lowstring

Recently I was asked to design a website for a local drummer in Rochester NY. He is fairly well known for being a great drummer, and he actually has laid down some drum tracks for us. Being the nice guy that I am, I offered to host and set up the site for free in return for him playing drums for us.

This is not the first time I have been asked to set up a band site, but this is the first time I am actually not in the band, so if something breaks or needs updating, I won’t be around to help. So ease of use was my first priority.
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I have been bouncing around various web sites, forums and bb’s looking for some answers and the best resource I could find as far as this stuff goes is musictheory.net. Although not entirely geared towards guitar, it is still a valuable site to anyone wanting to learn more about music and the theory behind it.

The first thing I am going to delve into is how you go about determining the key of a song, because once you figure out the key, the scales will follow. A capo will just change the key of a song, so obviously knowing the initial key before you change the key using a capo, will help. I found various people asking the same question: “how do I find out what key a song is in” and I found many answers, most were incorrect. Most often the first answer was, find the first and last chord of the song and that will be the key of the song. Obviously this is not entirely true, BUT I would say it is true for 80% of the songs out there. The main problem I see with this approach is there could be key changes during the song, and you would never realize it. If you get called up to jam out a song during one of your friends local shows in front of hundreds of people, and the song changes keys right before your big solo……… you would look like an idiot! Believe me; I have faked my way through many solos, but once the key starts changing and you don’t know where you are, you will be in trouble. Hopefully after reading this, you and I will be able to determine a songs key on the fly just by knowing the chords or listening to it.
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Here are a couple of the latest songs that are in the works.
“Not me” is an old song lyrically that I updated musically.
“Lonely Eyes” is a new song, with lyrics by Bill Sweeney.

Not Me
Music/Lyrics - Driscoll
Not Me
Lonely Eyes
Music - Driscoll / Lyrics - Sweeney
Lonely Eyes

Remember you can always check out the latest mixes over at the music page.

I have been a fan of Motu interfaces since I first ventured into the land of “owning/operating a home studio”. I rocked a first gen Motu 828 firewire interface for probably 4 years and it still worked when I got rid of it! The general thought when it comes to Motu is that they make hardware/software for Mac users right? Well not entirely, when I purchased my 828 it came with cuemix software that only worked on Mac’s! So that left me one option when it came to monitoring; and that was to use an external hardware mixer, in my case a Mackie CFX20. That is not a huge deal, but mixers take up space, and add more cables and buttons to the mix. I used a patch bay to split incoming signals, one going to the mixer for monitoring, and the other going to the 828 for recording. Then I took the 2-channel output from the 828 back into a stereo channel on the mixer for playback. Pain in the ass right? Yeah!
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Lately I have been checking out various ways to sell my original music online. I think the days of selling a physical CD to someone is limited, and with new online services coming out every week, why not take advantage of them?

Obviously the most successful online music store to date in my opinion is the iTunes music store. But how do you get your bitchin new album up on iTunes? Easy! Enter Tunecore . In fact Tunecore will put your music up on most major online music stores including iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody, MusicNet, eMusic, and Sony Connect for a small fee of course. Tunecore does charge a one time fee of $0.99/song when uploading to their system as well as a $9.98 maintenance and storage fee per year per album. Each store you want to upload your music to will cost you another $0.99 per store. For example: if you had a 10 song EP, and wanted to sell that album at 5 different stores, it would initially cost you $24.83, and then $9.98 a year after that….not bad, not bad.

Myspace is becoming a popular site for music, and I actually have been finding bands that have better Myspace pages than regular websites, so it is not surprising that Myspace has recently offered an online music store add on that you can incorporate into your profile (or any other site for that matter). Myspace relies on Snocap to handle the sale, storage, and download of the music. Sign up is free, but Snocap does take a cut of each sale. From what I could find on the Snocap site, they charge $0.39 per download….. Ouch! So if you are selling an album for $9.99 you would actually only end up getting about $6. BUT the kicker is that you set the price at which you want to sell your music. So Snocap’s Mystore is an option, with a plus being you can incorporate your “Mystore” into any site, not just Myspace.
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