Realstrings 2009

Despite the credit crunch and despite my wife having the toughest year of her life, for realstrings.com it was  a ridiculously good year.  Thank you to all the producers, composers and record labels who have employed us, and to all the musicians who help me!  Here are some of tracks we recorded strings for, released in 2009.  With thanks to the copyright holders.

Queensberry

Love it or hate it, the X Factor / Pop Idol models are keeping the music business going, including the music services that supply producers – like me. In the last year I’ve worked on tracks for artists from all over Europe and America who have come out of those franchises and every territory supports its own local version.
Queensberry is a German pop band and this remake of a Shakespeare Sister song (I think) was produced by Philip Larsen, with strings from realstrings.com. The track is released in October 2009.

Strings in Bratislava

London, Warsaw, Prague, Moscow, Sofia and now Bratislava; recording strings in studio 1 at Slovak Radio is my latest experience of string sessions around the world!

This one was the toughest test yet for an orchestra; a rhythmically and harmonically complex score for a video, composed by Richard Jacques.  The typical criticisms you hear from composers/producers who go to Eastern Europe for  string sessions are that they struggle with challenging scores (particularly syncopation) and don’t match the expressive power of UK or US sessions.  That myth was shattered by my experience in Bratislava.  None of the cues could be labeled ‘easy’ and some were frankly terrifying!  Yet over 7 sessions the orchestra and conductor (Allan Wilson) maintained an excellent standard to complete around 75 minutes of music.  For efficiency, we recorded most cues in sections – beginning to letter B, letter F to H etc.  These were given to the ProTools operator as bar numbers; the Protools session files were submitted in advance by the composer to ensure the bar numbers, tempo maps and time signature changes in Protools matched the score.  (We didn’t get round to rehearsal letters as markers for this job.)

My role on this gig was to prepare the string score and parts, and assist the composer on the sessions.  The notation needed to convey the composers ideas, facilitate rehearsal/takes, and give the players the best possible chance of sight reading their parts.  If the notation doesn’t achieve all these things, then too much time is wasted in simple musical geography and communication.  My process for achieving this is documented on the ‘Scores’ page.  I reproduce a typical page of score here, though not from this particular project.

And a time lapse movie of the strings returning after a break.

Organic Loops

It’s taken me a while, but finally I’ve got a strings loops library up and selling!

And currently it’s number 2 in the bestseller list on Loopmasters.  It’s a long term investment taking on a project like this, but provides another angle to my work (you’ve got to evolve and exploit your own specialisms!). I looked at other outlets for string loops, but none seemed to have the marketing machine that Loopmasters achieves.  (The library is on Organic Loops, mainly sold through Loopmasters.)

Here’s the demo – put together by Rob at Organic Loops.

So, motivated by this success, I’m moving straight on to a disco strings project.  Starting point for something like this is to study the genre – so here’s my Spotify playlist which is providing some inspiration!

Soundcloud – embed on WordPress.com

Finally, some social media gets past the WordPress.com police!  (No offense WordPress!)

Here’s a track I wrote years ago.  Now if WordPress would just let us embed some other stuff I would be a truly contented bloke.

Online audio mixer

A quick and dirty post to launch my new online multitrack mixer, coded by Chris Savage.  Still some development to do but try it out!  Click on the image to launch.I’m going to use this to demonstrate how I supply strings as individual stereo stems, and the flexibility this gives composers and producers.  For now, this is just a library track, split up into stems.   The coding is such that publishing a new mixer simply involves editing some text in an xml file, converting my audio to mp3s and uploading a folder of stuff to a server.  I don’t need to touch html or Flash – everything in the mixer is determined by plain and simple text, that looks as boring as this.

<mixer>
<trackTitle>Realstrings – the stems</trackTitle>
<durationInSeconds>125</durationInSeconds>
<showCloseButton>1</showCloseButton>

<track>
<label>Violins 1</label>
<audiofile>mixerV1.mp3</audiofile>
<startmuted>0</startmuted>
<initialvolume>0.5</initialvolume>
</track>

A musician’s online identity

A musician’s online identity. It’s good to talk.

Read it or listen to it.

Getting work as a freelancer in the music business is a lifelong challenge! I don’t want to tempt fate here, but it never ceases to amaze me that I keep working (touch wood) in this dysfuntional but strangely inter-connected community. In the (bad) old days, networking and socialising had to be physical. Your contacts grew in studios, cafes, bars, over the telephone, and the maxim that if you were working, you kept working was very true – if your face was ‘in’ then you generally kept getting more work. If you disappeared off the radar, then people quickly forgot about you.

Undoubtedly, that sort of personal contact still counts for much. My credits page has turned into a record of my job sheet per quarter and well over half of those sources of work this year come from people I have known a long time, or via that other catalyst for employment, personal recommendation. But I’ve tried to increase my chances of connecting with people who want to work with me, by having an identity online.

I’ve approached this in a couple of ways. Straightforward, in your face advertising and the more gentle, human approach of talking through self-publishing. For advertising, I’m using google adwords and spending about a pound a day for those sponsored links that come up with a google search. I’m on a couple of virtual musician sites too – screenedmusic.co.uk and esession.com. Screen Music has a modest subscription charge and is aimed at media composers, while esession takes a fee from the producer who wants to hire you and seems to be more of a songwriters community. I’m new to both so I can’t offer any more advice from experience on these yet!

My website is also an advert but it crosses over into the other side of promoting yourself – socialising, or simply talking, having your say, self-publishing. When you express yourself you are not only saying something specific, you are projecting your identity. And, warts and all, that’s what I’m doing here. I’m expressing opinions, I’m relating experiences, I’m demonstrating that I have a keen interest in working in music, and hopefully building an identity that suggests I’m competent. My list of credits show I can do the job I say I can, but it’s my identity that should show I’m OK to work with.

Expressing myself is only half of a conversation. I’m not a prolific blogger and I only get a smattering of comments on my blog; but I respond to other bloggers, or join the conversation on Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and some other social sites like composers forum, and I publish videos on subjects that interest me on YouTube and blip.tv. This isn’t about saying ‘gimme a job’ it’s just simply joining in the music business conversations because it’s good to talk. And a by product is that I have a kind of professional-cum-personal identity online.

I don’t pretend I’m doing the self-publishing thing fantastically well, but here are a few of the music blogs I respect – great examples of online identities in the music business.

Ian Shepherd
Adrian Ellis
Tim Prebble
Ken Lewis
Sentric Music

Digital Skills For Musicians

Digital skills for musicians; I’m not thinking of the core tools of recording, sequencing and notating, but the apps and services that let you take your music further, to connect with others, to promote your talents, to project your identity and to continually learn.

How’s this: there are 5 main areas of digital skills for musicians (I know my apps and services suggestions are not comprehensive).
Digital Sound. This includes editing, compressing, hosting, embedding, sharing, transferring and presenting.
Apps and services like Audacity, Garageband, Soundcloud, iTunes, YouSendIt, FTP, idisk.

Digital Images. Video, photography and graphics. This includes creating, editing, compressing, hosting, embedding, sharing, transferring and presenting.
Apps and services like iMovie, iPhoto,  Flickr, Photobucket, Slideshare, YouTube, Animoto, OneTrueMedia, Xtranormal, Vimeo, Quicktime, Kyte.tv

Have your say (self publishing).  Blogging, micro blogging, podcasts, wikis, buying a url.  Apps and services like Twitter, WordPress, Blogger, wikispaces, iTunes and audio hosting services.

Make connections  (social networks and communications). This is about being part of the global music community. Twitter (again),  Myspace, Facebook, Ning, Imeem, LastFM, forums, commenting, Skype, iChat.

Information (finding, organising and using).  RSS, social bookmarking.  Apps and services like delicious, google.

I have a nagging urge to create an online course; Digital Skills for Musicians.  Throughout my working life I’ve had some connection with education and in recent years my passion has been centred round digital technologies and the web.  In my experience, current music courses don’t offer convincing curriculum content for the things that I see as central to learning and working in the creative industries – the social web, self publishing, and all the openness and connections that exist because of Web 2.0.

Much of the discussion around musicians and the web assumes that ‘musician’ means band or songwriter, looking to win fans and sell music.  My own experience shows that ‘musician’ can be interpreted far more broadly to cover a range of work.
In fact, if I survey 100 of my colleagues making a living from music, only a small proportion are artists/bands directly promoting themselves to fans; the rest are composers, performers, producers, engineers and arrangers.  So I’d expect the content of the course to reflect this.

I’m not starting entirely from scratch with this; I’d want to build on the content and community at www.manchestermusician.co.uk

I am not an expert in web tools for musicians but therein lies one of the many benefits of the social web – expertise is readily available and shared.  Through my own learning and development with digital tools and services I believe I am well placed to facilitate learning. The course will require each individual learner to personalise their development for their own needs and interests, and demonstrate learning with practical uses of the apps and services.  Getting such a course up and running (funded and validated) is a huge task!

I’ve started a wiki to develop some content (it will necessarily never cease to evolve). For each topic there are technical and creative elements;  how do you use the app or service and how can you exploit it for your own development?  So, what have I missed?

Here’s a slideshare presentation by Jane Hart; it focuses on organisations (business and education) rather than individuals, though the concepts translate to  an individual, managing his own development.