Sunday, August 19, 2018

Travellin' Times

Busy couple of weeks, and more coming up!

I'll be off over to Europe, then back via a few days in Vegas, starting tomorrow, so will be out of commission for the next 10 days or so. So I have crammed in a bunch of stuff before heading off!

Software

Since I am still making use of TuneSmith, I did the right thing and purchased Rhyme Genie - maybe I could have kept on using TuneSmith for free, but heck, if I am finding it useful, the creator deserves their payment!

After some frustration with reverbs that come with my amp sim software / with Cubase, I demo'ed lots from Valhalla, and settled on the awesome Valhalla Vintage Verb. Amazing price at only $50 for such high quality reverbs, and was hard to choose just one - will likely add more to my arsenal later on though. It got used on "Diamonds and Pearls" :)

Then just today I purchased Reel ADT from Waves as it was on sale at $29 - vocal doubling / thickening is another thing that I've never quite got to my satisfaction, and was something I particularly wanted for the work tape of that when the time comes around. I tried out the demo and really liked it, once again it solved something I'd always wanted to do but hadn't found a way of doing!



And that's it for now! Got to go pack :)

Sunday, August 5, 2018

Carded

Did you know

So long as your sound recording AND the music and lyrics have the same copyright holders, you can submit to the U.S. Copyright Office and cover both in one application, as a Sound Recording application. Can save the time, paperwork and cost of two submissions. See this document for details.


Frettie


It's been my pleasure to help out recently with some videos for the awesome songwriter community, Frettie. In this case, I've been making some videos to show how to sign up and get the most from the website - if you are a songwriter, be sure to check it out!

If you want to know the kind of thing you get access to, then there are two awesome "Know The Row" events coming up this month, which you can join if you are not a Frettie member - but if you are a member, you get access to those for free (both live and in recorded form if you can't make the date and time).

I also had the pleasure of meeting up with host and mastermind and owner of Frettie, songwriter Brent Baxter, earlier on this month too!



TuneSmith

If you're like me, and you write melody or chords, you'll likely find yourself firing up the voice recorder on your phone and recording a snippet of a tune, some words, or some chords. The problem is, how do you keep track of all that stuff and find the things that are worth actually continuing work with?


I'm trying out TuneSmith, which so far seems pretty awesome! I move the files off my phone (or tablet), and then I get a list of files that usually just have a date as their file name as they never got far enough to have an actual title or subject.

I can then just create a new song on TuneSmith, drop the file in there, and add my notes in the lyric section (and the lyrics if there are any, of course). I then sneak in an "R1" to "R5" where R5 is "Ok wow that sounds really cool" and R1 is "Hmm yeah what was I thinking when I recorded that?" - then a quick search of the lyric field will highlight the songs at that rating.

With audio, notes, lyrics, chords, and rating all in one place, it makes looking through those scruffy notes much easier.

And of course TuneSmith goes further, and you can add your co-writers, publishers, track when and where each song was submitted, whether it got cut and so on, which is really what it is for - but hey, it turns out to be great for organizing your notes too! PS, it's free, though if you want to use Rhyme Genie you'll have to pay for that side of it.


Carded



Now I'm in Nashville, where there is a thriving music scene, it was time to create some business cards. They came out rather nice I thought, good to see the logo worked well there! I used GotPrint if anyone is looking for printing their own cards, the price was good (I didn't go for any fancy options!) and they turned up really fast.


Songs

Thanks to TuneSmith, I've also been able to find a couple of other interesting audio notes and have started developing those to see if they turn into something.


Paperwork

A busy week, had to dive in and sort out copyrights and registration on BMI for a co-write. Would be easy enough, but slightly complicated by the fact that this was a song that existed before and has been rewritten in the co-write, so had to untangle how that works! As part of that, finally registered with BMI as a publisher as well as a songwriter.

Cheers!
   Tommy