Best Before Dates

As I go through and do my usual maintenance and updating of blogs and music sites, I have two thoughts. The first is: “I hate spam”. The second is: “Oh blimey, I wrote/recorded that HOW long ago?”. It’s sad but true, the internet may forever remain as a testament to, of all things, my learning curve. They say that once something is on the internet, it’s there for all eternity, or at least until some solar flare wipes out technology in a geomagnetic storm of awesome magnitude. I look at the evidence of me on the web and shudder at the thought that if all that is left is the internet, one day, humanity is really going to look like a collective dunce.

Yes, some of it is passable. Some of it might even be described as “good”, if you like listening to a girl playing piano and singing about love, anger, lover and anger, or zombies. But some of it… some of it is like your mother showing your new boyfriend/girlfriend that poem you wrote when you were five. You know you are better now, but that’s not enough to hide the mortifying fact that once you thought rhyming “cat” with “mat” was art.

Some schools of thought suggest not putting anything “unprofessional” or “unpolished” on the web. “Wait until you have something really excellent” they say, “take the time to produce high quality work”. I like that idea. Only, I’m such a perfectionist that if I follow that advice, I’ll never FINISH anything let alone publish it. And besides, criticism is an important bedfellow to creativity. Surely by attempting to only publish work that is close to perfect, you are not only attempting the impossible, but also cheating yourself of the opportunity to develop that oh-so-attractive rhino-like skin?

Songwriting is a learning curve. We’re never done, it’s never “finished”. The best we can do is transitional drafts of songs that feel right and “as complete as they can” at the time. At some point, you have to let the song go. I have decided to practice that a little more this year by returning to my old favourite challenge, FAWM. That’s February Album Writing Month. The 28 (29  this year) day challenge to just churn em out. And never mind how polished they are, it’s a great opportunity to get feedback from other songwriters on the strengths and weaknesses of your song. I want to get back to those roots, get back to that place where songwriting is about the process, not the finished, sterile, polished thing.

I know that a lot of what is up there on the web is more representative of the songwriter I was 2 years ago. I know I have changed a great deal, both stylistically and emotionally, and most of all, technically, as I have begun to learn things to improve my craft. And actually, as I examine it, I’m proud of my journey. So I urge you, today, to be proud of your art, whatever it be, and be proud of your earlier work, because it’s part of the curve that makes you who you are now. And who you are now, will make the artist you are in a year, or 5 years, or 10.

And if you hear something amateur on the web by an artist, something that sounds a little “cat on the mat” ish, be kind to that youngling songwriter. They still have years to go.

PIPA and SOPA – the loss of free speech or the protection of creativity?

I really am struggling with the idea of these new legislations going through. But I’ve been busy and ill, and I lack the clarity of thought to really express my opinion with the articulacy it deserves. And then I found this.

Indeed. And ditto. I agree. Go now, at once, and read. Philip says it far better than I ever could.

Happy New Year!

Well well, 2012 is off to a running start. Happy New Year to all of you and I hope this year treats everyone brilliantly

I start with some good news and some bad. On Christmas Day the Justgiving campaign to raise money for Cancer Research because of Bronia’s illness topped £579, so we more than made the target Thank you all very very much for your generosity and help during the run up to Christmas, this couldn’t have happened without you. The bad news is that Bronia passed away on the 23rd of December after a short but very determined battle with lung cancer. 

The lesson I take into 2012 then is that life is awfully short. Bronia loved life, and lived hers to the fullest. I normally don’t do traditional new year’s resolutions – instead I always try to do ten things each year that I have never done before, from simple things like trying a new dish, to things like visiting a new country or learning a new skill. This year I’m adding a wee something. This year I’m going to consciously live in the moment and enjoy each moment. I make the (common) mistake of tending to live a little in the future and a little in the past, and don’t spend as much time as I should in the here and now. So from now on, I will rectify that. I am so thankful for my friends, family, partner, course, home, cats and general situation, and I want to enjoy it as I live it. Life is short, I don’t want to miss a thing. 

Here’s to 2012.

What I learned about crowdfunding

As many of you know, I recently set up a JustGiving page to make some money for Cancer Research UK. It’s been a really interesting experience, because I’ve realised in short order how similar it is to using a crowdfunding site to raise money for your music, in terms of strategies and promotion.

For anyone unfamiliar with the concept, crowdfunding is a way for people to raise money for projects. New films, albums, charitable events, inventions… it’s basically limitless. If you have an idea, and enough people like it, you can raise money to help you do it. You can offer incentives to encourage people to finance you, and generally having a crowdfunding campaign can be an excellent way to focus your efforts on your project. Crowdfunding platforms can be general (http://www.indiegogo.com/) or specific to music (http://www.akamusic.com/ or https://www.sellaband.com/ for example). There is a definite skill to being successful on these platforms, and a smattering of luck helps too, but you can give yourself a good start with some simple tips.

1) The first and foremost thing to consider is that your profile needs to be clear, concise and interesting. You need to tell your story clearly and quickly, but also draw interest and attention. You need to think of it as writing a business pitch so that visitors to your site can see exactly what you are planning to do, and why.

2) Use pictures, video and music! After a fairly impressively failed campaign on Sellaband one of the things I realised was that I just didn’t have enough good quality material to use. The harsh reality is that even though ostensibly you are raising money to help you release that album or make that film professionally, your demos must ALREADY be as close to professional as you can make them without funding. There is so much user friendly software available now that even the most uninformed bedroom musician can knock up a pretty professional sounding demo in short order, and it’s what your potential investors are expecting. They won’t take you seriously unless you do.

If you really lack the skills for home recording, video making or photography, rope in a mate. Recently the press published the story that there are actually only 4 degrees of separation between all of us on the planet…. in terms of probability,  it’s extremely likely that you know someone who knows someone who can help. Offer pizza, beer, chocolate, wine or *insert other suitable bribe here, and you’re away. Or talk to a local college and get a film student or photography student to help you for their portfolio. That is also a handy way to get cheap/free session musicians.

Also in relation to making sure you have enough material, either make sure you are reliably prolific and can produce a high volume of good quality work quickly, or build up a catalogue and release them to your profile slowly over time. People respond really well to regular updates especially if there are new songs to hold their interest. Which leads me to point 3.

3) Update, update, update. Stay in touch with  your investors and potential investors. I saw a lot of projects fail on Sellaband because the profiles were set up and then just left. Often, people might not invest immediately but will watch your profile to see how much activity is going on, if you don’t update, they’ll drift away to another more active fundraiser. Even if you haven’t got a lot to say, say something. “Good morning all, it’s a beautiful day and I’m doing lots of songwriting…” – that sort of thing. Anything is better than radio silence.

4) Target friends and family first, as an empty profile won’t get investors yet. In fact, the first person who should invest in you, is YOU. Get that balance off the £0 mark, as soon as you can. Encourage friends and family to invest and ask people to spread the word. And be prepared for a long slog. This is not an easy road.

Finally what I would say is that crowdfunding on the big platforms (Sellaband, AKA etc) is probably not a good plan if you are a relative unknown. You might be better off doing what I did, and self releasing an album, for a few hundred pounds and build up a following. Waiting to use a crowdfunding platfom until you have an established a solid fanbase not only increases your chances of success, but the process of building your fanbase will help you learn how to manage your crowdfunding campaign once it gets started

Yuletide Bells for Cancer Research

Good morning lovely people

This isn’t really going to be much of a read, more an appeal. A very good friend of mine has been affected by cancer, and it got me thinking about ways I could be of use, and since Christmas is coming up, I thought I’d do something seasonal So, I have written, recorded, mixed and mastered a wee Christmas tune, which is available for download in return for a small donation, here: https://www.justgiving.com/Casee-Wilson

You can check out a preview here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhfcnG12Gaw&feature=autoshare

I’d be thrilled if y’all would check this out, donate, download and tell all your friends (and enemies, and strangers on the street..) The more this goes viral the more money will go to Cancer Research to help them battle cancer.

Thank you all so much!

 

The schizophrenia of an online presence

Years ago, I had a postcard on my wall above my student desk. It showed a map of Soho, and was captioned with several “You Are Here”s, complete with arrows, all over the map. The title, fittingly, was “A Schizophrenic’s Map Of Soho”.

Welcome to the baffling world of the online presence. Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Soundcloud, Sentric, Jango, Spotify, Last FM, Bandcamp – you are here, here, here, here and here…

If I google my name, in quotations, bearing in mind there really aren’t many other “Casee Wilson”s out there, I get 20,000 hits, all scattered like confetti to the four winds. I’m even on sites I have no control over and know nothing about, and sites as far flung as China, Japan, Russia and Iceland. Sound familiar?

The internet has done it’s job well. Release even a mere syllable, let’s say ‘eh’, at breakfast and by noon there is a website asking “know ‘eh’? Add band info for ‘eh’ here”. And it’s usually in Estonia.

The problem is, there are so many sites that it has become a bit of a full time job to maintain any sort of sensible web presence. So I inevitably give up, and procrastinate in favour of exploding gems in an un-named, well known, bust-as-many-gems-as-you-can-in-60-seconds game. And the internet doesn’t help, either.

Take Facebook. Until you have a certain number of “likes” you can’t run it with a normal nice web address. Prior to gaining a fan base of a certain number you are doomed to have a facebook page with a URL looking something like: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Heres-My-Band-Name/48759879278562987372898378972898172878278

Mmm. Catchy.

Even when you have the right number of “likes” and can have http//www.facebook.com/HeresMyBandName, in order to even have a page in the first place, you have to have a primary, normal, personal facebook account. So, whenever you use any other sites that sync to Facebook, they sync to, yes, you guessed it, your PERSONAL account. Blogs, music streaming, etc. It’s like useful but different. It becomes very difficult for you to keep your music/business stuff separate from your personal stuff.

I know of users who have got round this by setting up personal accounts as their music ones, which works slightly better now that Facebook aren’t banning people from using unconventional account names, so workarounds are available. I’m just going to have to keep plugging on with mine as it is, as when I started Facebook it was difficult to get any sort of functionality from pages anyway!

Which leads me to my next point. It is improving. Slowly but surely, many programs are allowing you to sync across several accounts at once, meaning you can do blogs and music updates at one site, press a button, and lo, facebook, twitter, and myspace will all see the action. Since this doesn’t account for smaller communities like Soundcloud and Bandcamp however, there is still some need for manual updateage.

My solution is inelegant, but has worked better than anything else I’ve tried. I set aside 30 minutes a day for web admin. I have a notebook containing web addresses and passwords for every site I run an active presence on (meaning I can do this from any computer, not just one on which the bookmarks are saved), and I work through the list checking whether there are any updates to apply, songs to upload, or old materials to delete. This keeps the todo list fractionally smaller and means I have a targetted period of time in which to do whatever I can, rather than eating into writing/recording time

However, I’m open for technically easy suggestions you all might have. I’m a luddite at heart, and some of the intricacies of setting up feeds and syncs is lost on me, but if you have found/developed a better way to manage your online presence, please do share it!

A word on opportunities

Good afternoon all… I’ve been having a ponder about a few things and thought I’d scribble ‘em down in here for y’all.

As some of you know, I’ve taken up the mantle of studenthood as an “older learner” and am very much enjoying the music course I’m doing at Access to Music. When I first applied to do this, I was mainly thinking that doing a course in sound engineering and music production would pave the way for my own work to become a thousand times better. I hadn’t really thought much beyond that. It’s become apparent though that because this is a music college, and we have students here of all disciplines, there is a much wider range of things I can become involved with.

I could narrow my focus to just the things I’m interested in, after all, there are only so many hours in the day. But so far I’m auditioning for The Voice tomorrow, (not because I think I’ll actually get beyond day one but for the experience, after all, an audition now and then is a great way to stay on your toes!) and we have an opportunity at college to remix a track by the Ting Tings, yes, I have to say I’m hella up for that I’m also taking vocal grades next May, also through the college.

And these are just SOME of the opportunities available to students here.

I don’t think I will ever be in a place that offers this much in the way of opportunities and enrichment, in my life again, and it made me think about life in general. As a musician, I tend to only pay any attention to opportunities that feel like a “sure thing”. Rarely do I stick my neck out above the parapet and take a risk on things I don’t feel strongly that I can succeed at. And where has this gotten me? Not very far.

My new resolution? Try everything once (legality dependent of course). There will be duds. But there will also be great chances, opened doors and successes, AND as an added bonus, my life will always be interesting

Go on, grab an opportunity today.

Music Theory – do “real” musicians need it?

The age old debate is raging – I mentioned on a forum I’m on that I had been writing music, and immediately one of the members pounced and said “but you have no classical training or music theory, how can you write music?”.

*sigh*

Let’s go back a few years. During my formative years, I grew up in a house with ex-hippy parents who listened to The Who, The Beatles, The Kinks, Dire Straits, Pink Floyd, Stevie Wonder, Kate Bush…the list goes on. I grew up with a love of music, a precocious desire to perform and a longing for a piano (something I can only attribute to a very early determination to marry Billy Joel….). My parents, strapped for cash, presented me with a small casio keyboard, and my Mum said the words that stayed with me forever: “always use all of your fingers”. And that was it. No music lessons, we couldn’t afford them. But when I got older and had access to pianos at school (or for one halcyon period, we actually had an upright, in our home, that we looked after for friends of ours because they were living in a top floor flat) I started teaching myself, slowly and painfully, to play.

Singing was an easier matter. I joined choir (it was the only thing I was truly devoted to at school) and I listened to as many vocalists as I could and emulated them as often as possible.

In short, everything I have done up until joining Access to Music this year has been self taught. Everything.

I could vaguely sightread to sing because of choir, and I could pick out tunes from sheet music on the piano, although it has always been slow. But I was always driven to write. I’d listen to music and “hear” a harmony line that it didn’t have yet. I’d feel where drums should come. I found learning to play pieces by ear was much quicker than picking away at the sheet music, so I pretty much abandoned any formal music theory learning.

Now, with 5 years of active songwriting under my belt, and several CDs worth of songs written, I am a little bewildered to be told that since I didn’t have a traditional classical training, I’m not a “proper” music composer. It set me to thinking about music theory and where it fits.

First of all, music has been around a lot longer than music theory. Ever since cavemen could bang rocks together and grunt a simple melody (the original “rock” music?). Hell, ever since birds sang. The five bar stave that we’re familiar with now didn’t really exist in any form we’d recognise before the existance of keyboard style instruments and even then it didn’t take on the modern form until the 17th century, largely because there was no way to record songs, so if you wanted to communicate how to play them to another musician, you had to either play them so they could be learned by ear, or write them down (hence the need for the stave).

Pythagoras was actually one of the earliest founders of mathematical music theory. As well as coming up with a way to calculate triangle side lengths (and thus torturing generations of high school students) he was also responsible for the Circle of Fifths that we use today. In fact, the greeks generally led the way in the music theory field. But do you think music waited for the greeks to catch up? Not a chance. Music kept on being made, passed down and shared, usually aurally, and the world kept turning.

Music theory is great, don’t get me wrong. It gives musicians a common language to use when describing concepts, and means that musicians who have never seen a piece can come together and play it through with minimal difficulty if they have the sheet music. But as to how it affects composers? I’ve never found my ability to write a melody to be compromised by my inability to write notes on a stave. I either remember it, or record it roughly, and once it’s built into a full song it stays with me anyway. Saying a musician can’t write without music theory is like saying that someone who can’t read can’t tell a story.

Finally, I don’t think anyone who composes a lot of music is ever truly writing without the theory. The theory is just a way of explaining the “rules” – but which notes sound good with which, while being mathematically predictable, is generally something that people can hear. They don’t need the theory to tell them. Where beats should come in a piece of music – if you have an inate sense of rhythm, you’re there already. And if you don’t, no amount of theory will help, only practice.

Paul McCartney can’t read or write sheet music. And the Beatles were a phenominal success.

But enough of me. What do you think?

Remember, remember

I love this time of year. The nights draw in, the leaves turn, and people make things explode with pretty colours, what’s not to love? I’ve been immersed in college too, and have settled in now, and songs are starting to flow once more. It took time, after the last grey year of so many things going wrong, both professionally and privately, so I’m relieved to be on the way up and at it.

I’m currently working on my second commissioned track, and the first has been put up on the web page (under the “Commissions” link). The idea is for this to be a permanent feature so that people can commission things for special occasions and have a lasting reminder of it. I plan to expand on this by also making work available for licencing (not commissioned pieces) but I need to do some research into the best music licencing companies. Taxi, the well known company used in the States, is a little too pricey for me, so I’m looking for something a little closer to home. I hear rumours that Sentric is good – anyone ever used them? I’ll look into it and let you all know what I find out.

Meanwhile, I feel that I must tell you all, especially you poetry lovers,  about a friend of mine and her new poetry book, now out on Amazon. Sohpia Blackwell is a slam poet who has been doing the circuit for a wee while and is gathering a devoted plethora of followers. Reading Into Temptation is like slipping unexpectedly into a champagne-drizzled, lipstick-rouged, corset-clad tidal wave, it left me sitting, drenched and breathless, dazzled by words. Or, if my analogy fails to move you: Reading it was really rather good, ackshually. Check it out

I have some other thoughts today which I shall address in my next post. But for now, have a wonderful evening, and don’t forget to reture to a safe distance after lighting the blue touch paper!

And time has flown past yet again…

Greetings friends! It’s been a while again. I’d love to say it’s been because I’ve been SO busy making new music that I haven’t been able to talk to you, but the truth is, it’s just been a sucky, sucky year. Real Life (TM) has been pretty grotty. Suffice it to say, I’m not going to go into all of the gory detail, because no-one wants to read about it, but there has been illness, both mine and members of my family, there has been computer fail, nearly nine months of getting Nowhere Fast with ProTools, and the recession hit my day job pretty hard too.

Now with September firmly upon us, some things have changed, and there are some small things to announce, so it’s not all bad

Firstly, Bellytrance is soon to have a video. We shot it on the 4th June, and it has been being edited and made beautiful. Danella is designing the DVD cover, I’m working on the ambient sounds for the beginning of the film, and our wonderful film-maker Emma has been working on editing the takes together, and we hope to see the finished project this Autumn. I’m really excited about it!

Secondly, I have taken the plunge and signed up to a two year diploma in digital musicianship and sound engineering. It’s a scary concept, going back to being a student, but I really think I can benefit from formalising my skills a little and getting more live production experience too. It promises to be an excellent course and should improve my music making no end.

Finally, my computer died this summer (the hard drive failed permanently) so I replaced it and installed Logic Pro. Writing is actually fun again because when I try to record things, it WORKS.  It’s funny how you don’t realise how much that impacts on your creativity until you have optimal equipment and you realise just how much of a struggle it all was. I’m feeling inspired again and it’s truly wonderful

I did get a music project completed this summer, a commissioned piece, which with the commissioner’s permission I should be able to make available to listen to, if not to download, and I do plan to offer this as a future service, in fact I have a second commissioned piece on the go at the moment. There will be more info available on the website soon, but if you are interested and want to know more, feel free to email me at caseewilsonmusic@googlemail.com, or send a message on the contact form on the website and I’ll be happy to talk about it.

I guess that’s all for now – as always do watch the web for updates and I’ll hopefully have more news soon!

Take care out there!

Cxxx