One of the topics, that I bring up occasionally, is that of getting your songs in a multimedia platform, such as video and interactive media (video games). Some may downplay this, but really, it is probably the most effective way to implement the methods here.

What is the first thing you think of when you hear the Simple Minds song “Don’t You (forget about me)”. This one is a double whammy, because they wrote the song for the soundtrack of “The Breakfast Club”, AND that is probably the most over-played movie in existence.

But, perhaps its not fair to take a song written specifically for a movie. How about a song that wasn’t even in the movie proper, but during the credits? Do you recall the song that starts at the very end of the first Matrix movie? When you hear that song now, do you think of the album it came off of, or the Matrix?

For these mere two examples, I am giving only a basic demonstration of Situational Timing. In this case, we are tying, in our minds, a song with an image or scene. What about the first time you asked that special someone to dance. Do you remember the song? What about your first moshpit? (I am avoiding the trite examples here purposefully)

The point is, that songs get fixed in our minds various ways, and “product placement” is certainly one of them. The other is coincidence. But that leads to the next method. Repetition, repetition, and…rinse, lather, and repeat.

There have probably been songs you have heard and thought, “This sucks”, only to come back a year later loving it because, “it grows on you”. WTF! Why did your mind change? The song didn’t? That is the secret of repetition.

Sixty two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth.
-Aldus Huxley, Brave New World

What I find funny are the people who love the single, go buy the cd. The industry must love those people, because they are the same ones that when the next single comes out say, “I love this song, who is it? I should get their CD”. No lie, I had to tell a (former) friend, “Go to track 4″…

Ever wonder why typical broadcast radio sucks, and why so many people love it?

For the most part, its people who see the simplicity of the system that think radio sucks. Leo mentioned this simplicity back in June. Radio stations play the same 13 songs day after day, 4-5 times a day. Similar stations play the same music, same line up, just different city. Don’t believe me, try tuning into rock stations while driving across the U.S. I can almost guarantee you will hear the same 4 songs repeating constantly.

Quiz Time:

How many of you remember basic stoichiometry from chemistry class? What about the quadratic equation?

Now tell me who’s slogan is “Have it your way”?

Disclosure time, I had trouble coming up with a slogan that most of you would know because I have avoided most advertisements in the traditional mediums by not using them altogether. But you get the point.

There is a reason companies don’t change their slogans, or even catch phrases. Because it sticks with you. Sure they may have different commercials, but they always comeback to “the phrase that pays”. Its the same with your music.

The more you can have it played in various places, the more people will learn to recognize it, and like it. Regardless of whether it is good or bad.

Now the big trick here is, how do you get your music out there to be played? The answer is easy. Give it away.

No not all of it, but you probably have heard me mention Creative Commons. That is one way. The other is to make some contacts in the Film industry. Big secret: They all started as students.

Find film school people and give them your music. For films with a budget, license it. But give them a cd to sample. The world is your oyster, and with a little tabasco, you can eat it up!

I am going to end on a quote from Douglas R. Hofstadter’s book Godel, Escher Bach:

“It is an inherent property of intelligence that it can jump out of the task which it is performing, and survey what it has done; it is always looking for, and often finding, patterns. Now I said that an intelligence can jump out of its task, but that does not mean that it always will. [...] suppose person A is watching television when person B comes in the room, and shows displeasure with the situation. Person A may think he understands the problem, and try to remedy it by exiting the present system (that television program), and flipping the channel knob, looking for a better show. Person B may have a more radical concept of what it is to ‘exit the system’–namely to turn the television off!

Of course there are cases where only a rare individual will have the vision to perceive a system which governs many peoples’ lives, a system which had never before even been recognized as a system; then such people often devote their lives to convincing other people that the system really is there, and that it ought to be exited from!”

These tips do not only apply to show production, but for anyone who receives email, wants to organize your music collection, or wants to produce a podcast/internet show. Google apps are used, but whatever email client, or Office Suite you use will work as well.

Email

Labeling or sorting your emails is extremely important, and something you should get in the habit of doing as things come in. Your Inbox, should only be temporary holding for things you haven’t read, and don’t have a specific location predefined.

This is very important concept to understand, You have to process EVERYTHING in your inbox. If you read it, you need to process it then. Otherwise, you may never get to it, and then its just a distraction.

This processing by Inbox concept is well described by David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity method.

In gmail, we use Labels heavily. They are like Folders in any other email client. I have filters set up to automatically label incoming messages as Artist Submissions, Comments, Interview Requests, Registrations, Myspace, Voicemails, HXC (which is hardcore music), etc.

Some of those are automatic, some aren’t. So far we keep all emails, though we will be reaching our 2gb limit soon, probably in a month, so we will have to start deleting Artist submissions at that point. Note: Deleting Artist Submissions, just means we are moving the information offline to our computers.

We contact artists before we use the content, and after a show has aired, with their track, we archive that email. Leo is keeping all the files downloaded on his computer, and there are various ways you can go about organizing those tracks.

Audio File Organization

We track all our submissions on a Google Spreadsheet, and make notes if we use them in an episode. I don’t know how Leo is storing the files on his end, just yet, but I have a copy of each track in my Episode Production directory, so I can easily go back and pull the track of one we’ve used it.

It all depends on what you want to track, one method of song storage is to file them under:
\Month Received\ArtistName-SongTitle.mp3

Or you could try and sort by Genre if you want, or you could just have one folder with all of them, but make sure when you put them in any folder that you rename them to ArtistName-SongTitle.mp3 (or whatever format works best for you).

You should keep track of the ones you play, so you don’t duplicate yourself (unless you intend to).

Episode Production

The way that we organize our shows, is to have a google document for each episode. We know how many tracks we want in that show, and we start adding them as we see them fit. Some artists work well with others for an episode, and some require we go for more variety of content. Right now I have documents for episodes out about 10 episodes in the future of The TLP, and Leo has laid out through Episode 10 of the Brutal Backhand. Note: That doesn’t mean we have filled out all of those episodes, we still have some blanks.

So in this way, we are keeping ahead of our submissions, and when we receive submissions, we already have an idea for where they fit. You are not limited by this, as sometimes things fall in your lap that you just want to run with, which is what I did recently, in that I moved some content that was going to be in Episode 10, and brought it up for Episode 4.

When you organize to that level, it really makes the job of putting an episode together easy. Just little pieces here and there and then multiple episodes fall into place at once. This is crucial to allowing you to create shows for a regular release cycle, and not have to devote a lot of your time to putting episodes together.

Hope that helps, and let me know what you end up with. Leave us comments, on your comments, or tips to add to this.

To be continued…

Seriously, just search for the term “google buys“.

In brief, the Google Apps/Tool we use (for now) are:

• Web Search
• gMail
• gTalk
• Calendar
• Documents & Spreadsheets
• Maps
• Analytics
• Feedburner

Starting at the top, who doesn’t use google to search for things? The name has become a generic term for “search the web”. Google it!

Gmail has been a great way for us to keep up with emails, easily accessible, searchable, and taggable(?). Also, in the way we are using it for the TLP show, Leo and I share the main account, and just Label (or tag) emails for each other to read, and to keep track of what we have coming in.

Tied into the gmail is gtalk, their instant messaging client. It is a convenient way for us to coordinate and discuss things without having to pick up the phone.

As a true Geek Out aside, gTalk is based on the Jabber protocol, and we typically just use our instant message clients to handle all IM’s (AIM, ICQ, IRC, MSN, YIM). Currenty we use Kopete and Pidgin.

Google Calendar is another tool which is very important to us. By sharing calendars with each other, we can coordinate recording/editing sessions, interviews, and events. We try to be as organized as possible, and this lets us also forecast when episodes will be released, and which episodes go when. Teaser: We already have Episodes 1 – 8 plotted, planned, and mostly recorded.

Documents & Spreadsheets: We would be lost without the ability to cooperatively work on documents. This is where we start our show notes, keep track of our artist submissions, and any other documentation related to The TLP. Additionally, we both have the show notes open while recording our episodes to keep track of what we want to talk about, who we are playing, and if we talk about anything that has a web link we add it there.

Maps: How we find those new venues, and where obscure places like Maysville, KY are.

Google Analytics is one of those unseen tools that you don’t know is there, but is really useful in finding out how many people come visit the website, what pages are most popular, and what countries you all are coming from.

Feedburner is a recent google acquisition that gives interesting statistics on how many subscribers we have. Also, if you visit the feed directly, it tells you how to subscribe with various online feed readers. (Google Reader is just such a reader, though neither of us use that…yet)

And that about wraps up what we are using right now. Google “just” bought up GrandCentral which is an interesting service to manage phone numbers and your voice mails. We might use that in the future. But that is another topic for another day.

There is no magic bullet for every situation, but perhaps learning about how we are going about things will help you get started, and learn along with us. I am by no means, an expert, I am just an aggregate of knowledge. If you can help us out, by correcting errors or things you hear that could be tweaked, please Speak out! Send us a comment on an article, or use our contact form, or call in and leave us a voicemail.

One thing to know about our show is that we both are in different cities. This presents a challenge in recording because I have found that we are mostly limited to either telephone or VOIP-type technologies, which do not result in the greatest of qualities. The qualities I have found are basically 8khz, where CD’s tend to be 44.1khz or 48khz. Order of magnitude difference, and you can tell.

So to overcome this challenge, we decided to record our voices independently on each end of the call. That way we can record at high quality and later bring the tracks together.

To have our conversations we decided to go with Gizmo, a free VOIP service. We have noticed there is a 1.5 sec lag, which is why we sometimes do not sound as natural as one would expect, but we do our best to work around that. One instance where this is annoying is when one of us interrupts the other.

Some of the technologically inclined might ask why I did not go with Skype. The reason is, if there is an Open (standards) option, I tend to choose that path. Also, quality-wise, they are the same, and Gizmo offers more services for free, that Skype charges for. Our voicemail line for example is simply a Gizmo account attached to a free Nevada phone number. Sure I can pay for a local number, but who is really local to anyone on the web?

Equipment

Each of us have a mixing board, a microphone, and an mp3 recorder. Technically, for the way we are doing things, all of these are not necessary. The mp3 recorder has a built in mic and we could use that. But for quality’s sake we are using good condenser mics, and the mixer powers the mic and lets us control our levels.

David’s Hardware

• MXL V63M Microphone w/shock mount & tabletop stand
• Behringer Xenyx 1002FX mixer
• iAudio U2, 1gb mp3 player
• Sony MDR-V6 Headphones
• Homemade PC – Debian Linux, with a Soundblaster Audigy 2ZS Platinum (w/o Live Drive, in severe need of replacement)

Leo’s Hardware

• Shure SM58 Microphone, w/ tabletop stand
• Behringer EURORACK MX802A
• iAudio U2, 2gb mp3 player
• Toshiba Laptop – Ubuntu Linux

I have had the iaudio U2 for years, and this is a kick ass device. It has been superseded by the U3, but from what I have read the quality of recording is not as good. Plus, you can find the U2′s now for about $75 for a 2gb. All our interviews are recorded with the built in mic on these guys, so think about that when you are listening. Also, it is about the size of a disposable cigarette lighter with a battery that lasts about 18hrs. </sales pitch>

The mixers we use are not really part of the process, since we are not mixing audio signals. I can play interviews through Gizmo so that Leo can hear them, and some music, though the quality of music on his end is pretty bad, and not worth doing.

Planning & Preparation

Now, in preparation for an episode we build our “show notes” in a Google Doc online and both actively work on it during recording.

Prior to record we have a feel for what order the segments will fall in, what tracks we will play in what order. This is our text layout.

The audio layout comes next, and for recording/tweaking/editing we use Audacity. Again going for the Open Source solution, Audacity is a free multitrack audio editor with built in effects and a plugin system to make it extremely extensible. I think on my installation there are almost 300 plugins (and I don’t know what most of them do).

As you might have seen on a previous Geek out post, I throw all my tracks in there, edit the transitions, and in some cases adjust audio levels for interviews. I leave gaps where our talking segments will be, and before we even start our recording session, the episode is mostly done.

Once we are done recording, Leo uploads the mp3 of his side of the conversation, I drop both his and my recordings into Audacity, sync them up, and cut out the silence, or off comments that don’t contribute to the episode.

Once everything lines up and sounds good, I export to an mp3 or ogg file, and voilá it is done.

One week to go until Episode 01 comes out. And so you know we aren’t slacking off, here is a special sneak peak at Episode 2.