songsterr has a stellar guitar tablature UI. Finding a counterexample of truly awful written music on the web is a depressingly easy job, but Mel Bay is as rock bottom as anybody: Read em and cringe.
David Byrne bike racks
August 20, 2008 – 9:03 am
The New York Times has an article on NYC bike racks designed by David Byrne. I like em:
In my mind this fits next to his blog as a reason to think of him as a creator in the present rather than a legacy act whose relevant work is in the past.
He’s like a silent film actor successfully making the transition to talkies.
byrne/eno drop
August 19, 2008 – 11:03 am
Embedded player for the new David Byrne + Briane Eno album:
Byrne’s comment on the site:
For the most part, Brian did the music and I wrote some tunes, words and sang.
I like this music.
When I first listened to this via the embedded player I had a hard time getting over my distrust of David Byrne’s post-peak output. Eno’s 70s releases are lifetime favorites for me, and I have a lot of respect for earlier Talking Heads, but Byrne’s stuff in the last 10-15 years is cringeworthy. I’ve gotten to like Byrne’s blogging, though, so this has redeemed him enough for me to be open to his new music.
So I gave this a long listen, going around the whole CD twice with headphone on. As you’d expect from Eno, it’s sonically delicious. It’s mainly warm and organic in the style of these guys’ later work, rather than cool and deliberately stiff in their early styles; IMO that’s a loss, but you can’t go back and doing what you really feel is always the right thing. Still, I’d have loved to hear Robert Fripp’s guitar. Eno’s vocals are strained in a bad way, Byrne’s are strained in a good way. The only spots that fall flat are when Eno is singing.
The packaging and presentation are user-friendly. For example there are FLAC files. I found myself rooting for them.
netaudio: Ian D Hawgood - The Fire Will Die At Night
August 15, 2008 – 6:23 pm
Ian D Hawgood - The Fire Will Die At Night is a beautiful piece of music with an really nicely done home page. I’d embed a player here, except that the page itself is part of the value so you’re better off clicking through. I especially liked the downloadable printable CD cover.
marketing songs the lazy way
August 15, 2008 – 10:29 am
I have added some new formats for my song Frog in the Well.
For people making videos, I created cuts of 20 seconds, 30 seconds, and 40 seconds. I have noticed that the length of a piece of music is a big factor in choosing it, so these cuts are to increase the number of situations that this music fits.
For people doing remixes, I created a sample pack with eight clips under five seconds. I did this because chopping up a song into samples is a fair amount of work, and eliminating that work increases the number of people who might use samples for the song.
With both of these sets of cuts, the goal was to increase the potential growth of my music. The popularity of my song can only grow linearly, as the sum of listens. For each song or video that it is incorporated into, there is a multiplier on that growth curve. If songs or videos that incorporate my work are themselves incorporated into other works, there is exponential growth in the listenership for my music.
I also created a clip to be used as a ringtone. My thinking was that supporting more playback contexts, and especially a playback context as common as cell phones, would again do good things for the potential growth curve.
Lastly, I created a page which can transpose and play back the sheet music using the Scorch browser plugin. This should increase the number of contexts that the sheet music and tablature are useful in and the number of people who can follow the sheet music. Having people incorporate my musical work by learning from a piece of sheet music that I created is again a way of hitching a ride on other people’s works.
What I didn’t do was go out and plug my song. I didn’t make CDs to mail to radio, press, and booking agents. I didn’t email bloggers one by one. I didn’t post comments on other musicians’ Myspace pages. I didn’t email all my friends. All of these ways of marketing are good things to do, but I am lazy and would rather have other people do that for their own stuff and bring mine along for the ride.
I also didn’t make a new song. It’s good to keep up a steady flow of fresh work, but winner songs don’t come along all that often and once you have one you’ll probably get more growth overall by focusing your efforts on the winner.
You can see all this stuff in context on the song page for Frog in the Well
.
Here is a video that used this song as background music:
lead sheet for “He’s in the Jailhouse Now”
August 11, 2008 – 12:57 pm
Over the weekend I posted my own sheet music for the old song “He’s in the Jailhouse Now” on my musician blog.
Some good things about it:
- Carefully proofread and corrected. I used it in a couple different rehearsals and ironed out the bugs.
- On a single page. No page turns.
- Big type and simplified changes. Easy enough to visually parse that you can play from it on stage with minimal lighting and rehearsal.
- Evenly spaced, with four measures to a bar.
- Lyrics, melody and chord changes in one place.
- Source Sibelius file provided for making modifications.
- PNG, PDF, and Sibelius can all be shared, modified, and redistributed, because they are under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license.
- Pretty damn good if not perfect copyright status, to ensure that people could really use it.
- Good documentation on the history of the song. I spent a couple hours looking up the details and collated a number of different sources.
Doing a clean and thorough job with sheet music is pretty rare. Free (as in beer) sources are usually a mess. Commercial sources are usually oriented towards piano players or beginners. My version is higher quality than other free sources and is oriented towards real-world players.
How to add Moon of Manakura to your web page
August 8, 2008 – 2:23 pm
Go to Rhapsody.
Ignore annoying upsell to their download store.
Do a track search for “Moon of Manakoora.” You have to set the scope of the search in the dropdown next to the entry field.
In the search results, right click on the link to the song and do “copy link location.”
Go to your own web page.
Paste in the link location, like this:
<a href="http://www.rhapsody.com/goto?rcid=tra.723445&variant=play">Moon of Manakoora</a>.
Add goose to your page like this:
<script src="http://mediaplayer.yahoo.com"></script>
Save and load the page. There will be a working play button next to the link, and the song will play in the context of everything else in the page, e.g. MP3s, oggs, whatever you have in there.
August 8, 2008 – 2:07 pm
Listening: RCRD LBL podcast 8.6.2008 (mp3). Great pocket for getting into the groove of the work.
