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ARTICLE

Becoming an Independent Artist – Posting Your Songs on the Web.

by Michael Wells

www.soundclick.com/MichaelWells

Sometimes things we have learned slowly over time are taken for granted.  Recently, I did a study of a local music newspaper, and noticed that very few of the independent artists had websites or took advantage of the internet to get exposure for their songs.  Being a shy, reclusive songwriter, I had (slowly over the years) collected a computer (now a Pentium III running Windows 98™), Digital Audio & MIDI recording software, two inexpensive mixing boards, voice effects, a MIDI Keyboard,  a few guitars, a couple of cheap mics, and more recently a Yamaha Qy100 Portable MIDI Sequencer (even more recently - and not quite paid for yet - a Roland Fantom x6).  I will explain how I used these things together to put a song on the web.  The process is very well suited to most disabled musicians, garage bands, or any up and coming musician.  I have been associated with the Coalition of Disabled Musicians on a volunteer basis for a few years and am currently setting up the hardware and assisting in recording “Range of Motion’s” second album.  Tom Ryan, who is a disabled musician and a member of CDM studied with me and self-produced three cds which can be sampled at www.soundclick.com/TomRyan.

My plan for this article is to simply follow a song that I wrote all the way from recording to the web, and describe the process of getting it there.  I tried to make it only mildly technical, attempting to please both geeks and novices alike. The song title we will follow is “When I Get My Way”. 

I play guitar and keyboards.  I do NOT play drums or bass.  When I bought my first windows sequencer, Digital Orchestrator’s  Project Studio by Voyetra., it came with a bunch of  drum tracks, which were simply drum patterns which could be looped.  These I would use to play along to, and later when I recorded, I would use these looped tracks as the drums in my demos.

“When I Get My Way” was heavily dependent upon the swing feel of the drums tracks that I chose to play along to.  I loaded the looped track into the sequencer, and played along to the drums to get the idea.   The sound that grabbed me was one called ”GX Dream” on my Yamaha Sy77. I use that as my MIDI Controller, and I use patches I collected as digital audio tracks.  “GX Dream” sounds to me exactly like the synth sound used in Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes”.

I sang this song lower than most of my others- actually as I got older, my voice got lower, and to me that was a good thing, because when I listen to some of my earlier songs – I cringe at how high it was. This one song, however, is lower than most.   I like the swing feel and the way the lyrics are answered by the synth in a give and take fashion.

Sometimes, I write nonsense lyrics with some phrases that I keep in the finished song.  This song, like many others, I started recording before I wrote the bridge.  Many of my songs don’t even have bridges. Since I seem to be pretty good at coming up with bridges on the spot, I often lazily decide that “these are just demos, if they need a bridge, I’ll add it later.” I finished the lyrics and started to record it.

1. Okay, I fired up my sequencer and loaded in the drum pattern I chose.  Then I manually copied the pattern out to about 3 minutes or so.  I add fills where needed by entering the notes directly into the piano roll editor, or copying a fill nicely provided by the “humanized” drum file.  
2. I added the synth part over the drums.  I recorded digital audio over the still midi drum tracks.  The Midi drum tracks keep the digital audio nicely synced with the measures. This allows you to copy whole sections, and quite often I record only one main section, a chorus, and a bridge and copy the sections as need to make the whole song.  I then add or subtract tracks to add variation or to build up.
3. I added a bass part, digital audio from my SY77.
4. I recorded the first vocal track.  My big secret is that I double track my voice, because I like the sound of it.  I use it like another instrument, and I like the Alan Parson’s type quality of the voice when it happens. Now, as my voice is getting  stronger,  sometimes I only double the chorus.  In this song, I think part of the appeal for me is the low doubled voice.  It was hard to do, and I threw out a few tracks trying to get it right.
5. I added the other vocals, an acoustic guitar track and a synth lead section.
6. I magically came up with a bridge. While recording it I tried repeating the “I don’t Get it” part by cutting and pasting across all the measures of the bridge.  It is easy to experiment using a sequencer on a computer. Most sequencers also have effects like delay, flange and chorus that can be added to any section of audio.
7. When the raw tracks were finished, I then needed to convert the midi drums, and any other midi tracks to digital audio to make the final wave file.  This, I accomplish by muting all digital audio tracks, routing the out to the in, and recording the MIDI tracks onto two digital tracks panned all the way right and all the way left.  That way I preserve the stereo sound of the MIDI.  If I use the Qy100 for MIDI, I don’t need to route the out to the in, since it is an external device.  I only need to mute the digital tracks and record the QY100 onto two  panned digital audio tracks.
8. When I have all digital tracks, I adjust the mix and export to a wav file at 44100KHZ .
9. Now, I listen to the wav and adjust the mix if necessary (re-export).
10. Now, I can convert to mp3.  This is the Indie’s key to fame and fortune! Kudos to the guy who invented the compression technique that allows a 50 mb wav file to be compressed to a 3 mb mp3 file.  This makes uploading the file possible even with a modem.  I use Audio Catalyst by Xing.  I used to use a utility called MP4, which I don’t know if it is around any more.
11. I add the ID Tag which is the author name, album, copyright info to the MP3 file.  It is also not a bad idea to put the copyright symbol in the title of the mp3.
12. The Mp3 is now ready to upload.

Next we will discuss the free independent artist sites, how to sign up, and how to upload your song. It will follow our song “When I Get My Way” all the way to the Easy Listening charts.

PART II

Mp3.com was the best independent music artist site for a long while. Their chart based site provided an ingenious way to insure that almost anybody who wanted to be on a chart could be. If you couldn’t make the site-wide chart, you may make the top 50 in your sub-genre (say “World Folk”).   At the very least, you may make the top ten in your home town.  Yes, they had charts for every town!   Ah, those were the days.  Well, no use crying over spilt milk…they are gone now. Soundclick appears to be next best. so we will upload our song to there.

For the purposes of this article, I will not discuss the artist sign up procedure for the artist sites.  Each has its own unique way, but all currently, are free with paid options.

1. To upload a song, login as a band administrator, and click on “add song”.
2. Then agree to the fact that this is your song, and not one that you ripped off.
3. You then specify if this is an upload from your machine or a “slurp”. Soundclick can copy your song from other web sites using its “slurp” method.
4. Next you fill out details about the song such as title, copyright, lyrics, story behind the song.  You also must choose a genre. This is a very important step, and maybe you should listen to the charts to see where your song fits in if you are not sure.
5. You can also upload a song image, and they will give you specs on the size. This can be a photo, or an image created in photoshop, or another art program.   It can also be a scanned image of your album cover if you already recorded your cd.
6. Then click update and the song is uploaded and appears on your site immediately.

Now we wait for it to become number one.  It is nice to have an emailing list of your friends and family to help you kick off a new song.  This guarantees a little action to get you a position on the charts, at least at first.   Although “When I Get MY Way” is no longer on the Soundclick Charts, it is on the Artist Launch Charts at number 35 or so.  Also, my song “Evrythng”  (I know it is spelled wrong) is number 51 on the Soundclick AAA (Pop Adult Alternative) charts .  Here are the links:

My music page – our song : “When I Get My Way”  down towards the bottom.

http://www.soundclick.com/bands/5/michaelwellsmusic.htm

My song “Evrythng” on the soundclick charts:

http://www.soundclick.com/genres/chartssub.cfm?genre=pop&Subgenre=172

“When I Get My Way” on the ArtistLAunch.com charts:  (use a space instead of the %20).

http://www.artistlaunch.com/chartsx_cat.asp?p1=Easy%20Listening

Hope to see you on the charts soon!

For any comments, questions, or suggestions, please email mp3@mrmulti.com.