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Bandcamp is joining Epic Games


Barrie

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16 hours ago, PavlovsCat said:

I'm quite sure that you have more talent than me in every area (music and production)

You haven't heard my drumming! 🤣In the 10 years since I took up that instrument, I consider it am achievement that more people have invited me to play than have asked me not to play. As a guitarist, well, I'm probably a good guy to jam with because I'm unlikely to try to take a solo on unfamiliar material (although I can do that well enough on keys, where I've learned my scales). I understand theory better than most underground rockers of my acquaintance, but that's because so few of them understand any at all.

I think I'm getting fairly okay at understanding and executing mixing concepts, but I wouldn't have asked you for stems if I didn't think I needed the practice myself. 😄

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@Starship KrupaI can play drums for a few minutes before I have shooting pain in my wrists. I've actually learned how not to let it ruin my timing. I was an excellent rock drummer back in the day.  But now, if I  can even play an entire song without stopping,  I  feel pretty good. And my great joy in music was always playing with other musicians.  If I  can find a bunch of musicians good with playing with a guy who hasn't practiced in 20+ years and can only play three minutes before taking an hour break,  I'm your guy. 

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1 hour ago, PavlovsCat said:

I was an excellent rock drummer back in the day.

I am, at 61, still trying to become "excellent" at anything musical. 😂 Still trying is good, though, I think on good days.

I'm not without my own injury stories.

When I first started playing drums, because I took no lessons I was holding my sticks so that they went right across the second knuckle joint on my middle finger, and the rest of my middle finger started getting numb and tingly. Even though I'm Starship Krupa, not Starship Bonham if you get my drift. I tried tape, I tried laminated bamboo sticks, then finally I remembered that I had had a similar issue when I started playing league softball 25 years earlier, but with my thumb joints. I changed up my grip so that I was gripping the sticks at a pad, between joints, and the problem went away. A teacher would have spotted that before it started to injure my nerves, I think.

One drummer friend of mine uses those sticks where they drill out the core and replace it with rubber, and dang, those things do absorb shock. They feel odd to play with at first because so much less vibration goes up the shaft. I'm sure you've tried them.

For programming beats, not even playing them on a controller, I am sure I'm better at it for having learned to play drums. There's a skill to listening to music and knowing, as a drummer, what will work. Even in hip hop and EDM, one of the guidelines is to try to avoid programming things that would be impossible for a human drummer to play, given our finite number of limbs. That rule is broken all the time, of course, and that's an integral part of some genres, but it's a valuable one to know. Moreover, you have to be able to imagine a beat before you program it (even it that's done as you go along).

I'd always been a guitar and bass player until about 20 years ago I started taking piano/theory lessons, which stopped when I cut the end of my left index finger off with a jointer. Fortunately a good hand surgeon was on duty that day, so while my left index finger is about 1/4" shorter, it still works. It didn't exactly improve my guitar playing. Tony Iommi'd. 🙄

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2 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

I am, at 61, still trying to become "excellent" at anything musical. 😂 Still trying is good, though, I think on good days.

I'm not without my own injury stories.

When I first started playing drums, because I took no lessons I was holding my sticks so that they went right across the second knuckle joint on my middle finger, and the rest of my middle finger started getting numb and tingly. Even though I'm Starship Krupa, not Starship Bonham if you get my drift. I tried tape, I tried laminated bamboo sticks, then finally I remembered that I had had a similar issue when I started playing league softball 25 years earlier, but with my thumb joints. I changed up my grip so that I was gripping the sticks at a pad, between joints, and the problem went away. A teacher would have spotted that before it started to injure my nerves, I think.

One drummer friend of mine uses those sticks where they drill out the core and replace it with rubber, and dang, those things do absorb shock. They feel odd to play with at first because so much less vibration goes up the shaft. I'm sure you've tried them.

For programming beats, not even playing them on a controller, I am sure I'm better at it for having learned to play drums. There's a skill to listening to music and knowing, as a drummer, what will work. Even in hip hop and EDM, one of the guidelines is to try to avoid programming things that would be impossible for a human drummer to play, given our finite number of limbs. That rule is broken all the time, of course, and that's an integral part of some genres, but it's a valuable one to know. Moreover, you have to be able to imagine a beat before you program it (even it that's done as you go along).

I'd always been a guitar and bass player until about 20 years ago I started taking piano/theory lessons, which stopped when I cut the end of my left index finger off with a jointer. Fortunately a good hand surgeon was on duty that day, so while my left index finger is about 1/4" shorter, it still works. It didn't exactly improve my guitar playing. Tony Iommi'd. 🙄

 Dead serious, After your post, it really hit me that we should probably start a thread  on the forum overcoming physical challenges. Years ago, I used to consult (pro bono, which I've always done for causes I believe in) to an organization for people with disabilities and I would sometimes  spend time on the organization's message board (not as part of my consulting, but as something I felt could do some good)  trying to encourage people (with disabilities) to play music -- some had very severe disabilities -- and I would post stories about various great musicians who had disabilities. like Django Reinhardt and Tommy Iommi (lost fingers) , Stevie Wonder (blindness), Hank Williams (Spina Bifida) , Toad the Wet Sprocket Randy Gus (osteogenesis imperfecta/brittle bone disease) ,Michel Petrucciani (osteogenesis imperfecta), Rick Allen (arm), Beethoven (hearing loss), Bill Withers (stutter)....  It really did inspire people to know what others dealt with and I think that's really valuable to know about challenges others have overcome.  As for me, it's really not a big deal. I had a 12 year run playing semi-professionally. Of course,  I wish I could play at even half the level I once did. I was born with a hearing loss due to a birth defect in my inner ears and some other hearing related issues as well that result in my hearing declining more dramatically than avg over time, so I never expected my hearing would still be good enough by this age (my 50s) that I could still enjoy playing music at all, so I'm appreciative for what I am able to do. 

Edited by PavlovsCat
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On 3/10/2022 at 10:24 PM, Philip G Hunt said:

I know there are ways to pay for listens (just like the old trick the record labels used to get their artist into the charts). 

21 hours ago, Philip G Hunt said:

Back in pre+internet days, big name artists would be in the top ten, not because of sales but, because of pre-orders made by the label itself.  This was an old trick to get the song onto radio and hopefully recoup losses once the public became aware of the song. 

 

I was in the UK industry - records and music publishing - in pre-internet days and worked with some of the biggest artists in the world. I never witnessed any of the type of unscrupulous activity described regarding big name artists. Record labels in those days couldn’t pre-order their own product nor could they buy radio play. No offence but it’s this type of misinformation that breeds inaccuracies all around the ‘net  and in the media.

The only real radio influence  in Britain was BBC Radio One and where it was very hard to get plays. Sure there were more than a few commercial stations and BBC local radio but they didn’t create sales. You had to be on Radio One and even then on the ‘A List’. Being on the B or C list was nice but didn’t ensure plays.

It was different in the States whereby all sorts of tricks were tried including the provision of entertainment for record dealers and radio personnel, plus the placing of reports in trade papers Billboard, Cashbox, and Record World advising that such and such an album had ‘shipped gold (or even platinum)’. Well, it may have shipped gold/platinum but not sold those numbers. The returns quite often would have totalled as many as were shipped out ... but they would have received  a few radio plays.

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1 hour ago, Ric said:

I was in the UK industry - records and music publishing - in pre-internet days and worked with some of the biggest artists in the world. I never witnessed any of the type of unscrupulous activity described regarding big name artists. Record labels in those days couldn’t pre-order their own product nor could they buy radio play. No offence but it’s this type of misinformation that breeds inaccuracies all around the ‘net  and in the media.

The only real radio influence  in Britain was BBC Radio One and where it was very hard to get plays. Sure there were more than a few commercial stations and BBC local radio but they didn’t create sales. You had to be on Radio One and even then on the ‘A List’. Being on the B or C list was nice but didn’t ensure plays.

It was different in the States whereby all sorts of tricks were tried including the provision of entertainment for record dealers and radio personnel, plus the placing of reports in trade papers Billboard, Cashbox, and Record World advising that such and such an album had ‘shipped gold (or even platinum)’. Well, it may have shipped gold/platinum but not sold those numbers. The returns quite often would have totalled as many as were shipped out ... but they would have received  a few radio plays.

 

Totally agree on Radio 1 being the deal breaker for big name artists. The UK was very miopic in that respect.

 However, are you seriously telling me you never saw any underhanded tactics?

I can tell you some direct accounts of underhanded tactics if you'd like. Especially when it came to demo deals.

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3 hours ago, Philip G Hunt said:

However, are you seriously telling me you never saw any underhanded tactics?

I can tell you some direct accounts of underhanded tactics if you'd like. Especially when it came to demo deals.

You’re not obliged to tell of things you know of although they may well be interesting.

The 2nd part of my biog (to be published in November) will talk about negative occurrences I witnessed or experienced in the business.  But, no I didn’t personally see any underhand tactics, there is plenty of that sort of thing revealed in artist biographies or autobiographies.

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5 hours ago, Ric said:

It was different in the States

Distribution in the States was a WAY different story in the physical media era due to the geographical enormity and population size. Touring still is of course. I get a smile whenever I see the phrase "UK Tour." Geographically, that's about equivalent to touring the state of California.

If for whatever reason your label ran into a snag getting your records on the shelves, it could blow your whole career. There's this band from the '70's, Crack The Sky, who were attracting album-of-the-year reviews for their first record, being compared to a heavier Steely Dan, etc., but their label got the radio station copies around before they were in the shops. They wound up very obscure except for in one major urban center, Baltimore, Maryland, where somehow a dj liked them AND the label got records in the stores. So in one single city they were like Styx, and everywhere else like....I dunno, Hatfield and the North or Mogul Thrash were in the US. A few cognoscenti might have known, but that's it. #3 on the bill everywhere but Baltimore, where you better have a big enough venue for their headlining appearance.

To this day, if you're an underground-ish act doing a van tour, if you make just a little extra effort to stop and play the college towns between the bigger cities, or book shows an hour or two's drive from whatever larger city where you're part of the "scene," you can make the kids deliriously happy, because they're starved for live music. There's less to do in those smaller towns. If a band from (gasp) San Francisco takes the trouble to play there, you'll sell out of merch and get treated like rock stars. Really quite wonderful if you're used to comparatively jaded big city crowds. Kids will come out whether they even like your style of music or not because it's where everyone's going to be that night. And they're so much less "cool" and standoffish than city punters.

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1 hour ago, Ric said:

You’re not obliged to tell of things you know of although they may well be interesting.

The 2nd part of my biog (to be published in November) will talk about negative occurrences I witnessed or experienced in the business.  But, no I didn’t personally see any underhand tactics, there is plenty of that sort of thing revealed in artist biographies or autobiographies.

Ohhhh biography? Where can we read it?

Are you Simon Cowell?

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Musicians obviously notice  Bandcamp because we are looking at all of the options out there. The general public though? Probably not to any large degree.

I see Bandcamp similar to Soundcloud. I mostly use SC for storage, but at one point I was more genre focused and garnered a fair amount of followers. Shot myself in the foot by getting into too many different things and alienating my small fan base. I have thought about deleting a bunch of my old material and attempting to remain more focused on a genre. If I had done things better I could have probably doubled my followers. At some point I will likely clean house there and pare it down some. I used my existing YouTube channel to put up some other stuff. The people that like it, like it a lot but there aren't very many of them.

A few years back something major happened to Soundcloud . I can say this because material that was of lesser quality was getting lots of legit listens and comments from listeners. 

Now when I release anything in that same genre that's at least as good if not better I'm lucky to get 35 plays on it in a month. On a good tune I would have 300-500 plays in a month if the material was good. A couple of my loyal listeners stop around probably more out of curiosity to see how far away from the main genre I'm going to stray this time with comments like, " now THAT was different." So between the odd change at Soundcloud and me drifting too far from center on a chosen genre, my following is pitiful. I blame only myself for it, because I didn't care what genre it was. I just made music I wanted to make. My goals were pretty much non existent so far as a marketing plan is concerned. I still have over 2000 people as followers, but I've lost at least 500.

It costs me about 155.00 a year which is mostly money down the tubes, so I might be looking for another place to park a few tunes. SC has marketing plans I have never looked into. Now when I launch a new tune I get fake members with big boobies offering to market my tunes for $$. I suspect they are on every new launch of anything. I could put out, " I pick my nose for fun" and they would make me an offer.

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12 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

I'd always been a guitar and bass player until about 20 years ago I started taking piano/theory lessons, which stopped when I cut the end of my left index finger off with a jointer. Fortunately a good hand surgeon was on duty that day, so while my left index finger is about 1/4" shorter, it still works. It didn't exactly improve my guitar playing. Tony Iommi'd. 

That's hard core 😳

A guitarist friend of mine had a fight with his brother who slammed a door shut..... with my friend's finger in it. He went to hospital with the finger hanging off. Doctor said, it couldn't be saved. My friend replied...'but I'm a guitarist'. Doctor took pity and saved the finger. What a star.

That friend of mine is The Great Park. About 80 albums to his name.

http://www.thegreatpark.co.uk/

Then there's the story of Django Reinhardt.

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49 minutes ago, Ric said:

That book of yours looks really interesting, @Ric. I think I may give it a read! Thanks for sharing.

Just curious, and completely unrelated to your conversation with Philip, as you are a very experienced engineer from the industry, do you use Cakewalk mainly to record your own music or to record others? 

Just a short thought with regard to Philip's post, as you said you left the music business prior to the Internet (I'm sure you meant web launching, which occurred around 1994),  it is entirely possible that the practices Philip mentioned, as they allegedly occurred during the web era, with a completely different generation of record company employees in place. I have heard of some of the things Philip mentioned, but I never worked in the record industry and have no inside knowledge. At best, back in the 90s, I knew a bunch of indie record label owners out of Chicago from labels such as Touch & Go, Pravda, Alligator Records..as well as a friend in management for a major record label and a number of musician friends, some with record deals.  But I never had any first hand knowledge of industry practices. But I am a marketing pro and have written on marketing since the 90s too, had a well known and respected publication and major book deal with  Wiley and have heard people I've met in the record industry talk about one of the practices Philip mentioned. Again, I have no first hand knowledge, I just wanted to put out there that it is indeed possible that you both could be right, as you were in the industry at different time periods. Peace to all! You both seem like nice people to me. 

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@PavlovsCat don't worry about me. I can actually name names if I wanted to. For example, I can tell you how a certain UK national treasure's label managed to screw a very talented singer out of his best material, and then passed it off as his.  Didn't happen to me but someone very close to me.

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On 3/13/2022 at 4:51 PM, PavlovsCat said:

I can't help but sense that our friend is going to come back and complain that this shouldn't be in the deals forum. But this thread is exactly what makes this place so good.

Isn't it true, though? Why are you so resistant to the idea of a little housekeeping by posting in the most appropriate subsection? When we registered for the forum we all gained access to all parts of it, so there's nothing but habit keeping us from moving around instead of getting stuck in Deals. Maybe we should form new habits that adhere to how the forum is organized instead of stampeding it into something unrecognizable out of stubbornness.

Organization of the forum into subsections serves everyone as it makes relevant discussions and information easier to find. Taking this thread to its appropriate subforum (e.g. "Production Techniques: Discuss best practices for mixing, recording, production techniques, music distribution, etc.") would make it easier to find, make more room for actual deals here, and prevent the constant stream of deal announcements from knocking it off the first page. If someone comes here just for the deals then these threads are noise to them, while the appropriate content of Deals is inherently an unstable environment for long, meaningful discussions.

I don't think the quality of this discussion is by any stretch of imagination a consequence of the thread being posted on the Deals subsection, as I wouldn't expect desirable personality traits to cluster with deal chasing. Not that I gave it much thought (change my mind).

I don't really care so much for strict compartmentalization and am all for free discussion and stream of consciousness type of thing, but I think the off-topic posts (i.e. chatter taking place within threads pertaining to deals) add significantly less entropy than routinely starting off-topic threads.

It seems you're trying to establish your own law that would make the forum adjust to your habits, first by tarring & feathering our friend and now sanctifying it by appealing to communality, in effect repelling criticism - whereas in my view the criticism is valid because the forum already facilitates all kinds of interaction by virtue of its subsections and all we have to do is make better use of them by adjusting ourselves.

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3 hours ago, PavlovsCat said:

Just curious, and completely unrelated to your conversation with Philip, as you are a very experienced engineer from the industry, do you use Cakewalk mainly to record your own music or to record others? 

Just a short thought with regard to Philip's post, as you said you left the music business prior to the Internet (I'm sure you meant web launching, which occurred around 1994),  it is entirely possible that the practices Philip mentioned, as they allegedly occurred during the web era, with a completely different generation of record company employees in place. I have heard of some of the things Philip mentioned, but I never worked in the record industry and have no inside knowledge. 

I’m a Mac user and work, generally, in Logic Pro X. I say generally because I like Reason for the rack and other technological simulations. However, its complexities and sequencer graphics are off-putting, although from Reason 11 onwards the rack plug-in can be used in other DAWs.

I didn’t actually leave the business pre-web. My biog is titled 1969-1979 because it encompasses a decade+ and I ceased working for a company in ‘79. I went on to do other things on a freelance basis and they’ll be detailed in the 2nd volume’s lengthy postscript.

As regards distasteful aspects of the industry: much of this is idiocy and incompetence; sometimes just plain ignorance and naivety. But one cannot ignore that there was nastiness practiced by a few unpleasant people and unfairness perpetually dished out by record labels and music publishers.

Some useful informative insights to ‘the business’ can be found by subscribing online (for free) to:

The Lefsetz Letter and Music Business Worldwide

ATB

Ric

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1 hour ago, sarine said:

Isn't it true, though? Why are you so resistant to the idea of a little housekeeping by posting in the most appropriate subsection? When we registered for the forum we all gained access to all parts of it, so there's nothing but habit keeping us from moving around instead of getting stuck in Deals. Maybe we should form new habits that adhere to how the forum is organized instead of stampeding it into something unrecognizable out of stubbornness.

Absolutely.

 

1 hour ago, sarine said:

I don't really care so much for strict compartmentalization and am all for free discussion and stream of consciousness type of thing, but I think the off-topic posts (i.e. chatter taking place within threads pertaining to deals) add significantly less entropy than routinely starting off-topic threads.

Yep.

1 hour ago, sarine said:

first by tarring & feathering our friend and now sanctifying it by appealing to communality, in effect repelling criticism - whereas in my view the criticism is valid....

If you've seen any of the gentleman in question's other posts, he is rather an asshat.

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