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!