This morning I’ve been playing some Paganini from an early edition, viewing through an Avegant Glyph driven by an Amazon Kindle Fire.
So far, it’s pretty thrilling experience and somewhat exciting to consider the possibilities of accessing archive material without expensive printing, using music stands, and having a truly focussed environment whilst working.
My normal day job is composing and recording film soundtracks. This is where such technology will fly, especially once reduced into a lens. The software I use to sequence, record and mix will all be effectively projected at a low level into the eye and will occupy no real estate in my studio.
Now if you’ll excuse me I have to get back to mastering those octaves – technology won’t do that for me…
This year I was about to lead into introducing Andre Agassi onstage when I spotted a lady playing with her phone. I decided to make her a bit of a star for the day.
Here’s what I did after a long day of recording in Abbey Road one night last week. I’d been conducting the orchestra all day, and my brain was in another place.
I was speaking a language far from English, and things were swimming in front of my eyes. Rather than start heading home, I decided to decompress a bit.
There’s a deeply unusual documentary I’m writing at the moment, so I put the film on, Gordon, my fantastic engineer set everything to record and I got ready to play along. In the end, I ended up doing a 59 minute solo take on my cello – which is something of a record for me… It was a bit surprising seeing as my arms were really aching from conducting all day.
Anyway, here’s the result. (Don’t worry, it’s not 59 minutes).
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/154592059″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]So.. here’s the next extract from the set I played as support for UNKLE at the Royal Festival Hall – opening for James Lavelle’s Meltdown Festival. This is my live cello-looped version of my orchestral piece ‘Final Day’.
Here’s the bizarre gear that goes into my gig bag along with the cello.
My solo performing setup generally includes loop pedals, pitch shifters and reverb units.
I’m doing a lot of experimentation at the moment with my live setup, using acoustic & electric cellos, new custom built units as well as some exciting new effects pedals from Boss, Boomerang & Line 6. Before I plan a programme I always draw a new circuit/ wiring plan and however much I try to simplify things around my feet, they always end up verging on the complex..!
The sketch above is the setup I have in my studio at the moment… Looking a little tangled for my liking…
Here’s a short improvisation from a set I performed in Mexico a couple of months ago. The guest speakers prior to me had mentioned whale songs, volcanos and one of my favourite pieces, La Folia. Needless to say, all of them found their way in.
It’s been great to see Andrew Bird storming Sundance with a live set where he built songs up from live loops on violin using a parallel setup of Line 6 delay modellers, one tightly locked, the other more for floating ambient lines. You can watch it here.
Andrew Bird
The great thing is that the gadgetry he’s using is rendered unimportant by the emotional punch of the songs. It’s easy to get hung up on gear for its own sake, but if you’re not making someone laugh, cry or get the chills, it ain’t worth it…
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:
[soundcloud url=”http://soundcloud.com/radiomovies/in-i-the-apotheosis-akram-khan-juliette-binoche”]
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 been involved with a few projects with Nick Knight and his team at ShowStudio – despite my being to the fashion world what Boris Johnson is to speed skating…
The most insanely enjoyable of these was a project where we made 24 films in 24 hours – where the great John Gosling (Mekon) and I provided the live music. I ended up being styled by the head of YSL – Stefano Pilati (I was probably the chubbiest person he’s ever dealt with) and the whole photoshoot & film shoot was turned into a catalogue for Yves Saint Laurent.
He’s a real gent.
Just found a scene from that session… Jessica Miller looks at me as if she’s used to being written on while a random cellist plays at her…
There are some new tracks added this week from past albums including Harrison’s Chronometer which I released as the other track on the EP length Glass Cathedral album, way back in 1999.
You’ll find them all in the sidebar to the right under Pages, including The Diver in the Crypt and In-I stage show.
Soon to come… the score of Sacred Monsters, (the Sylvie Guillem Akram Khan dance piece) and a very weird piece I wrote about the Venetian Underground System…
I like sites with long streamed mp3s where I can listen to music while I work – kind of webpage radio stations for each album, show or film project (where I own the tracks or have permission from the publishers). I’ve had lots of nice requests for the scores to recent stage shows, and I don’t want to charge people for the music – especially if they’ve already paid for a ticket!
I’ve had a really encouraging response from posts such as this.
So… The Jane Austen lovers have come out in force behind a certain piece of piano music, In-I has opened at the Sydney Opera House – and the score / soundtrack is now online here and Channel 4 are to shortly announce the transmission dates of David Starkey’s new series on Henry VIII – the Mind of a Tyrant.
Meanwhile I’ve started to put my albums online. I realised that it was ten years since I recorded The Glass Cathedral, and so I’ve decided to release it as a one tune radio station.. okay, so it’s actually a webpage with a Piranesi engraving and a tune… but, as with the dance scores, i like the idea of people being able to dial it up and listen. A lot of people have paid to see concerts, films, shows – for which I’m really grateful… why should I ask people for more money, and anyway, what’s wrong with giving the odd tune away?
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…
[youtube=http://youtu.be/xSVCL262gmU]
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:
Tips for breaking into the covert world of composition for new media, such as film soundtracks, TV, adverts, arranging and games.
[digg=http://digg.com/music/How_to_be_a_composer_for_new_media_tips] How get on the path to becoming a film, television, web or games composer
Music technology tips by Philip Sheppard February 2009
(These are key points from lectures I’ve given recently, and a recent article for Classroom Music Magazine)
WORK really hard. Work harder than anyone else you’ve ever met.
If you don’t love working really hard you won’t enjoy being a composer (and believe me, it’s a great job)
Ask people to show you how they do what they do. No composer minds being asked how they put a track together
Learn how sound works – if you study the physics of sound, you’ll be more likely to be able to shape it into agreeable forms
Make a portfolio of what you do. A showreel can be virtual – myspace is a start but can look fairly horrible. WordPress is excellent as a shop window
Specialize in something unique. A small business advisor will call this your USP – Unique Selling Point. (I got into the business by doing leftfield things with string instruments)
Always work with people who are better than you. I do, and I hope they can’t tell. this keeps me on my toes, and I learn from every job
Network network network… but in a cool way. If a player writes to you asking for work, it’s less appealing than if they write to invite you to a gig isn’t it? A mailing list/website with news and forthcoming events is a surefire way for people to see how busy you are. Once you’re seen to be terribly busy, this will attract more work. this sounds like a catch 22 – but it isn’t. You are likely to be self-employed, so employ yourself now!
Listen emotionally, analytically and critically to everything. If you love a piece you hear, try to work out why you love it. Dissect it into its elements. Equally if music doesn’t move you or grab you, try to work out exactly why.
Always carry a bit of manuscript paper with you (or a dictaphone if you don’t read music). Moleskine do really nice pocket manuscript books. Your best tunes will always hit you when you’re not looking for them
see point number one…
Coffee is your friend and enemy. Keep it close, but use it wisely.
How I got into it all…
I trained as a cellist at the Royal Academy of Music where I have been a cello Professor since about ’94. I had several composition lessons there as a second study, studying with Melanie Daiken, before second studies were abolished! However, by that point I was heavily ensconced in the Contemporary Music scene.
Luckily the RAM had a policy of drawing in great living composers, so I was able to play under Berio, Tippett, Messaien and many other truly inspiring musicians. At the same time I felt compelled to start improvising, and joined a quintet with Keith Tippett which specialised in ‘spontaneous composition’. At this point I learnt the value of knowing when not to play…
I’m motivated to write music that I’d like to hear – which sounds obvious and a bit selfish, but, it’s a pretty good filter.
My ‘break’ into composition came when I tried to multitrack some pieces on the cello, was encouraged to put them on a CD, that sold well and found its way onto the desk of an ad agency who threw me in at the deep end to devise the ident music for a major broadcaster… which was a learning curve, and a great break.
Pros and Cons: Pros – I love my job. Every day is different. I can be based at home and still write and record (very different from my former touring existence). I meet really exciting people – last year it was 5 moonwalkers in one day.
I’m my own boss. I can be creative and still be working. Cons not many.. Very late nights – but, I love working late. Oh yes – developing a studio tan (that’s very very pale) and having a habit of buying a new Mac every year and convincing myself I really need it.
This morning I’ve been playing some Paganini from an early edition, viewing through an Avegant Glyph driven by an Amazon Kindle Fire.
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