I’m hugely excited to announce the launch of Not so Silent Movies…
This monthly event takes place at the wonderful Kings Place in London. First gig is Sunday October 2nd at 3pm. Tickets from here.
The photo of Harold Lloyd is appropriate, as what we’re going to be doing is risky, thrilling and often hilarious.
Here’s the pitch:
Great silent film comedies,
Great musicians together on stage,
No sheet music,
No rehearsing,
No plan,
& No watching the films in advance…
Yes… it’s totally improvised (spontaneously composed if you want to be pretentious..!), utterly great when it all clicks, and unintentionally hilarious when it goes awry.
Our band is amazing… we have Guy Pratt on Bass (he’s been in Pink Floyd & Roxy Music for starters), Geoff Dugmore’s playing drums (He’s an incredible drummer – one of the greatest session players in the world), Pip Eastop on Horn (he’s a stalwart of the London Sinfonietta, a Professor, stunning soloist and one of the wittiest people I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing), Elspeth Hanson (violinist currently wowing audiences in Bond, was also glimpsed by about two billion people on a bus with David Beckham & Jimmy Page), Mark Neary (Pedal steel player and alchemist of weird and wondrous noises – last time I saw him he was laying down some lines for Flood!), Me (I play the cello a bit), and some amazing surprise guests too (not Jimmy Page… yet… but we’re working on it! see photo).
Geoff Dugmore, Jimmy Page, Me & Guy Pratt at a recording session
Future Not so Silent Movies are featuring Dame Evelyn Glennie (world famous percussion soloist), Robin Millar (Sade’s producer), Steve Mackey (Pulp’s bassist), Julia Thornton (wizard harpist & percussionist), Pete Furniss (Reeds – a mainstay of the extraordinary Impropera), Roger Eno (maverick keyboardist), Stephen Warbeck (composer, Oscar winner), Cherisse Osei (Mika’s drummer), David Le Page (former Menuhin pupil, Subway Pirhanas, Orchestra of the Swan) and many, many more…
You can probably tell I’m a bit excited about this…
Come and join us for the greatest comedies ever made – (featuring Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Joe Keaton, Fatty Arbuckle & co), and to see a group of musos having a busman’s holiday. We may even get you up on stage to take part!
Let me know who else we should invite, and which films you’d like to see us tackle!
Online music promotion & why musicians should make their own record deals… [This is a section of a talk I gave at the Royal Academy of Music]
[If you like this... then read the supporting article CLICK HERE]
Wilhelm couldn't help feeling the Wigmore makeover was a little too contemporary
During my lecture a student asked if they should send a huge dossier of references, biographies, programmes and recordings to prospective venues/employers.
Err.. nope!
A CD with a handwritten note – all nicely designed & personally directed is much better, especially if solicited via an initial email.
(The former package would in all likelihood end up in a recycling bin)
Harsh maybe.. but true!
Humphrey thanks Mrs Watson for the Gutbuster tailcoat
Here are some simple steps to:
Promoting tracks online
Releasing tracks online
Getting income through sales (though this may not be the primary aim at this stage).
You want people to hear you, join you, and get excited about what you produce next (and hopefully turn up in droves to your next recital).
The Burberry string trio's Morton Feldman season wasn't going well
Getting it out there…
Let’s assume you’ve already recorded a really well thought-through programme of pieces/ songs… (This is a whole other massive subject, and something that classical musicians can often get very wrong…)
The obvious place to start a web presence is myspace, but it seems (at best) an inelegant way to present yourself as an artist, especially when there are so many other free hosted sites with beautiful templates out there.
I have a myspace page, (it’s so very ugly.. I won’t even link to it here) but its primary purpose is to redirect traffic to my own sites!
The traffic on my MySpace page at the moment
WordPress
I love WordPress (where you’re reading this).
It’s free – it has excellent templates, so even a klutz like me can make something look half – decent…
I can place a track like this by entering a piece of simple code, and it looks professional.
It’s designed as a piece of blogging software, but rather than using it purely as an online diary, I find it is a great place to host your biography and showreel.
More importantly, it’s a great place to engage in regular chats with people who might like what you do.
The more people that comment and link to you, the higher you page goes in Google’s rankings, so make sure it’s appealing!!
Also, when people leave comments, good or bad, try to respond as soon as you can! This can be difficult if you’re busy, but shows that what you’re doing is artist led, not just a facade by a record company to ‘get down with the kids’…
You can get a WordPress blog here – highly recommended.
The chaps in Led Zep felt Jimmy had gone too far...
Mailing list
If you want to link with people who like what you do, then maybe use a company to administer a mailing list for you. I use Constant Contact and find them very effective. They have a good policy against spam and there are lots of safeguards in place to ensure you communicate properly in your (hopefully) mass emails.
Obviously Twitter links into this whole pattern very neatly too!
Getting a great look for your album
Sometimes technology creates more niggling work for us and leaves a big creative void in the heart of your soul… and then sometimes, it proves itself to be a thing of simple beauty.
I love Flikr.
I am a massive fan of specific photographers like Lucy Martin, Trey Radcliffe, TonTon Copte and many others. Something in their imagery and artistic sensitivities links with my music.
I found all of them through the site, and in fact recently licenced an image from Lucy Martin which was a perfect fit for my Henry VIII album. Have a look here and you can see why!
Mailbox was in a right grump
SoundCloud
A different way of grouping/ hosting your music for free is presented by SoundCloud.
What is neat about this is the way people can place comments along the timeline, and even better, anyone (if you like) can stream it to their own blog/site.
Here’s a recent piece of mine which is being streamed from the SoundCloud website.
Listeners can add comments at specific points in the track – you can see them by hovering over the pictures.
I use SoundCloud to determine whether a track has ‘legs’ or not.
It’s very meritocratic – if something’s good – it’ll get lots of plays!
Now, if you’re feeling generous, you can make the tracks downloadable (although you should tag them in iTunes first so the mp3 has your web address in its code – google ‘iTunes metadata’ if you want to know more).
This track is a download track – again, it’s being streamed via a simple bit of code from SoundCloud:
The downwards arrow on the right is a download link.
Here’s a site where someone’s placed a block of my tracks leading to free downloads.
Later in casualty, Fritz regretted selling the viola
Lastfm
A well-established streaming music service is lastfm.com. This is a curious amalgam of fansite and radio station. Personally I find it a bit disjointed, and also it concerns me that unreleased tracks often appear there from dubious sources. There are tracks of mine on there that I’ve never released!
The Sixty one
A completely different approach to new music streaming and downloads can be found at thesixtyone.com.
This is a really hard site to describe as it is as much about gameplay as it is about streaming music. There are two types of (free) account. Artists or Listeners. The Listeners get a higher ranking depending upon how they scout for new songs that the Artists place on there. They give ‘hearts’ to tracks they like, a little like buying shares in a stock that looks like it’s going to perform well.
Frankly, no-one really knows how it works.
Also, as with SoundCloud, you can tell pretty quickly if a track has merit as it will get voted onto the front page!
Players also give ‘tips’ which I hadn’t realized translate into Paypal dollars.
From my page here, I have enough for two cappuccinos already… hurrah!
However – it was a superb place to place your music, but following a recent makeover, users have expressed dismay at the frankly confusing navigation…
The Albert Hall's sitemap left a little to be desired
Setting up a label and generating paid downloads
Setting up a label appears at first to be an onerous and difficult task. This certainly used to be the case, when there was a baffling array of requirements; barcodes, encoding, registration and so forth.
This is no longer the case thanks to intermediary companies that have sprung up to help us confused and frustrated independent players and composers.
CDbaby
CDBaby was established by the very brilliant Derek Sivers (whose blog is essential reading). They distribute to a huge number of digital outlets, and have excellent accounting procedures for small labels. They started as a physical distributor of CDs but seem to have made a smooth transition to digital marketing. You can read about joining here.
Ditto Music
One of the most impressive of these new services is Ditto Music.
They have created a brilliant service where the tasks of creating a label for your releases is streamlined and organized for a one-off fee.
They also take 0% of your royalties when tracks are sold online, and they can distribute to 700 digital outlets.
The real icing on the cake is that they have created a means by which independent musicians can get their tracks loaded onto Spotify, and iTunes.
Whenever I have a soundtrack album for a film or concert project, they are my first port of call.
Xavier didn't feel the sponsorship deal with Dunkin' Donuts had compromised him at all
Spotify
There’s a widely held belief that as an independent artist, getting your tracks onto Spotify and iTunes is nigh on impossible unless you’re with a major label. This is happily untrue as discussed above. Spotify is an exciting way of streaming (and now temporarily downloading) tracks which has begun a seamless integration with phones and mp3 players.
Spotify are themselves trying to approach smaller, independent labels, and you can register interest as a future partner here.
What’s next..?
I’m going to write about physical CD production, as well as other merchandise… But I need a big mug of coffee first! Let me know if this is useful…
I’ve just found something on youtube that I’ve been searching for for years – literally…
I’ve been so lucky to have been able to play the cello with some of the most amazing musicians, but by far the greatest was Jeff Buckley. Of course he’s shot up the charts recently through his beautiful cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah – surely the antithesis of X-Factor..?
This is Henry Purcell’s Dido’s Lament from Dido and Æneas. But listen to this – Just. listen. to. it…
I mean, no-one can sing like that. No-one should be physically able to sing like that.
Jeff Buckley singing, withpianist Catherine Edwards, violinist Ian Belton and me on cello, in Elvis Costello’s Meltdown Festival, July 1st 1995.
I remember, this singer arrived really late, just before the show, dishevelled, all cheekbones, cool hair, black jeans and the biggest boots you’ve ever seen supporting a rake thin body.
He apologised – got out his music – a kid’s exercise book with the lyrics of the songs written out in a crazy biro scrawl. – If a word was written high up the page, well then it meant it was a high note.
At one point he asked me what country he was in… he was confused between Germany and the UK that day as I think he’d flown in with little sleep.
And then he sang.
As Elvis Costello remembers;
When he started singing Dido’s Lament at the rehearsal, there were all these classical musicians who could not believe it. Here’s a guy shuffling up on-stage and singing a piece of music normally thought to be the property of certain types of specifically developed voice, and he’s just singing, not doing it like a party piece, but doing something with it.
That’s an understatement… I remember the lights being pretty bright and the silhouette of his frame as he bent almost double to wrench every ounce of meaning from a song written 300 hundred years ago. Better than any classical musician I’ve ever heard.
As he was singing, a photographer shuffled along past the feet of the audience in the front row at the Queen Elizabeth Hall to get a shot, unaware that they were for that second the most hated person in London, and got a good clout round the head for their troubles from someone who should remain nameless.
I can’t remember anything straight after that, but Elvis Costello wrote in Mojo:
My last memory of him was at the little party in the green room afterwards. There were all these people sitting round Jeff who’d never met before – Fretwork, the viol group, a classical pianist and some jazz player – all talking and laughing about music. He’d charmed everybody. I’d much rather remember that than anything.
I just wish i could find a photo…
Here’s an extract from a Radio 4 Documentary when I talked about it:
