Posts tagged blog

So I thought I would speak about my intentions for this blog and how I intend to make some money off my passions, while exploiting current technology.

I haven’t spoken about it much on this site, but my absolute passion in life has become music and more specifically music creation, engineering and production. I absolutely love electronic music and my genres that I am interested in both from a production but also a live performance point of view are from the 125 bpm tech and electro house through to progressive house and then to the 140 bpm tech, progressive and uplifting trance with a massive dose of belting techno in the middle.

Between these genres they represent everything that appeals to me in sound and my own productions in some way, attempt to combine all my music interests into one track. One thing is massively prevelant in everything that I make and that is my love for percussion – african, latin and synthetic as well as my love for powerful, driving bass-lines that you might find in techno or tech-trance. There is just something so provocative about the rolling bass of a Simon Patterson track and the complex percussions loops of a Daniel Portman track. I love complex drum and percussion rhythms and the interplay with the bass-line always where my heart is at.

But back to what this post is actually about….I plan to completely redo this site using Joomla instead of WordPress and will put a custom theme together which I feel better defines me (well, I intent to pay on of my more UI talented colleagues to help me with it .

The reason for Joomla is because I intent to create a bit of a community and artist portal site for myself where I will not only provide my tunes as well as weekly/monthly podcasts of me mixing together my top tunes but I intent to use it as a platform to provide some pay-for content.

A big trend in the music production world over the last few years is for budding and mostly unsigned producers such as myself to release high-quality screen casts tutorials on things such as sound synthesis and design, sound engineering, mixing and production techniques, specific hardware or VST tutorials and even genre specific tutorials.

Most charge either a monthly fee to access all content (but then you need to be constantly delivering new content) or they work on a pay per course basis. Of course, the quality of the course is everything as well as the ability to leverage off the viral marketing potentials of the current interweb.

From all I have seen up till now, the sound and audio community is more than willing to pay for this (unlike the software dev community) and I, myself have forked out a good few hundred dollars for top quality content which has really helped me learn and grow in my abilities.

Now where I intent to diff slightly is that I plan to offer soundsets and sample packs for download. For example drum and percussion sample packs which I have designed from scratch. This is currently only being done by some of the top industry professionals and few can compete with the Vengeance sample pack series. Nonetheless I intent to try and initially I will give away a third of each pack for free to entice potential users.

For example say I have created a pack that contains Kicks, Snares, Claps, Open Hats, Closed Hats, Shakers, Congas and Bongos, then i will create a sample pack containing a third of each of the type of samples and distribute it on the various sites, forums etc etc.

This community is brutal, if my sample collections suck, they will flame me to death and obviously not buy. If they are good, there is the potential to gain not just the respect of the vast community but also to turn labels in your direction.

I would probably offer the full sample pack for $20-$30 and it might contain 300-500 one shot samples and maybe 100 loops created solely from the sample in the pack and various bits of processing that effecting.

For the tutorials, I will need to first determine what I want to create and how often I am able to get something out before deciding on a costing model. I will probably include the Ableton Live Packs for free (I use Ableton Live as my primary sequencing system) to registered users of the site, again to entice them to view the tutorials that produced the live packs.

I also intent to provide tutorials on my live performance setup once I have actually figured it out for myself and actually started performing live. My intention is not to be a DJ, but rather, an electronic musician commonly known as a Live PA. This differs to a DJ in two ways. Firstly, I will only play my own music. Secondly, like a band or musician, I will totally recreate the music live – if you have ever seen Goldfish, then you have an idea about what I am talking about…

Overall, this is not something that will make tons of money by any means, it is not something that will allow me to make music all day long. It could however, have a tremendous impact on community support which in turn leads to gigs (where the money is at if you are a DJ) and production/remix requests (not much money to be made any more here).

The current trend in the electronic music world is that your music gets you the gigs and the gigs get you the money and that is why, nowadays, every DJ is a producer and every producer is a DJ.

Anyways, should be an exciting year. My intention this year, musically, is to get my tracks to a level that I would be willing to submit them to labels. If I can do that, It would mean that it has taken me around 2.5 years to get to that level which is decent since most well known producers say that it took them 4-5 years to get their tracks to top level standard. Who knows, maybe I am being overly optimistic, I still have so much to learn but hey, that’s just me