Instructional | Hans Erik

Music Promotion Tips

Band Promotion for every musican is the key to success. To sell your music online, promote your band, promote your music or just showcase your band to the world you need to be able to promote your music with success.
As you well know, blogs have been all the rage for the last few years and rightly so. Blogs provide the reader with current news and content rather than some of the out of date and stale content that may appear on a lot of websites. If you are a musician or have your own band then starting a blog could help promote your music. Band Promotion is difficult enough and this is just one way to help in promoting your band.
Blogs also rank highly in the search engines for a number of reasons, most notably for their current and relevant content. There are, however, several key elements to creating a successful blog about your band or music as outlined below. You are competing with thousands of other bloggers within your subject area of music so you need to be different and follow each of the key steps as outlined.
Do your research! You must know what is already out there in terms of competition. You can do this by typing in your blog subject matter into the search engines and seeing what appears in terms of blogs. Also, search the many blog directories to see who is already writing about your topic of interest. Use the Google keyword search tool to see what people are searching for each month in relation to your topic. For example, you would be best suited to focus on a topic that people are searching for and attracts more than 50,000 searches a month. When it comes to music, you could write about band promotion which has over 70,000 searches for these keywords each month. Or maybe write about how to sell your music online or a related topic that people want information about.
Find Your Niche! As already mentioned there are thousands of blogs out there on the internet about music, bands etc. They key is writing about a niche topic and then you will be more likely to attract a targeted audience. To try and compete with an already established blog that has high page rankings, a strong viewer base, and lots of existing content is going to just get you frustrated. Focus on one key area of music or playing in a band and you will create your own loyal fan base who will crave informative articles.
Think about your blog title, domain name, description and content. Take your time in thinking about a catchy but relative domain name. It is very difficult to find the domain name you want as most one, two and three word top level domain names

have already been registered. You can buy one of these top level domain names from the owner but often the requested purchase price is unrealistic and just too costly. Also, try to get a popular domain name extension. Try to get the keywords in your domain name and blog title. This will help in the search engine rankings.
If you already have your own website then create a blog using your own domain name. Why? If you create a blog from your own band or music website then you will provide readers with the opportunity to explore and navigate to other pages on your website. This will also help in branding, brand exposure and providing one link for fans to find you.
If you don’t your own website and are not keen to start your own blog then try starting a blog on one of the top music network sites such as MyBandMate or MySpace. Both provide tools for musicians to promote their music in many ways for free and one is in the form of a blog. This way you will already have an established audience to read your blog. I would recommend doing this even if you do go ahead with your own independent blog. The more exposure for your band then the more band promotion you will achieve.
With your own independent blog it is important to develop keyword rich content with the keywords appearing in the title, description, first paragraph without going overboard. You will be penalised if you just “overload” your pages and articles with too many of the targeted keywords. You just don’t need to do it and Google is aware of all the tricks webmasters try to use when it comes to achieving high page rankings.
It’s all about the content! Readers will return to your blog if you provide them with informative and valuable content about the subject you are promoting. You are reading this article most likely because you want to start your own blog or are looking for ways to promote your music. As a result, if you gain some valuable information from this article then there is a good chance that you would return again to my blog to read other articles.
The content needs to be informative and relative. You will lose your reader just as quickly as you got them if you have nothing to offer. There is just too much competition out there so you must add top quality content. If you are not sure what to write about then read other blogs, not to copy their articles but to get ideas. There is nothing wrong with seeking out ideas and then writing your own article with a different twist or adding new material. If your readers like your blog they are likely to refer it to their friends which will increase your subscriber base.
Provide some incentive to get your reader to join your blog newsletter or RSS feed. One of the trends in recent times is to give away eBooks when someone signs up. You can create a 5 or 10 page eBook about your niche topic. It has to be catchy enough to get the reader to give up their name and email for it.
Promote your site via bookmarking. Some of the most popular sites include Digg, Technorati, Reddit, Jumptags, stumbleupon and many more but these are the top ones. You will be accused of spamming if you constantly promote and add your own content or site so get some of your friends to help you out with this. These sites will track your IP address and can permanently shut down your account so you will need to respect their terms of use. You can find that these “bookmarks” will give you some promotion on the first few pages of the search engines for your keywords.
Use RSS feeds. RSS feeds provide the reader with an option to receive updates when you add new content to your blog. Once again you will need to submit regular articles or news to your site and it needs to be worth reading to keep the reader subscribing to your blog. I have subscribed to blogs, newsletters and sites before only to be bombarded with emails selling products. I quickly went to the “Unsubscribe” button at the bottom of the email.
Encourage readers to submit comments about the various blog entries to submit. Your readers are there because they have an interest in your topic so try to create a bond with them in making them feel a part of your blog. If they leave a comment be sure to respond otherwise you will find that they are less likely to write a comment again.
You will need to market your blog. This can be done by submitting your blog to the various blog directories or by writing articles and submitting them to article directories with an active link back to your blog. Submit a free press release about your blog, get into related forums and include an active link. Be sure not to spam or just sell your blog as you will be expelled from the forum, be discrete in promoting your blog in these forums.
Form joint ventures with fellow bloggers or websites. Invite other bloggers to submit content to your site and in return you can submit content to their blogs and therefore cross promote. Most bloggers will follow up on a lead that will increase their exposure. As long as you are not in direct competition and only complement another blog then this can be a valuable option. You will also gain more content for your blog.
Make your blog stand out! Add other forms of media to the site. Add MP3s, videos, photos or even an audio interview. There are plenty of cheap ways to add this rich media content to your site. Make sure that they provide relative content that your readers are craving.

By hellomails.com:

Fresh Content! I can’t state enough how much your blog needs to contain fresh, informative and related content. It will take some work to maintain a dynamic and successful blog so devote at least an hour a week to working on your blog. Improve the appearance, promote it, add new content or pursue partnerships.
You can make money from your blog by adding Google Adsense, affiliate links or generating income from advertising on your blog. You will only gain interest from advertisers if you generate a significant number of hits each day. If your goal is to promote your music or band then don’t lose focus of this by distracting your readers. Good luck in promoting your music or band.

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Music Production Tips and Tricks to Help Record, Mix and Master

- Source -

Author: Ian Waugh

What makes a pro recording pro? What is the “sound” that the pros get and how can you make your recordings sound more professional?

The simple answer is – there’s no simple answer. But with careful listening and a little experience you can create excellent results with modest equipment.

Good mixing starts ear

The first and most important item of equipment is – who knows? Anyone? It’s your ears! Sorry to tell you this, but listening to ten hours of Rave at 110dB will do nothing for them and you might as well give your mix to a turtle as try to mix with misused ears.

Listen to commercial recordings of mixes you like, analyse them, listen for the effects and get to know what constitutes the sort of sound you’re after.

Mixing secrets

There’s no hidden secret to getting a good sound, but if we had to sum up the secret of mixing in two words it would be this – EQ and compression. Okay that’s three words.

These are probably the two most important tools used by professional producers. However, like any tools, if you don’t know how to use them you’ll be carving Habitat tables instead of Chippendale chairs.

That’s where your ears and experience come in. Here we have assembled some production ideas, suggestions, tips and tricks but they can only be guidelines and need to be adapted to suit your material. There are no presets you can switch in to make a bad recording sound good. And if your original material has been poorly recorded not even Abbey Road could salvage your mix. But follow these suggestions and see how much your mixes improve.

Get the level right

You can’t push the levels when recording digitally as you can when recording to tape but you still want to get as much signal into the system as possible. This means watching the levels very carefully for clipping, and recording at an even and constant level.

Some recording software lets you monitor and set the input level from within. Some expect you to use the soundcard’s mixer while others have no facility for internally adjusting the input level and expect you to set this at source.

Monitors

Your ears are only as good as the monitors they listen to. DO NOT expect to produce a good, pro mix on tiny computer speakers. It may sound fine on a computer system, but try it on a hi fi, in a disco and through a car stereo.

Oddly enough, you don’t necessarily need the most expensive Mic. Many top artists use what some might call “average” Mics because they work well and get the job done. You can spend a wad on a large diaphragm capacitor Mic (yes, they’re good for vocals) if you have the lolly but check out dynamic Mics which are much more affordable and can be turned to several tasks.

Mixing MIDI and audio

One of the great things about computer-based recording is that the parts can so easily be changed, edited and processed. It’s also so easy to combine MIDI and audio tracks and many musicians use a combination of sample loops, MIDI parts and audio recording.

Audio recordings are generally guitar and acoustic instruments such as the sax and vocals. Incidentally, the best way to record guitars is by sticking a Mic in front of its speakers. You can DI them and process them later and this may be cleaner but for a natural guitar sound a Miced amp is hard to beat.

It’s not necessary to record drums live and, in fact, it’s difficult to do and retain a modern sound. You can buy off-the-shelf MIDI drum riffs and audio drum loops, or program your own. The quality of the gear which makes drum noises these days is such that anyone with a good riff can sound like a pro.

Mixing MIDI

As MIDI and audio parts appear on the same screen in modern sequencers, it’s very easy to arrange them into a song. However, when you come to mix everything down there’s another consideration. If you are recording to DAT you can simply route the audio and MIDI outputs through a mixer and into the DAT machine.

However, if you want to create a CD you must first convert the MIDI parts to audio data. The entire song can then be mixed to hard disk and burned to CD. Converting MIDI to audio can have another benefit and that’s the ability to process the MIDI tracks using digital effects.

Effects

There are three positions for effects known as Master, Send and Insert. Use the Master for effects you want to apply to the entire mix. These will often be EQ, compression and reverb.

Although giving each channel its own Insert effects is kinda neat, each one uses a corresponding amount of CPU power. So if your computer is struggling and if you’re using the same effect on more than one channel, make the effect a Send effect and route those channels to it.

Many pieces of software let you apply an effect Pre or Post fader. With Post fader, the amount of sound sent to the effect is controlled by the fader. With Pre fader, the total volume level of the signal is sent. Post fader is the usual default and the one you’ll use the most.

EQ is the most popular and the most over-used effect. Yes, it can be used to try to “fix a mix” but you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear as me Gran used to say and what she didn’t know about mixing could be written in the margin of the book of honest politicians.

But before you start messing with EQ – or any other effect for that matter – make sure you have a decent set of speakers. Have we said that already? Oh, must be important, then.

There are plug-in effects such as MaxxBass which can psychoacoustically enhance the bass frequencies to make it sound better on smaller speakers. However, this is by no means the same as getting a good bass sound in the first place by observing good recording principles.

EQ can enhance a mix to add gloss, fairy dust, shimmer, sheen, a sweetener or whatever you want to call it to the final production. It can be done with enhancers and spectralisers, too, although these tend to mess with the harmonics which some producers don’t like. However, don’t dismiss them out of hand.

General EQ lore says that you should cut rather than boost. If a sound is top-heavy, the temptation is to boost the mid and bass ranges. But then what usually happens is you start boosting the upper range to compensate and you simply end up boosting everything and you’re back where you started – only louder!

The reason why cutting is preferred is that boosting also boosts the noise in the signal which is not what you want. Try it. Boost every frequency and listen to the result. If you think it sounds okay, fine. What do we know?

But when you’re fiddling, do keep an eye on the output meter. Boosting EQ inevitably means increasing the gain and it’s so-o-o-o easy to clip the output causing distortion which does not sound good.

Finally, check EQ changes to single tracks while playing back the entire piece. In other words, listen to the tracks in context with all the other tracks. It may sound fine in isolation but some frequencies may overlap onto other tracks making the piece frequency rich in some places and frequency poor in others.

Reverb

Reverb creates space. It gives the impression that a sound was recorded in a hall or canyon instead of the broom cupboard. Recording lore suggests that you record everything dry, with no reverb, so you can experiment with a choice later on. You can’t un-reverb a track once it’s been recorded.

The more reverb you apply, the further away sound will seem. To make a vocal up-front, use only enough reverb to take away the dryness. Vocals don’t want to be mushy (lyrics can be mushy) so use a bright reverb.

A common novice error is to swamp everything with different types of reverb. Don’t – it sounds horrible!

Mixing down

You’ve done all the recordings, done the edits, applied the effects and now it’s time to mix everything into a Big Number One Hit! Before you do, go home and have a good night’s sleep. Have two. In fact, sleep for a week.

Yes, we know you’re hot and raring to go but your ears are tired. They’re falling asleep. Listen carefully and you might hear then snore!

There is a phenomenon known as ear fatigue and consistent exposure to sound, especially the same frequencies, makes our ears less responsive to them. Goes back to the bit about spending your life in a Rave club – you’ll never be a master producer. If you try to mix after spending a day arranging, your ears will not be as responsive, so do them and your mix a favour by waiting at least a day.

Now, go forth and mix! And don’t forget – you get better with practice. For more information about mixing, pick up a FREE copy of Creating The Perfect Mix at www.making-music.com

***********
Ian Waugh is one of the UK’s leading hi tech music writers and creator of www.making-music.com. He has written for most of the major – and not so major – hi tech music magazines in the UK and many general computing titles both offline and online.

His output numbers over 2,000 articles, features and reviews and he has written several books and albums. He is author of the “Quick Guide to…” series which includes the Quick Guide to Dance Music, Digital Audio Recording, MP3 and Digital Music, and Analogue Synthesis.

Article Source: http://www.articlealley.com/article_29927_48.html

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Quick Tips To Help You Be More Productive In The Studio

By Björgvin Benediktsson of audio.tutsplus.com:

There are tons of way to increase your productivity and workflow in the studio. Whether the studio means your home voiceover room or a big commercial recording space, all of these tips can apply. Increasing your workflow and making your sessions go smoother is a crucial ingredient in looking good for your clients. Everybody wants you to be fast and do everything they ask of you in record time, so these tips can help your productivity and efficiency in the studio.

Create a good workspace – Set up your studio area so that you aren’t distracted by tedious tasks when you should be on top of the session. A clean, uncluttered desk with everything you need close at hand is a good way to keep you focused on the task at hand.
Use templates – Using templates can speed up your workflow significantly. Instead of always opening up a clean empty track and ending up with the same types of tracks every time, try saving your next session as a template so you can use it as a guideline for your next track. No need to create the same auxes and inserting the same old delays and reverbs when you can have it all ready immediately.
Save your presets – Some people frown upon preset-cruising, and I would agree that preset cruising doesn’t work when the preset is in no context to the actual recorded track. But when you are constantly recording the same tracks – whether drums, guitar or vocals – it can be good to have a preset that you know will work. Then it is only a question of tweaking the knobs to accommodate the new recording, instead of starting from scratch.
Take notes – I like taking notes. I like taking notes so much I designed my own custom track sheets to use when I’m away from my DAW. (You can download them here for free if you are interested). On the assumption that I like taking notes, there must be other people out there that like taking notes. So even though having loose papers on your desk violates the uncluttered nature of the first tip, I do recommend having a legal pad or a notebook to scribble in ideas, especially if you do not have access to your session or want to brainstorm your productions with someone.
Close your applications – I really need to learn to close my browser and other applications when I’m working. Whether you are recording, mixing or just plain doing some regular work, taking away distractions is the key to actually being able to focus on your projects.
Use keyboard shortcuts – I used to play first person shooters when I was younger. I had one hand on the mouse, and the other on the keyboard, giving me the most flexible and fast control over my character. Today, working in my audio program isn’t much different. Still one hand on the mouse and the other on the keyboard, frantically hitting keyboard shortcuts to speed up my workflow. Get familiar with your program’s keyboard shortcut so you can work faster and more efficiently. Joel wrote a great set of tutorials on workflow in Logic and you can check out his shortcut tutorial here.

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37 Music Production Tips From The Pros

By musicradar.com:

Head out into the wild world of the internet and it seems that everyone has a music production tip to offer you, but what you really want are words of wisdom from the people who’ve been there and done it.

Lucky for you, then, that we’ve collated 37 tips from experienced professionals. If you can’t learn something from these guys, we can only assume that you know it all already.

1. Liam Howlett, Prodigy

“Buy Superman albums. Y’know, big theme tunes from films. You get a horn section playing a chord and just sample a short section of that. If I hear a chord I like I sample it.”

2. Jamie Lidell

“Putting rhythm parts down simultaneously is the essence of capturing a human feel. And sonically, the spillover between the mics in the room is often your best buddy.”

3. Nick Rhodes, Duran Duran

“Having a studio at home is like having a gym at home – sometimes you’re just better off going out.”

4. The Stafford Brothers

“Use high-quality sounds. If you are over-EQing a sound to try and make it fit it’s the wrong sound. Move on and find a new one. Plus, always try and read reviews about gear and then download demo versions of plug-ins to get an idea of what they are like.”

5. Paul Hartnoll, Orbital

“Vaughn Williams: why does he always write in E minor? Blannng! E minor always sounds so full of mystery and mood. You can almost smell it. Move your chord up a bit and suddenly it’s gone.”

Dave spoon

Dave Spoon: likes Reason, but digs his 808, too.

6. Dave Spoon

“At Night [2006 single] was completely Reason. I wrote it in about two hours. Reason synths, mixed in Reason, the works – it was a defining moment for me.”

7. Steve Angello

“I use Logic’s own plug-ins. I want to make it as simple as possible. I want a basic sound that I can create myself. If you know your tools then you’re king of the studio.”

8. Lifelike

“I always take care to make my mixes sound quite old. If you try to do a record that’s ‘of the moment’ you can’t be sure that a DJ will play it in ten years time.”

9. Prok & Fitch

“We’ve found this wicked reverb made by QuikQuak called Fusion Field. We’ve started putting pretty much everything through it other than the kick. We use it on the shortest possible setting so you can’t really hear it, but it’s started giving our stuff loads of room and it really makes the sounds stand out.”

10. Will Gregory, Goldfrapp

“I’m all for progress but the time you spend upgrading your gear is time you spend not making music. We worked with Flood on our last album and he turned up with Logic 4.8 running on OS 9. The results sounded pretty good to me.”

Alex gopher

Alex Gopher: elbows off the table please young man.

11. Alex Gopher

“It may seem strange working with a compressor on the master channel during the mix but you get a much better sound. It’s hard to balance the sound if you mix then add compression later.”

12. Luke Vibert

“Depending on what mood I’m in, I can get loads of beats going or just do tiny little bits if I’m not in the mood to do full-on tracks. You should keep everything that you do then there’ll come a day when you finish 20 tracks in one day because all they needed was a little bit of arranging.”

13. Steve Lipson

“I can’t understate the importance of food and parking when you’re recording. So long as you’ve got food and parking then nothing else matters. Technology is nothing without parking.”

14. Trevor Horn

“If you want to get somewhere in the music business you should work really hard. That much is obvious. The important bit is that then, if you get some success, don’t go out and celebrate. Get back in the studio and get the next stuff sorted out. Otherwise you’re like fleas on a dog. You’ve got to remember that the dog rolls over every few months and a load of fleas fall off…”

15. A Guy Called Gerald

“I have Sundays as my ‘sampling days’. I go through old records and CDs and build my sample libraries. Now I’ve got an entire planet full of sounds I can go through.”

16. Arno Cost

“To make a good lead synth, work the sound with effects like reverb, delay and chorus to make it sound large and then add things like a bitcrusher or a phaser or flanger. After that, compression is really useful as it gives you the dynamic but it has to be tactful and well adjusted to sound good. I use the Classic Compressor from Kjaerhus Audio. It’s really easy to use and very powerful. I also put a limiter on the master at zero dB.

“Then, I put equalisers on almost every channel (lead, bass, kick, snares, FX, vocal…) to adjust the frequencies. The more you work your samples one by one, the more your beat will sound good.”

17. Sigur Rós

“The mic we use most is an old Neumann U47 through a Urei 1178 compressor/limiter. That’s the set up we use for all of Jónsi’s vocals.”

18. Neon Circus

“I can’t really explain how to write a track, I think it just happens. We always start with a riff or a beat and go from there. There is one tip a writer gave to me that I took on board: ‘Don’t over complicate things. If a person with little musical talent can play a melody you wrote on a piano, it’s accessible and they’ll remember it. Then it’s a hook.’”

19. RJD2

“One of the hardest things to learn is when not to compress something. I always thought that I should be struggling with compressor settings to get them right but if the instrument sounds fine exactly as it was recorded, just bring up the fader.

“Having a globally objective perspective is also really hard – forcing you to listen to something in the context of the song, not soloed out, and loud. Sometimes, I still have to fight the knee-jerk reaction to process everything and compress it all.”

20. Olav Basoski

“The best tip I can think of to become very prolific is to spend less time in the studio! When you’re listening to a track over and over again when producing, it really is inevitable that at some point you’re just not hearing it anymore, even though you might not even notice this yourself!”

21. Utah Saints

“The biggest Eureka moment for us was probably the simplest, and seems obvious but can really change your perspective, especially if you’ve been working for a long time. It was ‘go on how it sounds, not how it looks’.

“Way too often the way a mix looks – 16dB boost at 800k, no compression, etc – can affect the way people hear their own mixes. Every now and again, turn off the computer monitor, or don’t look at the desk and just trust your ears!”

22. Super8 & Tab

“There can’t be anything that is not really needed. Everything there has to be there for a reason otherwise those unnecessary hits might destroy the groove and eat up the dynamics which are needed for the other elements. So that’s why we always chop our loops into pieces and we take all the unnecessary bits away.

“When there are lots of drum parts, it is really important to use the same quantise for all the drums – also for bits chopped from the loops. Tuning the drums to the key of the song can make a big difference too.

“Sometimes, if we feel drums don’t have enough drive or roughness, we do some parallel mixing and send our drum buss to another buss and compress the hell out of it and then mix it with the original drum buss. All the UAD plug-ins are brilliant for drum buss mixing. There’s no other plug-ins that can make so nice a top-end and we really like to use UAD’s Fairchild to do our slamming parallel mixing.”

Simian mobile disco

Simian Mobile Disco: he’s behind you.

23. Simian Mobile Disco

“Before archiving a track that you have finished or given up on, try deactivating all the active tracks and reactivating all the inactive tracks. It might be shit on its own but it might be the start of a whole new direction for the track, or something new.”

24. Tocadisco

“Almost all the bass sounds in my productions from the last five years came out of Spectrasonics Trilogy. It has an amazing warm and full sound. You almost just need a good bass drum and a Trilogy bass sound and the track is already rocking!”

25. Mr Hudson

“For me there are no rules. I might start with a sample or play some audio in. Or I might plug in a synth and fiddle about. My start up template is 16 audio channels, one record channel, six MIDI instrument channels and a mastering preset which I punch in and out to get a rough idea of what a really squashed radio mix will sound like.

“It feels like I’ve only scratched the surface with Logic. I love the speed of editing and jumping between arrange page and mix, also working with MIDI and audio at the same time. I probably compress things harder than most people and I mix quite loud. I start with kick, snare and vocal then build round that. It’s all about drums. Also, I chop my audio quite brutally and don’t worry about everything being snapped to the grid or quantised. I like to keep a loose, organic feel where appropriate. Golden rule is: There are no rules. Just, does it sound good?”

26. Karl Hyde, Underworld

“When I’m writing lyrics and need inspiration, I go for a walk and look at everything around me. I carry a notebook and write it down. When it comes to recording, I sing them straight from the notebook.”

27. Yves La Rock

“I’ve just go hold of Spectrasonics’ new Trilian plug-in. It’s amazing for bass and it sounds fantastic. It makes the bass sound warmer and rounder allowing you to extend the bandwidth of the bassline.”

28. Pete Gooding

“To get a great sound to your drums I would use buss compression on your kick and bass at the same time. You can treat them individually but it’s better to isolate them both then put them through the same ‘bass’ buss. Then compress them together. This will give you a much bigger sound.”

Vince clarke

Vince Clarke: a fan of happy accidents.

29. Vince Clarke

“Mistakes and accidents often make the songs. If I’ve got a musical part to be sequenced then I’ll already have an idea of the kind of sound I think I’d like and would suit the track. But then, as you program a sound you’ll invariably end up with something different. It keeps it fresh and innovative that way.”

30. Riton

“My number one bit of gear is my Roland SRE-555 Chorus Echo. It adds movement and takes away the rigidness of the computer as soon as you run a signal through it.”

31. Fatboy Slim

“I always find a vocal hook first. That’s the most difficult part because other things can always be programmed. I usually stretch a few things but the rule is if it’s within three semitones I’ll use if but if it’s eight semis out I’m wasting my time.”

32. Peter Hook

“If you start with a great song you can’t really go wrong. There is a saying we have in Manchester: ‘You can’t polish a turd’…

“I suppose one of the greatest tricks that Martin Hannett [top producer] ever taught us was the use of ambience to create space in a record by pumping the instrument back into a room. So you would record what you wanted then pump it into bigger speakers to give it more space…

“And then you would record the space back. I think that was the biggest thing for me and was the biggest change in a recording technique because it just sort of opened your mind. I mean Martin Hannett was completely mad, he was like a mad professor and literally his imagination had no bounds and if anything, he was always teaching you to be as mad as you like!”

33. ATFC

“I always start a session with iZotope Ozone strapped to my master channel. D. Ramirez tipped me off about the CD Widener & Enhancer preset a few years back and it still beats everything else I have hands down for making your music jump out in front of you.

“Start with it on and run all your sounds really hot. A lot of producers who know the theory behind engineering chastise me when they see my mixes. ‘You have to start with the kick at about 60% and leave a lot of headroom for mastering etc.’ But they’re also the people that who ask me how my mix sounds so punchy and loud. I’ve had calls from mastering engineers from the best studios in the country ask me how I did it.”

34. Steve Lawler

“When writing and producing the first thing I do is build the drums, starting with a nice kick or maybe two kicks EQ’d to sound right. When I add percussion I always un-quantise them by pulling back the track delay so it brings the percussion slightly off the kick so you get a more live organic sounding drum loop, I do the same with shakers, tambourines – it all makes your drums more organic.

“When I come to add bass or bottom end to my track, these days I use sub bass more than anything to give the track a heavy dark sound. I don’t use any bass sound or module, I simply open up the EXS sampler and play the MIDI controller with no sample going through and get that tone. I then play in my bass melody on the lower keys, and use the Sonalksis TBK filters to get the tone sounding nice and smooth.”

35.Gui Boratto

“Most people usually solo things when equalising. I never solo a track when EQing. I’m also a grid freak. When I create something in MIDI I always record and transform it into audio, to have total control of time and to have other options such as EQs, dynamics and effects.”

36. Serge Santiago

“It seems to me that everyone believes FL Studio is a child’s toy. It isn’t, its user interface is fantastic and fast – faster than Cubase or Logic – plus it now boasts some of the best plug-ins around. It’s also a great way to sound different.

To get good sound off the master channel, use Image Line’s Soundgoodizer along with T-RackS’ Brickwall Limiter. That keeps the sound clean without it sounding over compressed.”

37. Sean Tyas

“Among the nice features of Logic Pro 8 and 9 is the ability to freely move around your plug-ins from channel to channel, as well as copy them. Simply hold the Command key while dragging any plug-in on your mixer, complete with all your settings intact, to any other channel strip.

“EXS24 is one of the quickest samplers you can possibly ask for, and here’s a great reason why: want a bank of kick drums or hi-hats? Open up an empty EXS24, then click the Edit button. Make sure Contiguous Zones is selected. Now go into your Finder and find a nice folder of kicks, hats, whatever. Drag up to about 80 drum samples to the C0 key of the keyboard you see in your Instrument Editor. Bam. Click OK, and you now have an instant bank of all those samples.”

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How To Start A Record Label – Part 2

By Trevor M of soundsxp.com:

Getting down to the nitty gritty of the things you actually have to do to make a release and promote it there are a number of areas that need to be thought about. On the manufacturing side – Do you home print the sleeves? Do you get the sleeves professionally printed? Where do you get the vinyl pressed? Where do you get the CDs made? Do you home burn CDr releases? What mailers do you need to send out the records/CDs – whether that’s for promo purposes or to ship out the sales that have started to trickle in via your website?

Home printing sleeves? There is no right or wrong way about doing this. In my time I’ve used many different print shops and also done my fair share of home printing. The DIY element of home printing doesn’t always save you money. Ink/Toner isn’t cheap. I think I am on my 5th printer in a little over 3 years. I was lucky enough to pick up a cheap 2nd hand colour laser printer last year and even now I get through about a 1000 sheets for every £100 of toner that I buy. Sometimes, it’s easier to get the larger runs (over 300) done via the place you are getting the CDs/Vinyl manufactured.

I have also found that printing off small run releases (I currently do CD EPs in runs of 120) is where home printing the sleeves comes into its own. It does take time. You do need to invest in a decent paper trimmer. I settled on a Dahle 550 (http://www.dahle.com/products/trimmers/rolling_trimmers/professional.htm). This makes the job of trimming the sleeves down to size a lot easier and I wasted plenty of time and effort with cheaper trimmers before realising that spending a little up front does actually pay dividends further on down the line.

As for paper, ink/toner, mailers etc. It pays to shop around. eBay is a great resource and I source my mailers from there 90% of the time. It makes sense to think about the type of printer you are going to use before buying one. Look at the cost of ink and what thickness of paper the printer can handle. Don’t be afraid to order from small online suppliers. They can give you good deals on recycled ink cartridges. I’ve found this site useful for consumables: http://www.consumablecafe.co.uk. Although I’ve not used them every time – they’ve been very helpful down the years when I’ve run into ink/toner issues. As for my paper supplies I have tended to buy in bulk to get the price down and I have used http://purelypaper.co.uk/ for all my paper needs to date.

In the past few years I’ve settled on two suppliers for making the records and CDs that Odd Box release – one for CDs (http://www.gilliesaudio.co.uk/) and one for vinyl (http://www.noisebox.co.uk/). There are plenty of others out there and nearly all vinyl manufactures in the UK use a pressing plant, GZ, in the Czech Republic (http://www.gzcd.cz/vinyl-2/). You can deal direct with them – but I decided against it as I was inexperienced and I wanted to be able to easily call someone in the UK when I was unsure of what needed to be done to get the release looking and sounding how I want. In the past I have home burnt CDrs for releases. I found this to be a right pain in the backside (failed copies and time consuming being my main two gripes) and it’s something I try and avoid these days. Why? Getting 100 CDrs from a place like Gillies Audio is actually a lot cheaper than I’d imagined (£69 for 100) and I think there are places out there that are even cheaper.

After you’ve looked at manufacturing you then need to think about promoting your release. If you are a small DIY label you are not going to be able to afford to advertise in magazines like NME, Stool Pigeon, The Fly etc. So you have to use the tools available to you. Namely – the Internet. Sites like Facebook and myspace are invaluable tools for reaching fans of bands you are releasing. Set up pages for your label and over time people join and come to your little corner of the internet because they like what they have heard by a band on your label. I’d also say build your own label website. In 2010 it easy enough to set up a blog and use this as a template for your label’s site. You don’t need masses of technical knowledge and you can learn about sites like Blogger and WordPress as you go. There is a wealth of information out there on the internet on how to build blogs and an afternoon’s research should yield enough information for you to make the right choice for your site.

The other area that you should consider is mailing lists. I know they’re a dirty word and you can be seen as a spammer. I’ve taken the approach of giving away free download only releases in exchange for an email addresses and also asking people to sign up at gigs that I put on. People can easily unsubscribe if they don’t want to know about your label’s latest wonder release. I’ve toyed with self hosting my mailing list and in the end it got to the point where it was more trouble than it was worth so I moved my mailing to an online provider – http://www.yourmailinglistprovider.com/ – it’s free to use for small volumes and if you find you have grown above the free limit there are cheap price plans for moderate use.

The final piece of the Internet promotional jigsaw is message boards. Remember to target boards that broadly fit with the type of music you are releasing. It would be pointless engaging on a board about death metal when you have some gentle indiepop to promote. Also – I’d stress that this type of promotion is fraught with danger. If you only turn up on the board whoring your wares – the local community is likely to take a dim view of this. So I don’t post to masses of places – I target ones where I can stop and interact with the folks that use the board. These places are also a great way to find out about new bands, shows etc. So it is worth investing a little time to become part of the community. This probably sounds more cynical than it actually is – the bottom line is to remember to treat the boards with a little respect and join in with other discussions where you can.

You can also send physical/digital promos to relevant magazines, blogs and online music webzines. For this you need to decide which approach is right for you. I have just enough technical know how to upload the releases to my website and password protect the folder that holds the release. This is great for sending out digital promos. Blogs tend to like this approach whereas magazines and DJs less so. So it really is horses for courses. On smaller releases I tend to stick exclusively to digital promos – but on a 7” singles of 300 or more copies I tend to send out a select number of physical promos to relevant Radio DJs, magazines etc. It really does pay to be selective and to work out who is likely to be interested in your release. There is no point sending out over 100 promos if most of them are going to end up in the bin, on eBay or unheard. Building up this knowledge takes time. And it’s over time that you will come to learn which magazines, DJs or blogs are worth approaching.

For all forms of promotion you will need to write a press release. Sounds daunting. It’s not. I’ve found the best press releases are short, snappy and they give a pointer to what the band sounds like. A brief bio on the band never hurts – but don’t write pages and pages as it puts people off reading. Keep it brief, try and avoid clichés and if the band have had good press previously a few choice quotes from a Radio DJ, respected blog/magazine does more for a release than all the prose you could ever come up with. See http://www.shutupbands.com/ for examples of what not to do.

Finally – the best source of advice is usually from fellow DIY labels. Darren at Squirrel Records, Sean at Fortuna Pop, Ian Watson at How Does It Feel To Be Loved? And Robin Allport at Club AC30 have all been a great source of advice early on and continue to be so to this day. It was this sharing of information that helped make the step from dreaming about being a record label, to actually starting a label a reality. With that in mind I set up a small resource for other people in the same boat. The DIY Music Resource (http://diyrecordlabels.ning.com/) – it isn’t as active as I’d like it to be – but it has started to grow and I hope it’s a place where like minded people might be able to find information they need to help them on their way to running their own label, gig night etc.

Right, I’ve got to go and bag up another 100 7” singles and I’ve got to make another call to Cargo. And I’ve got 15 demos that need listening too. The work of DIY label is never done…

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Music Education Resources and Tips for Teachers

Music education has been included in many curricula in different nations around the globe. However, since not all students are musically-inclined, not all of them are motivated to learn music. As a result, they are no longer excited to experience formal music schooling inside their classrooms. With this conflict of interests, music teachers are then challenged or pressured on how they could make their students learn and love music at the same time.

To basically adhere to the problem, they are determined to research the latest music teachers’ resources. Since both teaching and learning are two dynamic processes, music teachers and their students should meet half way – adjusting to the kind of individuals they are.

And because they are up to music education, these music teachers need to update their lists and records with the most modern trends and techniques, which are believed to be very effective and influential with the kind of students they have right now. From time to time, there could have been new music teachers’ resources that could improve their teaching strategies as well as their way of relating to their dear students.

Today, music educators incorporate theories and application to give a well-rounded musical experience and to teach music in various perspectives intended for international understanding. To meet many demands and expectations of their students, music teachers keep on upgrading their available music teachers’ resources by doing some researches over the Internet. In just a matter of few clicks, they would be aware of what is really the latest in the music academe as well as the newest style and approach in teaching that they can utilize in their everyday instruction.

The perceived effort to enhance music teachers’ resources also results in a greater number of students, who are now more motivated and determined to learn and love music. When their music teachers use some personal touches as part of their resources – sharing their own insights, thoughts and experiences on a particular topic, the learners become more eager to attend to their music classes and listen to their classroom discussions. This happens simply because they feel that they have something to relate to and such experience could also happen to them in time.

Indeed, teaching and learning music can be both fun and enjoyable. Just like in real life and in our daily activities, when we integrate music into anything that we do, it amazingly turns out to be more special and a lot of fun. After all, music gives most of us such inspiration and motivation to look forward to something better and brighter. Love music and enjoy tomorrow.

This music education website offers many useful music teachers resources and tips. Visit it now.

Earl Marsden started developing a passion for music at the early age of twelve. He first learned to play the guitar at thirteen, and from there he pursued the study other instruments including the violin, piano and flute. Currently, he devotes some of his spare time to writing articles about music teaching while managing his own music studio.

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Creative Music Teachers Resources: Effective Ways to Motivation

Most music teachers consider teaching music to their dear students both their profession and passion. Most of them have the heart for arts and music – making each student love learning music and music as a whole. With this kind of outlook and disposition in teaching music, the inspired and motivated music teacher tends to begin his search for consistent improvement in his teaching strategies as well as his effort for personal and professional growth.

Indeed, there is a wide variety of creative music teachers resources that students can certainly enjoy and get excited working on with. According to studies, the integration of audio and video recording in music education has been an effective technique to catch the attention and grab the interest of the learners. This is believed to be an effective tool in raising the level of interest and motivation among music learners.

Current practice in music teaching favors a practical and a hands-on approach in emphasizing performance and composition. The use of recorded music as a teaching resource has tended to take a back seat. However, recordings are the predominant vehicle of musical experience today. As the students are expert listeners to recorded sound, major developments in the access to and presentation of recorded music are opening up new educational possibilities to most of them.

Targeted to be implemented in most music classrooms, the production and engineering aspects of recorded sound to online music libraries and teachers’ experiences of using recordings in the classroom have been randomly practiced and taken into consideration.

When a classroom setting has a relaxed atmosphere, informal learning may take place yet anxiety, tension and pressure would neither rule the learning situation. Hence, when there is relaxed supervision with no teachers behind the desk, the students would be more eager and interested to learn music. Students may also work in groups – giving them more chances of friendship and peer support. In this case, cooperative learning is found effective. The music teacher may encourage the students choose various musical instruments of their choice and eventually master such.

After they finish recording, they may organize or set-up a short play or a mini-concert to show their rendition of songs and other performances. These activities can heighten the learning process as they get too excited in meeting their objectives and getting high grades. These can also help them boost enough self-confidence and self-esteem. Through these music teachers’ resources, the music teacher tends to meet most of his objectives all at the same time.

These creative techniques in music education intend to motivate the learners from different ages and with different lifestyles. So start your quest to amazingly creative music teachers resources now. Be inspired to share your knowledge as well as the joys of music to your students. Make them realize that learning music is fun so they have to do it all by heart. Happy teaching!

Get to know more music teachers resources, visit this music teacher’s website.

A Teacher’s Passion for Music

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Mining Your Metaphors: Writing Lyrics in Veins

“With the jungle cats, lions and tigers, leopards and cheetahs

For gazelle you get chased like a zebra, they blaze cheeba-cheeba

And dominate the weaker on the street

Hungry bellies only love what they eat and it’s hard to compete

When they smile with your heart in they teeth”

- Mos Def, Habitat

When miners are digging for metals they are looking for precious veins of ore. A vein can run extremely deep and travel a great distance, twisting and curving, folding back on itself. Hitting the start of a vein can be extremely profitable for a miner. It’s no different for a writer. Sometimes it takes only one real good metaphor and writing in the vein of that metaphor to create an entire lyric. Random metaphor creation is fine and can give some startling results but some pretty interesting things can happens if you stick in a metaphoric vein for longer than a phrase.

In the above example Mos Def is using a jungle metaphor for the street. People are lions, tigers, leopards, cheetahs, gazelles, and zebra. By writing in the vein of the jungle Mos Def has mined his metaphor to get it to pop out all kinds of messages and meanings. First he is telling you about the hierarchy of the street from behind his metaphor. The jungle is a place where the stronger pray on the weaker, like the street (that’s the connecting idea). By staying with his metaphor he reveals yet another interesting point: you consume what you love on the street. That’s kind of a startling revelation, that on the street you might only love someone out of hunger but simultaneously be consuming them, which would eventually kill them. But the real home run is the last line, “it’s hard to compete, When they smile with your heart in they teeth.” Now you are the gazelle or zebra, and the lions and tigers and leopards and cheetahs are sinking their teeth into your heart with every grin. You only see you’ve been eaten when they smile. Pretty amazing. The streets have been compared to a jungle before (check out The Message by Grand Master Flash: “It’s like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder how I keep from going under.”) but never have they “smiled with your heart in their teeth.” All because Mos Def stayed in the vein of his metaphor. Here’s how you can do it. Let’s use Mos Def’s metaphor: The city is a jungle.

Creating a Worksheet

Now we’re going to begin to tie many of the techniques we’ve worked on these past few weeks together. Start with your initial idea and do an object writing on it. Choose one side of the metaphor, in this case either the city or the jungle.

1. Idea Generation

Remember, no more than 10 minutes using as many of your senses as possible. I chose the jungle:

The humid air makes everything stick to me. My shirt is sucked onto my body. The heat comes in waves, is hot like breath. The jungle’s breath. The squawking of monkey’s in the towering canopy above. Chattering cries. The trees seem to reach up forever forming a perfect lid on this thick air. An air-tight seal in steam and sweat. Even plants have teeth as they chew at my skin. Hot drops of water from the weeping trees, it’s dark here, even in the middle of the day. Fear hides in every shadow. Are we being stalked? A panther? The stillness is worse, what you can’t see can hurt you.

2. Make a List of Interesting Words or Phrases

humid air shirt sucked onto my body

the jungle’s breath squawking

towering canopy chattering, crying

a perfect lid an air-tight seal in steam and sweat

weeping trees dark in the middle of the day

fear hides in shadows plants have teeth

stalked

3. Two Questions Modified: Super-Imposing

We just spent 10 minutes elaborating on what characteristics the jungle has so we’ve already answered the first question of metaphor making. We are trying to cross the jungle with the city so the question we must now ask is “what in the city shares these qualities?” Look back at our list. The way we are going to accomplish this is by taking the action words and images from the jungle and super-imposing them on the city.

Humid air doesn’t get us much, nor does shirt sucked onto my body. But starting with the jungle’s breath we can maybe get somewhere. The city has breath too, it’s hot and full of exhaust. The squawking in the city is no longer the monkey’s but could be car horns and sirens. The towering canopy is no longer trees but sky scrapers. The chattering and cries are from people, maybe the collage of languages one can hear in most larger cities. The weeping trees could be the drainpipes that still spout rusty water after the rain. Darkness in the middle of the day is now the result of the towering buildings, indeed in Manhattan the sun shines on the street for just a few hours a day. And shadows can be dangerous in the city too, murderers, thieves, or muggers can be waiting, or even stalking you. Now we are ready to write in the vein The City is a Jungle.

The City is a Jungle

The city is a jungle. It’s humid exhale sucks my shirt onto my body. Horns and sirens squawk and cry out. Above, a towering canopy of sky-scrapers block the sun forming an air-tight seal in steam and sweat. People chatter in their native tongue while drain pipes weep rusty water. Fear hides in every shadow here. Panthers pine for your purse. And the stillness is worse, what you can’t see can hurt you.

That worked out pretty nice. Now it’s your turn.

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ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC: Understanding Performance Rights Organizations

The purpose of a Performance Rights Organization is to figure out who’s music is getting played and then paying that artist, writer and publisher for public performances of their work. It’s hard to put a price tag or a number on how important music is to the world but long ago, when the record business was just getting started, artists and writers of music argued that what they were doing was of some value to the world. And radio stations and bars and clubs and concert halls and shopping malls all agreed, music definitely was good for business. So around this time the first Performance Rights Organization was created. It was called the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers or ASCAP. It’s job was to figure out all the ways and places in which music was being used publicly and how to turn that into dollars for the people creating the music. They came up with a scheme that was pretty simple to understand and quite effective. They did this by selling licenses to any place of business that used music. If you wanted to start a radio station you had to buy a license from ASCAP. If you owned a club where live music was going to be performed you had to buy a license from ASCAP. If you owned a store where you were going to play music to create a relaxing atmosphere for your shoppers, you had to buy a license from ASCAP. And it remains the same today, but now there are three major organizations that collect performance money, one is ASCAP, another is BMI and the last is SESAC. All do the exact same thing: Collect money for artists, writers and publishers for the public performance of their songs.

Before we go any further let me explain a few ins and out of Performance Rights Organizations. Let’s start with a few definitions:

Artist: The person performing the piece of music. Some artists write their own music and lyrics, some do not. As you will see there is quite an advantage to being a writer as far as Performance Rights Organizations are concerned. In fact artists who only perform other people’s music do not get any money from the public performance of that music. The author of the lyrics and the music that the artist is performing is the one sitting back collecting checks!

Composer: The person writing the music. In a traditional songwriting arrangement the person who makes the music gets half of the writer’s share. More on that later.

Author/Lyricist: The person writing the words to the music the composer wrote. As you know, not all music has lyrics, but for the last 70-80 years most popular music has. In a traditional songwriting arrangement the person who writes the lyrics gets half of the writer’s share. If there are two lyricists they must split the lyricist’s half in half. So two lyricists are each only getting a quarter of the total writer’s share.

Publisher: The publisher is someone who works for Artists, Composers, and Lyricists (and themselves) to publicize musical works. This means it is their job to try to find ways to make money on the music they represent. This may include getting a song placed in movies or on TV shows. It can include getting songs used in commercials, it can even include helping artists get in touch with more people that can help them, like record labels, promoters etc. The bottom line is that publishers are trying to get the music they represent to the public to make money for themselves and their Artists, Composers and their Lyricists.

Now, each Performance Rights Organizations has it’s own way of calculating how to pay their artists, composers, and publishers that I’ll look at in a later post, but all of them do a few things the same:

They all sell licenses to use their music. That means that someone wanting to start a radio station today must buy three licenses to broadcast music, one from ASCAP, one from BMI and one from SESAC. That’s because Ciarra may be represented by one and T-Pain is represented by another. If a radio station wants to play Ciarra’s music and T-Pain’s music it needs a license for both. Remember: ASCAP, BMI and SESAC represent ALL the music made in the United States.

They all split the money they collect from licenses and pay half to the Writers of the music and half to the Publishers. What? You mean if my song gets played I only get half the money? Well, yes and no. Let’s look at the typical arrangement first. If you have a song on the radio that generates $10,000 dollars your Performance Rights Organization pays you $5000 and your publisher $5000. Why? Because Publishers are not paid by anyone, they make their money when you make your money. Remember, it is the Publishers job to publicize your work, and what better motivation to get out there and make money for you than for them to also be making money for themselves.

“But I want ALL the money!” you say. Ok, you can have it: By being your own publisher. All the Performance Rights Organizations let you also start publishing companies with them so that you can collect your writer’s share and your publisher’s share! And don’t be scared by the idea of starting your own company. It’s as simple as coming up with a name that hasn’t been used and then giving your social security number and stating that you are the sole proprietor (I will go into further detail about different kinds of companies in a later post including what a ‘sole proprietor’ is).

All said, though, don’t underestimate the power of a publisher. A good publisher is often well connected, much better connected to people who could use your music than you, so you need to weigh carefully the pros and cons of each scenario. Then again, you can always start your own publishing company and then when a better opportunity presents itself you can re-assign your publishing rights to a bigger publisher. Either way, never give away publishing rights for anything other than publishing. Don’t trade beats for publishing. Don’t give your lawyer publishing (unless they can prove that they can make you money publicizing your work). Save your publishing for someone who can really do something for you.

Now, remember what I said earlier about how the Writer’s Share is traditionally carved up. Traditionally, the writer of the music gets half of the writer’s share and the lyricist gets half of the writer’s share. So of this $10,000 the lyricist will only get $2500, half of half!

Now if you have two lyricists they are expected to split half of their half of their half! Like this:

You get the idea, it only gets worse the more lyricists you have on your song. And look at that Publisher way up there with his $5000…makes you want to go into publishing doesn’t it!

Lastly, I’d like to point out that there is no artist in this equation. You better be an artist who writes, or composes music if you want to get paid this way. Better yet, be an artist who does both…and has their own publishing company!

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Better Metaphors: Two Questions To Help You Create Better Lyrics

Last week I talked about the essence of metaphor creation, that they are essential the collisions of ideas or things that don’t belong together. We explored this through an exercise called Word Collision, which is essentially the “accidental” creation of metaphor through the random pairing of nouns and adjectives. This week I’d like to be a little more purposeful and give you two guiding questions that drive and inform all good metaphor creation.

The trick is in identifying the connecting idea. Here are the two questions you need to get to the heart of it:

What characteristics does this idea have?
What else has those characteristics?

Let’s see this in action. I’m going to pick something to illustrate how the metaphors come tumbling out with just these two questions. I’ve picked the police as my subject. Now I ask myself, “what qualities do the the police have?” and just start listing the fragments:

protect
corrupt
peace keepers
abuse
power
control

We’ll start there. Now I ask myself, “what else has those characteristics?” Just take one of the words to start. I’ll take protect:

Guns protect
So do houses, buildings, and bomb shelters
Clothing protects, raincoats, sorrels, gloves.

Let’s see what we have:

The police are the guns of society

The police are the bomb shelters of the city

A raincoat of police

I kind of like that last one. You can just see the police fanning out. Let’s keep going. Corrupt:

The Mob is corrupt
Dictatorships are corrupt
A computer virus corrupts a computer file.

The police are the mob of the city

The police are the dictators of society

A virus of police

Again, I like that last one. It’s a bit abstract, (what exactly does a virus of police look like?) but it gives me the general impression of an out of control force working towards a bad end. Alright, one more. Let’s take power:

Hurricanes have power
So do horses
Ferrari’s have power
The United States has power
Cannons, tanks, and explosions have power.

A hurricane of police

An explosion of police

The police are society’s cannons

Again, interesting. I never would have thought to say, “a hurricane of police”, but I think it is a rich metaphor in that I can see them moving with the speed and ferocity of 100mph winds. See how many metaphors I’ve generated? And that was just from three of our words. There’s no limit to the number of ideas you can generate. Now you try. And by all means, drop me your favorites in the comments below.

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Stolen, Completely

1. Liam Howlett, Prodigy

2. Jamie Lidell

3. Nick Rhodes, Duran Duran

4. The Stafford Brothers

5. Paul Hartnoll, Orbital

6. Dave Spoon

7. Steve Angello

8. Lifelike

9. Prok & Fitch

10. Will Gregory, Goldfrapp

11. Alex Gopher

12. Luke Vibert

13. Steve Lipson

14. Trevor Horn

15. A Guy Called Gerald

16. Arno Cost

17. Sigur Rós

18. Neon Circus

19. RJD2

20. Olav Basoski

21. Utah Saints

22. Super8 & Tab

23. Simian Mobile Disco

24. Tocadisco

25. Mr Hudson

26. Karl Hyde, Underworld

27. Yves La Rock

28. Pete Gooding

29. Vince Clarke

30. Riton

31. Fatboy Slim

32. Peter Hook

33. ATFC

34. Steve Lawler

35.Gui Boratto

36. Serge Santiago

37. Sean Tyas

Creating a Worksheet

1. Idea Generation

2. Make a List of Interesting Words or Phrases

3. Two Questions Modified: Super-Imposing

The City is a Jungle

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