It’s time for me to shut up.
For all the times I complain quietly to myself about feeling left out or slept on, this is definitely not one of those times. On Saturday, I’ll be one of the DJs as part of 9 Deep, this weekend’s Mashville event. Mashville is the monthly DJ event showcasing great DJs in the area. It’s always an honor to be a part of a such a fun event. Definitely come check it out. Also, check out the Mashville blog plus their bandcamp page.
247 is a good friend of mine here in town, but more importantly he’s the hidden force behind a lot of great things happening in Nashville! 247 has done a lot of production for other artists around town, including my friend Spoken Nerd. I’ve told you about him before because he’s one-third of The Billy Goats. Also, he appeared on the Machismo EP.
One of my favorite things he’s done was his project with BlackatSylvesta & Ugly Lovely called Out of Place. 247 is the main lyricist in the project. You can get their entire Genetic Defects album for free by going to the Out Of Place Bandcamp page. Or just play it here.
He’s been doing a lot of video production as well. Recently, he began an online interview series highlighting some of his favorite artists around Nashville. You can catch interviews he’s done with James Fate, Bobby Exodus & Spoken Nerd on his youtube channel. Finally, I was able to “take my talents” to 247’s place and shoot an interview video plus a live performance featuring Jed Smith on drums. Take a look!
Most people from my high school days frequently get at me on Facebook to say, “Wow, I didn’t know you were into music now!” They only know me as the quiet drama kid. For the first time, people from my life now are saying, “I didn’t know you were into acting too!” Last week, a commercial aired, in which I was the main character. This is a really short commercial but I’m very pleased with it. We shot two days worth of footage to get just 30 seconds. But that’s OK!
Here it is on youtube:
Look for it on cable TV, let me know if you see it!
I have a lot of shows coming up in the Middle TN area. I love to play live. It’s one of the more cathartic things I do in life as an artist. I recently found out that I will be a part of Mashville in August. Mashville is the monthly DJ party here in Nashville where the best DJs play hip-hop, electronic, dubstep, and whatever other music they want. It’s always an honor to play. Here are some pictures from the last time I played Mashville.
Something odd happened at the last Mashville show. I had some fans come out to see me. After my set, they were all disappointed. One of them had brought her friends. She said, “Well I told them how awesome you were and that you had such a crazy energetic live show. But when we saw you, you were just playing records.” I was kind of taken aback. Did she not know that I was killing it? But then, I realized the problem. Normally, I don’t just DJ with records. My live show has developed into a unique blend of music, crowd engagement and performance art.
I recently learned of a term and genre for this called Live PA. The PA part stands for “Performing Artist.” This Live PA term is used to describe producers who recreate their studio environment while performing their tracks live. Usually, this is different from a typical DJ set where a DJ will play mix tracks that he might not have created himself. I do think that you can be both. Perhaps, the best DJs and Live PA artists are both. The Live PA forum states, “The “real” Live P.A.s take it further by recreating their studio sound live and have the expressive capability to improvise and change the music on the fly, because all of their instruments are right there with them on-stage.” Later, they go on to say, “…many of us grew up going to and playing in rock, jazz, and classical bands and concerts, where musicians play instruments live and put on a show for the audience. Some Live P.A.s also DJ, and some DJs also do a Live P.A., so the two performance methods go hand-in-hand for some musicians, while other more traditional musicians wouldn’t want to be caught dead behind turntables – it all depends on the person. ”
Check out Divinci of Solillaquists Of Sound
My goal as an artist and as a performer is to grow in the DJ world and the Live PA world. My favorite DJ, DJ Shadow, seems to move effortlessly between these two distinctions. For instance if you have his In Tune and On Time DVD/CD, you can see that he has lots of turntables, samplers, midi controllers; plus, he’s remixing it all live to create something completely different from the studio creation. Somehow I think this is what DJs can and should do anyway. However if you then listen to a Shadow mix such as this next one, you’ll note that he performs tracks of his own plus some other ones.
DJ Shadow In Los Angeles 10.31.09- Snippet by djshadow
Anyway! To avoid future disappointments, I will try and communicate what kind of set I will be doing. Either a Live set or a DJ set. If you see my name on a flyer with no distinction, it’s probably a live set. For instance here:
But if you see it and it says DJ set, well then obviously:
Eventually, I hope to grow to the point where this type of distinction isn’t necessary. At the same time, it’s kind of a fun problem to have. Would you rather watch a DJ set? or a Live PA set? You have any stories or comparisons? Let me know in the comments.
One of the questions I’ve been asked the most is: How did I get my music on Pandora.com? Well, this is an easy question. Pandora has a wonderful FAQ section and the step-by-step process is spelled out nicely there. However, for the benefit of us all, I will walk you through everything I did, my thought process while doing it, and even what I am doing now that I have music on the site.
First off, it goes without saying. I’m a big fan of Pandora. Just about all the music I currently love is music that I discovered through either word of mouth or Pandora’s random selection. People like Blue Sky Black Death, Bonobo, and Free The Robots. So when I released the Machismo EP, I knew that I wanted it on Pandora. However (and in spite of the great instructions on their site), I hesitated. If you’re an artist, you might be hesitating too. I needed to do a lot of research. I felt like looking around and seeing if other indie artists were going this route. Thinking back, they obviously were or else where would all this great new music be coming from? Anyway, I kept stalling until I read a great blog post about Pandora over at genyrockstars.com. That’s a great post from Greg Rollett and long story short is a retelling of how to and why it’s great to be on Pandora. I recommend it for anyone who is wanting to do this. So anyway, it was a great kick in the pants and if I was going to be serious about my music, I needed to get on it. So, I got started.
I sent my Machismo EP in. I needed to have a barcode. At the time, i was struggling over whether to go with CDbaby or Tunecore to distribute the Machismo EP. I don’t know how it is now, but Tunecore was giving out barcodes with their subscription whereas CDbaby was charging extra fees. So I went with Tunecore for that reason alone. Also, you have to have your physical CD for sale on Amazon. You can easily set this up with Tunecore as i did with their on-demand store. You have to do this and you have to make sure it’s physical copy.
I uploaded two tracks to pandora.com ; filled out all the paperwork and sent that in along with a physical copy of the CD and then you wait. I took this time though to also fill out and get my stuff registered over at SoundExchange. Lots of paperwork, but you have to do all this stuff. Anyway, from the time I started this Pandora process until the time it showed up was about 6 months. Long time, eh? But hey, now it’s on there.
Ok great! Well, how was anyone going to find my music? Well, if you’ve heard the Machismo EP, you know that I have two instrumental tracks and 6 tracks with emcees. Pandora had only analyzed one track (Machismo) into their system. This means that only that track would possibly show up in rotation. Also, it means that my similar artists would only be artists who had music similar to that one song. Well, it’s the curse of having a diverse little record. I emailed their support to see if they would do any more. They got back to me to say that it’s customary that only 1-5 songs would be analyzed. Well, I thought that was both good and bad. I was able to up the load to 3 analyzed tracks. You see in the pic above it’s the 3 tracks that it says “try tracks 2, 4, and 6.” Anyway, so I have made comments over at my profile and at my record about how anyone can download Machismo for free. And I can edit those comments later if i need to.
So that’s cool. I noticed that they matched me up with artists like Dela & Panacea. Pretty cool, but I want people to catch my instrumental stuff too. Maybe the next record. One thing I also have done is create a Pandora station. I did this using Quiet Entertainer (again, that’s ME) as a seed. Also, I added some other artists that I like and other songs that I like as seeds. So anyone who listens to my custom Pandora station, will not only get a good mix of similar sounding artists according to Pandora but a great dose of stuff similar to what I’m listening to now and hopefully will have a keen ear to what my next record might sound like. Of course, you can hear the custom made Quiet Entertainer Pandora station here.
That’s really about it. The joy of Pandora is that it picks music for you. I can’t really push my music on people; and I wouldn’t want to. I hope that it plays my stuff for people and that they enjoy it. I wish I could tell if people were finding me through Pandora. But I guess I have other things to worry about. Like working harder and creating more. Meanwhile, I hope this was helpful to artists and also to anyone else as more of an insight to another aspect of something I deal with as QE.
Two things: 1) If it was helpful, then I’d love it if you’d share or re-tweet this. 2) Are any of you getting your music on Pandora? & how are you promoting it?
