A little bit of reggae mon over a thick beat. Dedicated to my friend Jay from NuFunk!

To add a bit of spice to the drums, here’s a little trick I did: I duplicated select ones like the kick and hi-hat, and then i modified their loop points in a new slot. It helps add a bit of movement to the beat. Oh and there’s also the MPC groove applied too!

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Events are one of the most frustrating features of Facebook for me. Why? Because as much as I don’t like the amount of emails that come in through the day, I found that turning off the notifications led to me missing a lot of events. And I don’t blame my friends and promoters for this behaviour: Facebook makes it really easy to send out invites.

However, after a small interruption like an email from Facebook, it can often take five minutes to get back on task, and sometimes as long as fifteen minutes!

At one time I was toying around with gmail filters, but all it takes is for me to click All Mail and i’m looking the time suckers straight in the eye again.

Well I finally found a cool service called NutshellMail, powered by the famous newsletter service Constant Contact, which can help us find the best of both worlds here.

The way it works is simple! You plug in your Facebook, Twitter or MySpace accounts into the system, and it batches all the updates into digest emails for you, at intervals you decide.

It can even summarize all activity on the news feeds, but I found that kind of unnecessary. I was about to stop using the service altogether until I realized it was holding on to a golden nugget: Events summaries.

All you have to do is turn off every section in your update, except for the really critical ones. In this case I am including the Events, and then i’ll go over to the maze of Facebook settings and turn the notifications for that one off.

NutshellMail’s settings

Facebook: Account —> Account Settings —> Notifications

I can imagine people who are more popular than me will want to do the same setup for friend requests.

While we’re here, another use of this service for Twitter could be when someone starts following you, or when they @reply to you.

Now instead of babysitting both of these websites ten or more times a day, you can just do it once or twice at times that don’t interfere with your priorities.

Always keep a lookout for services that help you cut down on interruptions, and free up more time to work on what matters most: your music!

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1. An instrument
2. A band of people playing instruments
3. Alternative controllers like the wii mote
4. A screen behind you that people can interact with using their phones
5. Visuals that move to the music and clips that are relevant to the sound
6. Dancers
7. People on stilts
8. Little people on stilts
9. Little people on stilts with visuals behind them
10. Sing
11. Ask the crowd to sing with you
12. Be spontaneous
13. Don’t use a computer
14. Use a program that not many other people do like renoise or audiomulch
15. An interpretive dance with the crowd (see Dan Deacon)
16. Have members of the crowd come up on stage and loop them clapping or singing
17. Cover / remix classic songs that people haven’t heard in ages
18. Play only one instrument and run it through a ton of loopers and fx pedals. Voice is a good pick if you go this route
19. Have an interlude with drama acting
20. Engineer the set in 5.1 surround
21. Fly in from the ceiling attached to wires
22. Enter from beneath the stage
23. Play a genre that your audience might not have heard live before
24. Play an instrument that your audience hasn’t even seen before
25. Play music that you actually enjoy! Your enthusiasm will carry itself

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I was writing an email to a friend last night, and we were talking about my music on Bandcamp. He asked if I make any money from this, and I explained that the business of putting music up online and expecting to make money is not feasible at this stage in my career. It’s also not the end goal when I sit down to write these days.

There are still people doing getting by on digital sales (albeit a small number), and it’s certainly possible if you create the right mix of marketing, touring, and most importantly, putting out good tracks.

I do believe it’s important for musicians to be compensated some way or another, no matter what the strategy is. For some people they are interested in financial rewards, and others might be more interested in emotional ones. No matter what though, rewards help grow and sustain careers.

Regardless of what you seek to acheive, sometimes we have to look beyond the mp3 (look to the cookie Jerry!). I’d like to offer you 45 ways we can try to do that.

Some of these ideas do not make money in themselves, and some of them involve digital music, but all of these can lead to benefits somewhere else in the chain.

1. Produce video tutorials

2. Write an e-book on lessons you’ve learned in the music business

3. Start an online course – either focused on performance or business

4. Run a workshop in person

5. Design synth and fx patches

6. Design (Ableton) Live sets and either sell them stock or customized to the user based on what controller they use and what kind of music they are performing

7. Produce sample libraries

8. Build iPhone and mobile utilities (chord finder, inspiration deck) – are you tapping into the Android market ?

9. Build a music game (Flash still works well for this)

10. Write a comic book that comes bundled with a CD

11. Develop websites for other artists

12. Develop Wordpress themes that are dedicated to artists who want to post their music easily

13. Write an e-book on developing Wordpress themes that are dedicated to posting your music easily (affilliate link on the first)

14. Produce tutorial videos on developing Wordpress themes that are dedicated to posting your music easily

15. Design album art and promo materials for other artists

16. Start your own music unconference following the Podcamp model

17. Build a proper blog with ads. Not one that sits on your artist site like the piece of junk you’re currently reading.

18. Build a blog with opinions so great that audio manufacturers and record labels feel compelled to hire you

19. Write for a blog that pays its writers

20. Write for a magazine that pays its writers (tumbleweeds?)

21. Design T-Shirts, but not just ones with your band name on it – really cool ones!

22. Make a CD that does something unconventional, like folds out into a boardgame

23. Build a hardware music player, that only plays your music

24. Curate really good concert listings that deliver relevant picks to your users, and sell it as a small subscription ($1.99/month)

25. Sell tutorial materials on circuit bending like Make Magazine

26. Start a podcast where you pay for exclusive mixes, and sell it as a subscription

27. Have you written a lot of tracks this year? Why not start a service where you produce, mix and ship custom albums for your fans?

28. Do session recording for people remotely (keys, guitar, mixing)

29. Give lessons on playing instruments or using software to people in your city in person (classic musician income!)

30. Press vinyl and make the album artwork really good

31. Produce audio books for authors that don’t have one made yet. Have a team of really good voice talent (watch out this might end up as a mp3 ;) )

32. Produce radio dramas, really funny ones

33. Do PR for other musicians who need the help. Write album descriptions and press releases because it’s the last thing artists and labels want to do.

34. Curate compilation CDs of really rare music. Chase after obscure and defunct labels to attain rights. Carry on a legacy that might die otherwise.

35. Raise money for a cause that you truly believe in (learn about the non-profit world)

36. Open a bar that features the best music in your town

37. Start a service that connects really good musicians with businesses that need them like wedding bands (learn about the recruiting world)

38. Sell your services as a remixer. But do it for genres that are untapped

39. Build an app that helps musicians track their finances (musicians don’t track finances the same way that normal people do)

40. Build an app that helps musicians keep track of their contacts (musicians can’t do anything the same way that normal people do).

41. Write music for mobile apps, films, or vlogs. Give away music for free to promote your work in this area, or sell stock

42. Pick anything on the list above, but be really persistent with people. Nag them until they give in

43. Pick anything on the list above, but actually do your work and follow through with the idea

44. Pick anything on the list above, but try to wake up before noon so you actually have a few hours to do get something done

45. Pick anything on the list above, but do so with the intention of sustaining a long term relationship with your fans and not to sit on a pile of money and smoke sleezy cigars. Having good intentions helps sustain a long and prosperous career, while having poor intentions will cause you to fail sooner or later.

If you look at the list above, you can see that the death of the traditional business model was not such a bad thing because the constraints helps us become more innovative. In times like these, musicians learn to be the most well-rounded and professional.

Of course everything is a cycle, but let’s hope that we don’t repeat the same mistakes again.

Do you have any ideas for how to earn a living in music, aside from selling mp3 albums?

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We are always coming up with new ideas for what we want to be doing, or what we want to stop. Some of us feel the need to share our big ideas before we’ve even started to implement this change.

I think it’s important to just do things, and not make anything of it. If you are annoyed with a particular area of the music business and you don’t want to do it any more, then just stop. No need to throw your arms about and make grand announcements about it. Sometimes you realize that it was a bad idea, and after you’ve made it public to your colleagues or fans, it’s hard to turn back on it.

Also it’s been said that people who announce their intentions are less likely that they will get them done. The reason being that in the act of merely talking about it, your brain has considered it partially done, and you are less likely to keep taking action.

However, there is something to be said for throwing ideas out there. It can be great to get feedback from people, or other times it can be great for others to be in the loop because we feel accountable to them.

But I personally believe that keeping it to yourself and actually acting on it, is the better path to take.

“Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.”… Theodore Roosevelt

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I got an email last night from Avid, and it mentions that there’s a new version of Torq available for Snow Leapard, and also some more “exciting news”.

Click through and i’m in the forum reading what is basically a letter saying “Avid has taken over the product development, our product evangelist has left, but we are still working on Torq”. In other words, it’s been a shakey year.

Earlier in the day, Native Instruments dropped a bomb on the world with their new digital DJ system which is basically like Torq’s Xponent controller times ten. It’s the kind of product update that Xponent users should’ve seen by now, but the Torq project has been moving at a slow rate. Software updates have taken very long to come out, and new hardware in the past few years has been nill.

So what’s my beef here? I think it’s annoying when a company tries to improve the communication efforts with their users, only when the consequences of not doing it are obvious.

Torq has been a great program since it started, and it will probably still maintain some benefits over using Traktor which is a more complex system. I just hope that Avid doesn’t mess this one up.

Either they will save a project that needed more resources in order to compete, or they are telling the users to hang on and not jump ship, but in reality they are focusing on their starchild: Pro Tools.

What do you think is going on here?

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