can prioritise effectively, focus on the right things and with each release take strides forward that match a realistic expectation.

No worries. They are just to give you an idea. I will be uploading the full collection, latest versions. The Music blogs one is one to get started with, It can take time to build a relationship with music bloggers, and that doc will give you some useful info. You can use the Songstuff music industry contact database to identify blogs to target, along with Google. Meanwhile you should get to work on your artist bios and your press kit. Getting some photos are often challenging for online bands, at least ones that place you together. Just as well you have some photoshop skills!

More a cover/site theme, with the neon dark noise club straight on being the logo text.... all that said it looks very good! Nice one Ale/Richard! That reminds me I need to sort out your marketing document access ASAP! Hopefully you found the ones I sent interesting

Good stuff @Odanada. I think this is all especially true in the most creative stage of writing a song, the draft/initial idea phase. A little bit less so during edit. Much the same as recording. Some stages are very creative, some levels of working are very creative, but then it pays off to give attention to the nuts and bolts to help all that creative work shine. Worth pointing out is that some writing is today technology lead. Once upon a time writers took time to write before recording. Some genres now the writing happens in the studio, and tasks and ways of thinking overlay each other instead of being distinct. In that scenario, genre is very much a creative decision at the time of writing, right from the get go. Production, recording, performance and writing all happen in a cyclic mix. That can be good fun, but it is a step away from more traditional writing steps. If you nurture your muse, it tends to be there when you need it. That means exercising and indulging your creativity pretty well every day. You don’t always need to be creative with writing. Or production. Or even the music itself. Just using your creativity makes a huge difference. Trusting instincts is important, but so is learning to improve what we do. There is no wrong or right here. Different writers and artists have different ideas and perspectives, each with pros and cons. Just like different approaches for a song, try stuff and use what works for you and drop what doesn’t. Like many things in life, so much is just opinion and at some point, you have to make your mind up. At least until another suggestion or a variation comes along and prompts you to reassess. Fun, fun, fun!

The forums don’t allow any code embedding because it is too easy for hackers to exploit. Instead the system detects urls like soundcloud, YouTube, vimeo, Spotify, ant provides the appropriate authentic embedding code on the fly. At the moment that system does not support audiomack. If you can send me intact code I can try and add a custom version that then detects audiomack urls and does the embedding. To send it you might need to email me a txt file or pdf. Point is we can try and make it easier for you to share

Hi Andy Welcome to the Songstuff family! Firstly, I would say to split your activities into distinct things. Yes, write and record songs, arranging and producing them for different genres. Exploring is good, all through your music career. As part of that, try combining interests to see what you come up with. Punk/Reggae, folk/garage etc. For speed, you don’t always need to write a complete song to get an idea, plus you can arrange and produce songs in different ways. For example, you can write a verse and chorus to get a rough idea of where a song is going. Likewise, you can then arrange and produce a single song as pop, garage, folk. Yes sometimes the adjustments are pretty big... but that is the nature of experiments. As a second type of activity, start thinking about what you want a specific artist name to be known for. Sometimes when your interests are so diverse, you can create more than one artist to champion specific music. Yes that might mean two or more EPs. No matter if you have one or many artists, you still have to filter your tracks down to combine into a pleasing whole. That is even true when you are putting together a compilation of other people’s songs! You still have to start with one artist, one EP, even if your plans are for more. So, whatever factors you consider most important, can then help you decide what experiments become whole songs, and what whole songs are earmarked for what personal projects you have going, and what songs you intend pitching to other artists/publishers. You might at that point decide that you have a song that really captures something you want to expand on stylistically. That is a great seed for an EP. You can then write and record specific tracks, or adapt other tracks, to pull together a full EP. You might get that idea during the experiment phase, when reviewing experiments, maybe after you have a couple of tracks in the same vein... or simply as an idea. By thinking of your EP project as a separate thing you are freeing up your experiments and at the same time providing mental space to focus on your EP goals. Just some food for thought

Unfortunately we don’t have code for autoembedding audiomack. I will look and see if it is easy enough to add Otherwise, yep, not quite hip hop, but still a good song with loads of potential and I enjoyed listening. As to hip hop, it isn’t all that far away and could very easily be worth exploring for you.

Hi Chelseybobby, It really depends what your music goals are and the type of contribution you want to make. As a player, an artist, a manager, producer, promoter etc. We can help with education, giving you ideas and strategies for everything from writing through recording and production to release, marketing and promotion. We can help you in knowing how to engage fans better, how to combine real world and online world in a better, more synergistic way. Plus we can also highlight and promote good music to other members and visitors to our sites and portals on social media. I am sure we can enable much more and help in many ways. So what do you want to do? I will split this into it’s own topic in the musicians lounge as it would be a better fit in it’s own topic. Cheers John

Hi UhMe Welcome to the Songstuff family!

lol, the idea is to introduce yourself, tell us about your interest in music etc. Either way, welcome to the Songstuff family!

Hey Jon! Welcome to the Songstuff family!

I got the full version of Kontakt 6, thinking of authoring my own instrument, but haven’t had a chance yet. It’s an awesome bit of kit. Kontakt Player is almost essential these days. So many great instruments use it. For example, anything by Output is pretty awesome. Although I have a good few VSTi, lately my time has been more focused on FX, processors, amp sims etc. I will dig out a list

Nice idea @VoiceEx

Can you provide any more details? Such as file type, size etc? I will check the logs, though I suspect the server is timing out for some reason, which would be more likely with larger files

Hi Matt, welcome to the Songstuff family!