musics

From Musicians To Music Festival Organizers

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In todays musical economy, youre lucky to be a band thats invited to join a music festival lineup. Festivals are blowing up in terms of popularity, so much so that nearly every major music festival in 2011 saw record attendance. To be on one of those bills could do a lot for your career, but to create an entire festival? Thats just crazy talk. Or is it? One band has been doing just that for 12 years.

Horror Rap duo Insane Clown Posse has unarguably the largest cult following of any similar sounding act in the entire country. The reasons for that are many, but its safe to say the fact that they have their own annual festival where fans (Juggalos) can meet up every year goes a long way in solidifying those fans loyalty. Of course, Im talking about the Gathering of the Juggalos!

Producing a Music Festival

Theres nothing easy about producing a music festival, especially one as involved as Gathering of the Juggalos. Location, artists, security, vendors, permits, scheduling, promotion, insurance, and stage setup are just some things that have to be taken into consideration by curators like Insane Clown Posse in planning. And if you dont sell as many tickets as you need to in order to make a profit, it can be a very expensive loss.

Insane Clown Posse hosted their first Gathering of the Juggalos music festival in 2000 after several years of talk and planning surrounding the event. Its hugely successful today, but even a band as large as Insane Clown Posse had to fight and endure trial and error over the years to bring Gathering of the Juggalos to its current level of success.

Music vs. Events

Of course, the artists playing the festival will be the most important selling point to potential festival-goers. This years Gathering of the Juggalos festival was loaded with talented horror rap acts, and enough Juggalos to satisfy your social desires until Insane Clown Posses next Gathering of the Juggalos festival rolls around. But what makes the Gathering more original than any other music festival around the country isnt the music; its the on-site activities.

Its essential that there are more activities on hand than those related to music. Insane Clown Posse knows their fans might get tired of non-stop music for four straight days, so they came up with the idea to provide them with fresh activities seen at no other music festival. While these events may only be attractive to the Insane Clown Posse fan demographic, they provide some great insight on the ingenuity needed to make fans happy at music festivals.

Helicopter Rides at Gathering of the Juggalos

To start, there are helicopter rides at the Gathering of the Juggalos. Why? Why not is a better question. For a little bit of money, customers already at Insane Clown Posses festival can take a ride in the helicopter and tour the festival grounds from birds eye view.

Artist Seminars

There are meet and greets or autograph signings at a lot of major music festivals, but very few offer attendees the opportunity to sit in on a seminar conducted by your favorite artists. The guys in Insane Clown Posse always make sure they release as much news about their careers as possible at their artist seminars.

Juggalo Championship Wrestling

Insane Clown Posse, their Juggalo followers, and everyone else somehow connected to the Psychopathic Records family have been immersed in the wrestling scene since it all began. Gathering of the Juggalos just wouldnt be Gathering of the Juggalos without Juggalo Championship Wrestling on hand!

Those events are all given, but some others that take place at the yearly festival are mud / oil wrestling and the Ms. Juggalette contest! It might not be your typical beauty pageant, but some lucky lady will still be headed home with the title of Ms. Juggalette at the end of the weekend!

Over the years, Insane Clown Posse has mastered the art of creating a festival thats pleasing to die hard music fans and the more casual customers who also enjoy alternate activities not related to music at all. This balance must be achieved if you ever wish to host your own music festival some day!

Musical Instruments Of Colombia

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Everybody deeply appreciate the great treasure that is Colombian musical instruments, such as Colombian tiple, made in coral wood, with clear lines and awesome authentic color, with twelve metal strings arranged in four courses. Any professional or student guitarist will find it easy to use in Colombian folk music, and in many Latin American songs. Musicians can use it in Latin American folk jazz music, but also in original songs as well. Tiple’s ethereal and clear sound is also used in classic guitar music creations.

Colombian Cuatro is concert grade guitar; it is made of slices and blocks from curly maple. It has a violin shape and has a great pitch accuracy and finish. The ‘seis’ is a hybrid of the cuatro and a supplementary sixth course tunes a fourth below the usual fifth bottom course. It is also a very popular Colombian musical instrument. This feature allows an expanded bass range. It can be used also for guitar intervals as well, and it makes a awesome music, It sounds as a guitar, but sweeter, faster and louder.

Original Colombian music instruments
Spanish and African traditions are strongly represented in Colombian music. Traditional quena, a king of flute, and Spanish guitar are very popular. Colombian bandolina has fifteen strings and its sound is beautiful, sweet and clear. It is usually made by hand, of unexcelled quality. The marimba is another Colombian musical instrument; it looks like a xylophone and its keys are made in wood. The arpa is a local version of the harp, the guassa is a rattle. The songs from the Pacific coast are using drums and are tinged with Spanish influence. Due to the Spanish influence, piano music is also very popular in Colombia. The newest music style in Colombia is “valenato”, based on the European accordion.

Many Colombian musical instruments are beautifully crafted, from the ancient times until our century. The charango, a kind of guitar made in wood, the vessel whistle, the erkencho, a kind of clarinet, the chirimia, an oboe, are carefully made and original Colombian folk music sounds great with them. There are six ethnic zones in Colombia; the music is a hybrid between Indian roots and Spanish traditions. In some regions, there is also a strong Negro influence. Guitars, flutes and drums are always necessary; in the Caribbean zone the most important Colombian musical instrument is gaita, a kind of oboe. In Colombia, music is a tradition. There is a habit to pass folk songs from one generation to the other.

Rap Beats – Get Your Music Heard! – Music Marketing 101

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Rapping Beats

Marketing of your music product (mixed and mastered vocals on Rapping Beats or R&B Instrumentals) is probably the most important part of the music BUSINESS. In this Rap Beats and Instrumentals support article Ill give you an intro in the MASSIVE world of Music Marketing. This article is part of a series on how to become a successful Rapper or Singer. You can view all the articles in this series on the authors page.

You can have the craziest lyrics and the hottest rapping beats and R&B instrumentals in the world, but if no one knows about you and your music, it makes NO difference. You can even have distribution with the biggest distributors in the world. But without proper marketing it wont mean anything. If you dont promote your music heavily, youll get lost in the ocean of rappers and singers that are online and in stores. Ill give you an intro here, but the topic is way to huge to discuss in one article.

Q: Once my song is ready, where and how can I promote it and get it heard?

A: Like I said earlier this is a big subject which cant be explained in a couple of paragraphs. But once you have a fully mixed and mastered song with solid lyrics on a really HOT rapping beat or R&B instrumental, youre ready to get it out there into the world. (Remember, as important as marketing is, music quality still matters). One thing you definitely want to keep doing is constantly learn all you can about Music Marketing. The key is to get AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE to hear (to actually listen to) your song. Post your music up everywhere online. Give it to all your friends and tell them to make copies and share it with their own friends. Hand CDs out at clubs and concerts where they play music similar to yours. When youre first starting out dont be afraid to give your music away for free. Yes I said FREE. (well Almost free, the only thing you should ask for in return is the persons Email Address more on this later.) People wont pay to listen to a song from an unknown artist they might not like. They have to trust and like you before they buy from you. Trust me, giving away your music to gain a true fan will PAY OFF in the end.

The next thing to do is get your music on the internet and let the world hear. Upload your music to any music related website you know of. POST IT EVERYWHERE YOU CAN! Some good ones to focus on are iLike, ReverbNation, MySpace (yes MySpace still matters), Last.fm, Jango and BandCamp but the list goes on and on. After that get on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter and socialize with different people tell them about your music! Its important NOT to be annoying and spam people with ads of your music. That is one SURE way to get potential fans to HATE you. (Do you ever click on those kinds of posts? Didnt think so) You have to start or join in conversations and build personal relationships with people. Thats the key to social networking Its hard work, but it WILL pay off.

Another thing you dont want to forget about is having your OWN website it looks professional and will give you credibility as an independent artist. Having a MySpace of Facebook Page is great but you need a HOME your personal website will be your own store-front where you can gather fans. A good solution for this is BandZoogle. You can easily design a professional looking website with them and get your own domain (something like www.YourArtistOrBandName.com). BandZoogle also has a great Mailing List application that will let you collect all your fans email addresses so you can keep in touch with them. This is VERY important. When you give your music away to fans, make sure to get an email address in return and keep them updated on all your new releases. Its much easier to keep old fans (customers) than it is to get new ones! Well this is the longest article in the series so Ill leave it at that for now! Keep learning about Music Marketing Its Important! Hope this helped.

Holla @ ur boy!

DatPaki
Producer/Songwriter
PBE Music

How To Get Your Music On Spotify – And Earn Money On It!

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When I first started making music back in the 1980’s, I didn’t think I ever could get my music out to a large audience – and getting payed for it never ever crossed my mind.

During the years I created thousands of tunes. Many compositions were created together with friends, and later I started to make demos that we sent out to record labels. Together with a friend, we got signed on a small Swedish label that wanted to release one of our techno/trance tracks. We were of course very happy for this, and had big plans for the future. This is the first time I came across talks about earning money in context of our music.

However, that record label got into economic problems and we never saw our tune get released. Sadly so, because we both thought it was a very good song and we had a strong concept. The band name we choose was Cube, and we created some sort of mix between techno, trance and euro-disco.

The whole disco scene has always interested me, and I started up a large streaming radio channel via an online service back in the late 1990’s. This proved to be successful, especially since I played only Italo Disco and had many very obscure and different songs in the playlist. At one time, the radio station – then called SouthPole Radio – was the largest Italo Disco radio station on the internet.

But it is costly to run a radio station. Not only hosting and bandwidth – it also costs money to make it legal. All this was done by the online service, but I never got anything back. My radio station was free for all to listen to, and even though I recieved many happy emails about how good the station was, I spent more and more money on the music.

The station did inspire me to keep writing my own music, and I started yet again to create own tunes. This lead to buying equipment, and somewhere during 2000-2001, I created songs with an Amiga 1200 as sequencer (and sampler) hooked up to a Novation BassStation keyboard, a Roland TR-505 (a not so good drum machine) and a Roland SC-88 MkII – a very nice synth module with lots of good sounds.

But over the years, different software sollutions proved to be an improvement to the hardware. The equipment was sold and production started with only different sort of software programs, using everything from PC, Mac and even Atari computers.

When I first laid hands on Spotify I was amazed. Spotify is a very good music streaming service that is free in many parts of the world. But even the paid accounts are worth the money. Spotify tries to distribute all music ever published, which I believe is a hard and tough, but very good, goal.

Since Spotify is available all over the world today, and the fact that they have so much different music, there were no more use for an Italo Disco exclusive radio station anymore. SouthPole Radio was therefore turned into a record label, and in November 2009 SouthPole Radio released its first album: Antarctica, by Pingo (spotify:album:7zUqiTY4BmwXXUWhP1kyti).

Before we released any album at all, we made a lot of research on how to actually release music on Spotify. First, we wanted to release for UK and USA charts too, and other media centers as Apple’s AppStore, Amazon and such. However, this proved to be fairly expensive, and without our label and artist name well known, we didn’t want to take that chance.

However, several different online systems (Ditto Music was the one we finally signed with) had very cheap methods for distributing to Spotify. SouthPole Radio therefore decided to exclusivly launch the first album on Spotify via this online system. It was very easy too!

Here is how we did it:
First we saved all the tunes in mp3-format in 320Kbps or higher resolution. After that, we created an account with Ditto Music and payed the 2 up front fee. This is a monthly fee that has to be payed for hosting, accounting and such. It is very cheap, and if you get 100 streams per month, you will break even.

You then upload the tunes together with a 800×800 pixel JPG-picture that is your cover art.

That’s it! After that, it takes about 4-5 weeks, and then your music is live for as long as you pay the 2 monthly fee.

For each stream that people listen to in Spotify you will get 0.02. This is also payed out to you monthly.

This is probably the most easy way – and maybe even the cheapest – to get your music on Spotify – and get payed for it! With a bit of marketing, you will get a lot of listeners, and the more listeners, the more you get payed.

If you then update your account on Ditto Music with downloads and other sales, you can keep selling your music for a profit.

If you want to know more, check out SouthPole Radio’s Official Website (http://www.SouthPoleRadio.com) and read our constantly updated news where we write about our newest releases, how to create your own album, how to get more listeners on Spotify and other interesting and important information that will help your own music career.

Music Creation Software – What Are Your Options

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Those of you aspiring to create and record your own music can now do it sitting at home. Music creation software packages allow you to create, record and edit music conveniently. Not just this, there are software packages that cater to different ages, from musically inclined kids to the more advanced music creating software for adults.

Morton Subotnick’s Making Music for beginners

This is an educational and fun music software for kids. Created by Morton Subotnick, an award winning composer, Making Music allows children to have an easy and enjoyable music composing experience. Designed to be kid-friendly, the software has ‘animal building blocks’ that allow children to create their own unique melodies. Rhythm and pitch can be modified by lining birds up on a wire, resembling music notes. The software also allows kids to select any of the sixteen instruments on the computer screen and listen to the sounds produced by each individually or together. Other fun and exciting games include testing kids musical sense by asking them to listen to two melodies and judging whether they are different or similar.

For aspiring musicians

With its popularity in Europe soaring, Music Maker from Magix allows aspiring musicians to create music even if they do not have prior knowledge of music composing. This music creating software allows users to choose from several thousand pre-created samples and loops from different musical instruments, digital music files and CDs. The samples, loops can be previewed, dragged and dropped on screen. The software allows users to create more than ninety different music tracks. Other important features of Music Maker include enhanced editing tools, a quality drum machine and a tuner that creates a complete choir from one recorded voice and also corrects recorded vocal samples automatically. The musical pieces can be exported to files and played on Windows Media Player.

Using Microsoft Songsmith, you can create songs by choosing appropriate music to accompany your vocals. You start by choosing a particular song style and setting a tempo. You will then have to sing the song into the microphone in tune with the percussive beat. Once you are done recording, Songsmith will set the key, choose the chords and play the song again with musical accompaniments. You can edit the score, export it to a disk and share it.

DUBturbo is another quality music creating software using which you can create hip-hop, house, jungle and modern music pieces. Sonic Producer is also an impressive music composition and creation software that offers bang for your buck.

Advanced music creating software

Cakewalk Music Creator Pro and Cubase are high-end, advanced music creation and editing software for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 users. They can be used with a computer keyboard or you can attach instruments to a Midi keyboard (sound card). The programs offer more standard pattern and loop based arranging as well as advanced audio mixing. Pitch shifting and real time stretching are some interesting features offered by Cubase.

Determine your musical needs before you buy music creation software. Research and compare different music software online to make an informed purchase decision.