COLLABORATING with Other Musicians - is it for YOU?

I believe each artist, involved in whatever medium, has to keep their ducks in a row first before approaching other people about collaborations. Part of that comes from the experience gained from learning other people's songs, & another part comes from the point when your desires reach a point where you feel the innate, internal need to fulfill yourself by composing original songs & recording them.

All in all, when approaching other people for combined projects, it's a great idea to have around 15 songs that are loosely structured (they can be solid as well) so you can focus in on the vision that you want to make concrete. sometimes, musically, if you don't have the above things, certain musical mis-communications develop. The vision becomes blurred & the stresses of the creative writing process & seemingly endless revisions & secondary drafts are worked out.

It's vital, essential...heck - it should be mandatory that a band or two people collaborating should be hanging out & having fun, shooting the breeze around 40% versus the 60% work that you'll all be doing, b/c when it gets down to the pressures that are associated with recording & just simply keeping the music "together" & "tight", it takes an understanding that needs to come from a place where you KNOW, that the person on the other end of that musical idea, IS YOUR FRIEND.

I've seen & heard about so many bands that fall apart by not adhering to these reality-based tips. they exist for a reason. & if we don't utilize them, we're setting ourselves up for a lot of hurt, wasted time, & overall - personal & social failure in the local scenes & within the grand range of influence in the music industry as a whole.

I'll be working on a list of specific tips in my draft blog section to help growing bands & solo musicians. Also if you guys have any yourself, feel free to post them as comments & i'll add them to the list! ;o)

It all starts with 12 notes.

So 12 notes in the chromatic scale are the well-point for every musician that's ever lived and created life from pitch. Creating music is like arranging the musical alphabet on the steering wheel of your car. Letters "A" through "G". Sometimes when you start up your car and try to back out, you might have left your steering wheel turned all the way to the left or right...in that case, if you accelerate/back up too fast, you'll get a rude awakening. That’s kind of like hitting a wrong note. Or when you're writing a song & you can't find the next note to further solidify your composition. Each note that is concrete is litterally like a piece to a puzzle. first you start with finding the end pieces, then you work on the picture and what it really is. finally you fill in the gaps, then you can even transfer the puzzle to a piece of cardboard and flip it on a table, gluing its frail pieces together - that's how you make a permanent puzzle...AND MAKING A SONG ISN'T TOO FAR OFF.



You have to work it out, hit a bunch of wrong notes (or turns) before you find the ones that are highlighted in your mind/head/brain. You have to hear a melody in your head, hum out something - then try as best you can to emulate that on the guitar. Your hands are the translators. The musical knowledge you gain and utilize will be your weapon of choice - for good. For the future of all that will listen to what you have to say musically and lyrically, as an artist.



There's a slight fear that someone's song, album, or level of success will be as good as or better than ours. That is inevitable. But this should fuel and drive us to create all the more passionately. We should be writing songs and whole albums from that place - the place where our hearts reside. The place where we go when a song is on the tip of our tongues or fingers...





And once all of the above is finished, we need to hold fast to what we know to be true: in ourselves, our past, our music and conversely, the caliber of our fans. We need not add people from Greece (unless your style of music applies and/or you wanna book a European Tour thru there LOL).

MARKETABILITY!!! (GET SOME)

IMAGINE THIS:

You've climbed a mountain, you're looking down after all the hard work you've put into training for this moment. You did the full climb! You look around at the wide expanse of a view; it's breath-taking - literally. By chance, you happen to see the original place where you began your ascent. After a few short moment, your gaze turns to the left of the horizon towards a larger mountain in the distance. You sent a goal to find out the name & height above sea level it stands at for a future climb.


Based on the experience you used to get atop the first one, you can choose what mountain to climb to next...

THE MUSIC INDUSTRY, IS VERY MUCH LIKE CLIMBING. EACH MOUNTAIN WILL SERVE AS MOMENTUM TOWARD YOUR PERSONAL SUCCESS.

See, in the music industry, it's about mastering & redefining your art. You HAVE to have an unusually alluring yet different voice - a front man that doesn't look like a bum and can dress himself (without all the drug problems) - (yep, Beer is a drug too) is a must, not a maybe.

Your drummer has to have the timing of a Rolex & the syncopation of a full pit orchestra! He needs to not have a big head & try to throw a drum fill in every chance he gets. Some of the most respected & listened-to albums of all time have had basic beats. This orchestrated, epic sound I'm referring to can be best understood by thinking about the depth and change-ups in a song like Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody". Think of songs like Edgar Winter's "Frankenstein"!!! This is the stuff that hits are made of - rhythm is an integral part of creating lasting legendary melodies and riffs!!!!!

Bass and Drums needs to be spot on together, working as one unit.

All guitars need to know their parts as well as each others should someone break a string or have to cover b/c of technical difficulties.

And finally, the whole band has to transition well as one sound!!!!!!!


for gigs: ANY ONE THING THAT IS OFF, AND THE BAND LOSES CREDIBILITY IN SOME AREA WHERE THEY WOULD'VE EARNED A CALL BACK, A SPOT AS THE LOCAL HOUSE BAND, A HEADLINING GIG, A SOUNDTRACK FOR THE NEXT BLOCKBUSTER, etc.
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THINK ABOUT THE POSSIBILITIES:

Sponsorships from companies (if you're touring extensively), a deal to be a venue’s house band, endorsing select clothing lines, even having other people’s product or services on your touring van/vehicle (seeing as you’ll be on the road more than their own vehicle that has a dinky little old 1x3 foot magnetic ad), you could also get people to get a “wrap” on their car to support you, even a t-shirt with a funny or serious musical cause message would be fun and cool to have someone promote you with.

The music industry is a funny funny world. There are so many levels and facets of interaction. The blood that flows through each day while music is the sound and drive for millions of people around the globe. Others don't even have to understand the lyrics to get hooked. It’s the best addiction one can have, I think; a true genuine love for music. All music.

Should Music, Just Be Listened to...OR...Should We Try to Categorize it as Much as Possible?

It’s interesting! As humans & music lovers, we feel the need to try & categorize so much of what we hear.

"Oh, ::pshhhhhh:: that's straight-up Post-Grunge dude"...or "Flight of the Concords are doing what Adam Sandler has done for years!!! It's Comedy Rock! I can't believe you called it ad-lib humoristic musings from the minds of stand-up artistry!!!!"

It's like we want a place for our favorite songs & artists to belong. I wonder sometimes if in our hearts & memory are not enough?


It’s been said that the thing people fear aside from public speaking, is silence itself. I agree with that. Sometimes even us musicians have a tough time not filling every possible measure with a note; the rests or pauses in music are necessary and I think that they build positive tension and have climactic elements that are the building blocks of theoretically perfect songs like the Fibonacci Sequence eludes to.

Our constant struggle with "good enough", "having it better", "constant improvement" - we say that if you have something great, soon... something else will come and take its place. I think this causation is all the best reason to write songs that last more than a decade, era, or period in the fad. It's all the more vital today to write songs from the heart. Songs that are pure; people will unmistakable recognize.

All in all, I understand the need for classification but some songs and melodies can't be held by that process. Some bands & artists transcend all of the labeling and become their own genre, a sound in and of itself. People begin to describe a band by another well known band.

Choosing a Brand of Strings, Guitar Shopping Basics & Tuning Facts:

I LOVE, D' Addario Strings!



They come in a vaccum-sealed package so they're as fresh as if you picked them up from the string factory after being made! I've seen a popular large music store taking old Ernie Ball guitar strings and mixing them with a new shipment that came in. totally not cool. so with D'Addario, that will never happen; if the sealed bad is open, you'll know! AND THAT'S, A SWEET DEAL!

So THAT'S why I play exclusively D'Addario Strings on both my acoustic and electric guitars.

When i first started playing guitar (on electric), i didn't know the first thing about when or how or even how often to change my strings. Also, what gauge and how many sets should i buy?

These were some of the beginner's questions i had.

So when i went to a store in Clearwater, FL...they gave me this canned answer of, "well it depends what you what to go for." To me, that didn't make any sense. I tried brands like GHS Boomers & Ernie Ball, but i wasn't really satisfied with the high end pingy overly brightened sound/tone they had. It just didn't sound natural to me.

Maybe it was just that i was just getting started learning guitar and i didn't know WHAT sounded good. but evenually, i was able to tune a guitar up and tell whether it was just that the factory strings has been old or if the guitar is a lemon and might have some factory defects. that's sometimes the cause of these huge deals for hundreds off a guitar that usually costs 1300 bucks; it's got some stuff wrong with it. And usually the strings are the least of what we should be concerned with. We can easily fall for the markdown as the deal-finding consumers that we tend to be. It's easy to think that it won't matter if the guitar is "a little, off", but in all actuality, it real DOES matter - and it can do some major damage on your musical progression and as an artist.

Bottom line? Our ears will be misinformed - as we train our hearing towards picking up on these small changes and nuances, they develop into a solid knowledge of what sounds right and wrong. Which is why it's so vital to always use your electronic tuner. And it's a given that after you finish your 15 min.- 2 hrs. of practice each day, chances are that when you pick up the guitar the next day, it'll be slightly out of tune. And that still matters. So! - just as seasonal changes bring out new critters, they also bring about temperature changes wherever/however you store your instruments. Going back to the ear training. if you don't tune you're guitar as perfect as you can get it, your ears are hearing the wrong notes and pitches.

So in the beginning it's best not to rely on what you THINK you remember an E note sounding like b/c it could be an Octave off or even be the wrong note. As much as i want people to be able to quickly and effectively learn to tune their guitars without a tuner using relative tuning, if you're just starting out or have gotten to a point where you want to take on some serious practice and find a teacher for some lessons, you can't trust your ears to be perfect - 99% of the time, they'll fool you. They even still fool me sometimes on some of the strings. Mainly the 2nd (B) string. :o)

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IN CLOSING, HERE'S A GREAT TUNING PEDAL FROM PLANET WAVES WHICH IS AFFILIATED WITH D'ADDARIO STRINGS (TRANSFERRED FROM WWW.ULTIMATE-GUITAR.COM):

Planet Waves does it again with the new Tru-StrobeTM Pedal Tuner. The Tru-Strobe Pedal Tuner, the answer to the Tru-Strobe Table Tuner, enables the musician to fine-tune any stringed instrument using the most clear-cut method on the market – the strobe. The new tuner offers true strobe accuracy (not a simulation) that will ensure precision tuning up to +/- .1% of a cent.


Featuring a heavy-duty, die-cast design and convenient pedal housing, the new tuner will prove ideal for studio use or on the road where accuracy competes with clutter, noise, and poor lighting. To that end, the readout is exceptionally bright compared to competing units with its large back-lit LCD display that can be seen on dark stages and equally well in full sunlight. The tuner also features an extremely simple, user-friendly design to promote additional ease-of-tuning. Utilizing the Buzz Feiten Tuning System Offset for guitars to ensure tuning accuracy, it also employs six de-tuning modes for players using drop-tunings. In addition, the Planet Waves Tru-Strobe Pedal Tuner incorporates True Bypass wiring that will not affect the original instrument’s tone.

"The release of our Tru-Strobe Desktop tuner brought immediate requests from artists and fans that we should offer it in a pedal version," says Planet Waves Product Design Specialist, Robert Cunningham. "We chose to make other adaptations, as well, to meet the market needs, such as the backlit LCD which addresses the need for many players to see their stage tuner in daylight, and the addition of the Buzz Feiten programming, which is more popular than ever. We view this as our ultimate design achievement and based on testing feedback, players are going to flip when they try it!"

The Planet Waves True Strobe Pedal Tuner will be available mid-August 2009 and will retail for $159.99.

For more information on Planet Waves products, visit www.planetwaves.com.

POSTED: 08/10/2009 - 08:59 am

One Man - One Scale...in a town without hope - a rocker must find his way back to the stage, back to his life - HIS FAMILY.

i concur Danny. :)

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