Firstly apologies for the gap between my last blog entry and this one, it’s been far too long. Writing these things is not something that comes particularly naturally to me as I (stupidly) tend just to assume that everyone already knows what I am up to so there is no need to tell anybody (which of course you don’t, if I don’t write a blog).
I left it back in mid March questioning whether an original artist doing some cover songs for a different angle on exposure was a good idea. Well I now have four cover songs with videos on the JustDave YouTube Channel to go with my one original song video, and I can safely say that they haven’t exactly set the world alight……. yet. This may just be because none of the videos show me impaling myself on a BMX bike while doing a triple back flip with a half turn over a bus, or show my dog skateboarding and doing a paw stand while eating ravioli through a straw etc, etc.
Seriously though, the first cover video went on YouTube in early April and the latest in early June and after a good few initial hits each one had just a trickle of views until the last week or so when all of them are being watched much more regularly now and the view count for all of them is increasing steadily.
I originally had around fourteen songs to choose from for the videos and I eventually recorded six of them. Of those six, I only used four as I wasn’t as happy as I felt I should have been with the final song feel on the other two. Three are acoustic with me just playing either acoustic guitar or keyboards and singing but the ,fourth was a late addition and is a full production with a guest vocalist.
The first three were good fun and served their purpose as the basis for a video as intended but it is the fourth song which has proved to be invaluable to me.
I was asked if I could play and produce a cover song for a friend of mine, Lauren Salter, to sing to. It sounded like a good project so I agreed. She chose Avril Lavigne’s ‘My Happy Ending’ which I learned, played and recorded as faithfully as I could manage.
What has proved so valuable to me is that this is the first time I have ever had reason to carefully study and try to reproduce someone else’s production, much less an artist with massive resources behind them.
After listening to the original track numerous times you can start to hear loads of additional tracks they have used to support the sounds that are the basis of the track. I am probably way short of what actually was recorded in their studio but even with my resources I have three different electric guitar tracks, two different acoustic guitar tracks, three different keyboard tracks over and above the standard array of guitar, bass, keyboard and drum tracks which you use to form the basis of the song you believe you are hearing when you hear the track on the radio etc.
With the two separate drum kits used and a good few of both Lauren’s and my own vocal tracks, my version as it is has 54 audio tracks (effect and group tracks take this total well over 65 tracks). Having the tracks down is all very well but then getting the individual sounds right and mixing that many tracks on a PC is a formidable task.
What I am really saying is that I would recommend to anyone who records and produces their own material to try this exercise as the educational value of doing this track has been more valuable over a shorter space of time than anything I have done previously.
Obviously I am not saying that in some naive way I believe my version of this song is perfect or a total reproduction of what Avril Lavigne did. It definitely has a lot of my own interpretation (and my mistakes) in it, but the amount I learned about how what you hear on major recordings is achieved and how much of it is not what it originally seems to be is massive.
Take a listen to the track at JustDave Downloads where you can hear it and download it for free and please let me know what you think.
We also did a video for it which is on the JustDave YouTube Channel. Lauren did a great job with both her vocals and the video and is really pleased with the result for both. I’m fairly pleased too.
Its not that I either want to sound like Avril Lavigne or even to necessarily use the sounds like a typical modern commercial recording, but learning the basis of how they make their sounds will inevitably help me to make my own sounds better in future.
You really should try it.
Thanks for reading
-JD-
I am completely new to this blog thing so bear with me if this sounds like the ramblings of a deranged personality…. It’s just it probably is!
Please feel free to drop me a note if there is something I raise here that you want to add to in any way and I will include your comments and feedback in my future drivel. (Believe me I know that I am far from always being right and there are two sides to every discussion so I don’t mind holding my hands up if someone makes a good point. These are after all, only my opinions.)
Please feel free to drop me a note if there is something I raise here that you want to add to in any way and I will include your comments and feedback in my future drivel. (Believe me I know that I am far from always being right and there are two sides to every discussion so I don’t mind holding my hands up if someone makes a good point. These are after all, only my opinions.)
My Last Word on Covers - I Promise !!
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To Cover/Not to Cover – That is the question!
As I have mentioned numerous times on various web sites, I have been working on some acoustic cover songs lately. I am using predominantly just vocals and an acoustic guitar although on one track I have used just keyboards and vocals and on a couple of tracks I have overdubbed a second (electric) guitar. None of the tracks are strictly fully live and all have been through the studio recording process.
The songs themselves are intended as ‘unplugged’ style backing tracks for YouTube videos, the first of which I uploaded this morning to my YouTube channel at JustDave YouTube Channel for the purpose of self promotion. I have also made the MP3’s of the tracks available for free download in the ‘Members Area’ of my official website. (You can become a member simply by joining my mailing list at JustDave Mailing List – it’s all free).
Doing the cover songs is all very well but the question I am sure you are all asking is why, as an original artist, am I doing covers of other people’s songs in the first place?
Part of the answer is that it is quite good fun and provides a break from writing, rewriting, recording and rerecording original songs, with covers at least you know where they are going when you start one. The real answer is that I feel a large majority of people would prefer to hear something they are more familiar from a new artist to help them to assess that artist before they move on to listen to the original tracks.
Obviously this process isn’t necessary with commercially backed artists as the level of advertising and airplay they get by default makes people believe that they have heard most new releases before anyway (although many bigger artists have started their careers with a cover song and some still make a career out of cover songs!) Similarly a great number of commercially available tracks are written to template format anyway whereby the sounds, structures, melodies and production used are extremely similar to each other so that even new tracks have a very familiar feel to them. Obviously not being commercially signed etc, I am not privileged to these inbuilt advantages so I have to try to make my luck using other methods.
Another advantage of this is as I am not currently playing live, the videos give people a way of seeing me playing (live????) and to get a different angle from the promotional photos and words which is all that would be otherwise available.
Writing this I have almost convinced myself that this is a great idea.
Good idea/crap idea – you choose! I’ll let you know if there proves to be a method in the madness later.
Thanks for reading.
-JD-
The songs themselves are intended as ‘unplugged’ style backing tracks for YouTube videos, the first of which I uploaded this morning to my YouTube channel at JustDave YouTube Channel for the purpose of self promotion. I have also made the MP3’s of the tracks available for free download in the ‘Members Area’ of my official website. (You can become a member simply by joining my mailing list at JustDave Mailing List – it’s all free).
Doing the cover songs is all very well but the question I am sure you are all asking is why, as an original artist, am I doing covers of other people’s songs in the first place?
Part of the answer is that it is quite good fun and provides a break from writing, rewriting, recording and rerecording original songs, with covers at least you know where they are going when you start one. The real answer is that I feel a large majority of people would prefer to hear something they are more familiar from a new artist to help them to assess that artist before they move on to listen to the original tracks.
Obviously this process isn’t necessary with commercially backed artists as the level of advertising and airplay they get by default makes people believe that they have heard most new releases before anyway (although many bigger artists have started their careers with a cover song and some still make a career out of cover songs!) Similarly a great number of commercially available tracks are written to template format anyway whereby the sounds, structures, melodies and production used are extremely similar to each other so that even new tracks have a very familiar feel to them. Obviously not being commercially signed etc, I am not privileged to these inbuilt advantages so I have to try to make my luck using other methods.
Another advantage of this is as I am not currently playing live, the videos give people a way of seeing me playing (live????) and to get a different angle from the promotional photos and words which is all that would be otherwise available.
Writing this I have almost convinced myself that this is a great idea.
Good idea/crap idea – you choose! I’ll let you know if there proves to be a method in the madness later.
Thanks for reading.
-JD-
Is There Anybody Out There????
Since the release of my CD Well I Never… at the end of September, I have been working quite hard to get it some exposure. So far it is available here , CDBaby and most recently iTunes,. I have had online reviews and interviews with various sites, I am advertising it on all of the other 14 sites I am involved with and it will shortly be on every other significant online download retailer you can think of.
I offer free high quality MP3 downloads of five songs on this website and lower quality downloads of the same songs on a further three other sites.
For the most part the reviews have been great, the critical feedback on GarageBand.com has been very positive and the people who have listened to the songs are generally impressed. I am getting a reasonable amount of traffic through each of the sites and am high on the charts in a couple of them (in fact I have been Number One for two weeks on the UnsignedBandWeb.com Pop/Rock chart with up to four songs in the top ten at the same time.)
The problem though, is with MySpace. As of yesterday (1st November) I hit 1000 song plays from over 2700 visits. On the surface that looks quite OK, but considering I have six songs on there (and have always had no less than four) it had the potential for between 10,000 and 15,000 song plays relative to the number of visitors. The fact that it is only around one listen per 2.7 visits suggests that a lot of visitors look at the number of song plays and think ‘That’s Not Very Popular So It Can’t Be Any Good’.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not a moan it is just a statement of the Bleedin’ Obvious about something which will be affecting all new MySpace members. Most of the MySpace sites I have looked at have been there for at least a couple of years where mine has only been there since the start of August this year (as in a couple of months). I am very, very grateful to all the people who have taken the time to have look and even more so to those who had a listen but isn’t it obvious to most people that when you see a band from Outer Mongolia that has 10,000 visits but 1.2 million song plays and only two songs on the track list that they may have bought a bit of dodgy software to create an illusion?
The easy answer to that question is obviously NO, a large number of people are obviously influenced only by the song play counter completely in spite of all the other available facts and I don’t doubt as a result of the deception these bands are now getting significantly more genuine plays. I'm not actually sure which is the most sad, the fact that bands resort to this or the fact that people are so hyped up over a (fictional) expectation of Instant Celebrity that they force bands to resort to this to be noticed in the first place.
At this point you may be thinking that ‘people aren’t listening to your songs because they are rubbish, but as yet there hasn’t been sufficient people listening to my songs on MySpace to pass that sort of judgement and the other sites are suggesting a different story.
Either way I am glad to have got that of my chest and I can safely say that I am in this for the long game and won’t be resorting to underhand tactics to attract attention. Let’s see what has happened in another few months.
Thanks for reading.
-JD-
I offer free high quality MP3 downloads of five songs on this website and lower quality downloads of the same songs on a further three other sites.
For the most part the reviews have been great, the critical feedback on GarageBand.com has been very positive and the people who have listened to the songs are generally impressed. I am getting a reasonable amount of traffic through each of the sites and am high on the charts in a couple of them (in fact I have been Number One for two weeks on the UnsignedBandWeb.com Pop/Rock chart with up to four songs in the top ten at the same time.)
The problem though, is with MySpace. As of yesterday (1st November) I hit 1000 song plays from over 2700 visits. On the surface that looks quite OK, but considering I have six songs on there (and have always had no less than four) it had the potential for between 10,000 and 15,000 song plays relative to the number of visitors. The fact that it is only around one listen per 2.7 visits suggests that a lot of visitors look at the number of song plays and think ‘That’s Not Very Popular So It Can’t Be Any Good’.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not a moan it is just a statement of the Bleedin’ Obvious about something which will be affecting all new MySpace members. Most of the MySpace sites I have looked at have been there for at least a couple of years where mine has only been there since the start of August this year (as in a couple of months). I am very, very grateful to all the people who have taken the time to have look and even more so to those who had a listen but isn’t it obvious to most people that when you see a band from Outer Mongolia that has 10,000 visits but 1.2 million song plays and only two songs on the track list that they may have bought a bit of dodgy software to create an illusion?
The easy answer to that question is obviously NO, a large number of people are obviously influenced only by the song play counter completely in spite of all the other available facts and I don’t doubt as a result of the deception these bands are now getting significantly more genuine plays. I'm not actually sure which is the most sad, the fact that bands resort to this or the fact that people are so hyped up over a (fictional) expectation of Instant Celebrity that they force bands to resort to this to be noticed in the first place.
At this point you may be thinking that ‘people aren’t listening to your songs because they are rubbish, but as yet there hasn’t been sufficient people listening to my songs on MySpace to pass that sort of judgement and the other sites are suggesting a different story.
Either way I am glad to have got that of my chest and I can safely say that I am in this for the long game and won’t be resorting to underhand tactics to attract attention. Let’s see what has happened in another few months.
Thanks for reading.
-JD-
Defining Moments
I have been on a mission recently to try to define the type of music I make for the benefit of providing a description which will actually convey something useful to other web users if it comes up in a search. I am sure that this is a dilemma that every band experiences when they set up a page on the web.
I initially described my music as Pop/Rock but then added PowerPop to the description as my stuff can have a bit more edge to it in places than what most people perceive as simply Pop/Rock. The trouble is that a small group of words like this isn’t able to convey what a twelve song album is actually all about with any degree of accuracy and can tend to put you into a pigeon hole you shouldn’t necessarily be in and by that give potential listeners the wrong impression and therefore make them still only potential listeners.
The reason I say this is that while trying to define my own music I have listened to numerous other songs which are on the various charts or pages of other sites (most specifically GarageBand, MySpace and UnsignedBandWeb as JustDave is represented on each of them) to see what the common expectation is of the various available genres. What I have found is that very few of the songs in the various categories of Pop/Rock/PowerPop/Indie/Alternative or the various combinations of each etc. actually sound anything like what their short chart/genre description suggests. That is not to say that the songs aren’t good as most of them were excellent, it’s just that the description doesn’t fit the product.
One of the biggest oddities I have come across is the use of the word ‘Alternative’ which you seem to be able to attach in front of any other group of genres to change the overall meaning. For example there is:
Alternative - (MySpace and UBW, but on MySpace it can be used with any other two genres to make a different description)
Alternative Country – (UBW)
Alternative Metal
Alternative Pop
Alternative Rock – (All on GarageBand)
Not very long ago alternative music (before they invented the term ‘experimental’ as a musical definition) was when someone recorded a track playing a Gregorian nose flute with their arse to the rhythm of a drum kit made entirely of kitchen utensils, plastic pipes and a plywood box playing in a loose 16/43 time signature with sporadic animal noises in place of the vocals. In other words the musical equivalent of modern art where the guys playing it really believe there is no other form and anything different is crap and their ‘followers’ by and large don’t understand it but think it’s cool to be around these people.
Wikipedia Description Wikipedia
Alternative rock (also called alternative music, alt-rock or simply alternative; known primarily in the UK as indie) is a genre of rock music that emerged in the 1980s and became widely popular in the 1990s. Alternative rock consists of various subgenres that have emerged from the independent music scene since the 1980s, such as grunge, Britpop, gothic rock, and indie pop. These genres are unified by their collective debt to the style and/or ethos of punk rock, which laid the groundwork for alternative music in the 1970’s. At times alternative rock has been used as a catch-all phrase for rock music from underground artists in the 1980s, and all music descended from punk rock (including punk itself, new wave, and post-punk).
Not a bad description as far as I can tell and pretty much as I thought I understood it. Further down the same page it goes on to describe some of the common elements which make certain musical styles Alternative and on the basis of those descriptions, a lot of my stuff could be considered Alternative too.
I noticed the other day that on the Coldplay ‘Official’ MySpace site they define themselves (presumably) as ‘Alternative/Pop/Rock’. In my opinion Coldplay are about as ‘Alternative’ as Big Brother contestants are talented as are a vast amount of other acts who use ‘Alternative’ in their genre description. (Read the wording here carefully before you get all exited and start slagging me off)
If the Wikipedia description is accurate, then Indie and Alternative are much the same thing but from different countries of origin. So why do the sites also include separate ‘Indie’ references?:
‘Indie – (MySpace and UBW, but on MySpace it can be used with any other two genres to make a different description)
Indie Rock – (GarageBand)
‘Indie’ simply derives from ‘Independent Record Company/Label’, as in – not one of the majors, although strangely, in terms of a musical style, it is actually a better description as most true Indie bands had a style that was not mainstream hence why they were on an independent label. Given that these bands were actually signed and most bands on the aforementioned websites are not, this makes it very hard for Indie to be the correct description.
The thing I have found by listening to other peoples music is that if all that is described as Indie/Alternative is actually that under the current definition, then Indie/Alternative is actually mainstream. This is obviously the exact opposite of the definition above so one of them is wrong – which is it??????
Don’t get me wrong, a lot of the music under the Indie or Alternative listings is exactly that by the current definition, it’s just an equal amount isn’t even close. Unfortunately the attitude I described in my own definition (anything different is crap…) still seems to apply to a lot of these acts (and I suspect mostly the ones who aren’t really Indie/Alternative).
On the basis that if everything else is crap if it isn’t Indie/Alternative – and a lot of these bands aren’t actually Indie/Alternative, does that make those bands crap by default.
No of course it doesn’t, but it doesn’t mean that their attitudes aren’t.
Anyway, nuff said about that as I’m still no closer to figuring out what my own definition should be. I’ll keep thinking and I’ll let you know where I get to in a future post.
If you got this far, thanks for reading.
-JD-
I initially described my music as Pop/Rock but then added PowerPop to the description as my stuff can have a bit more edge to it in places than what most people perceive as simply Pop/Rock. The trouble is that a small group of words like this isn’t able to convey what a twelve song album is actually all about with any degree of accuracy and can tend to put you into a pigeon hole you shouldn’t necessarily be in and by that give potential listeners the wrong impression and therefore make them still only potential listeners.
The reason I say this is that while trying to define my own music I have listened to numerous other songs which are on the various charts or pages of other sites (most specifically GarageBand, MySpace and UnsignedBandWeb as JustDave is represented on each of them) to see what the common expectation is of the various available genres. What I have found is that very few of the songs in the various categories of Pop/Rock/PowerPop/Indie/Alternative or the various combinations of each etc. actually sound anything like what their short chart/genre description suggests. That is not to say that the songs aren’t good as most of them were excellent, it’s just that the description doesn’t fit the product.
One of the biggest oddities I have come across is the use of the word ‘Alternative’ which you seem to be able to attach in front of any other group of genres to change the overall meaning. For example there is:
Alternative - (MySpace and UBW, but on MySpace it can be used with any other two genres to make a different description)
Alternative Country – (UBW)
Alternative Metal
Alternative Pop
Alternative Rock – (All on GarageBand)
Not very long ago alternative music (before they invented the term ‘experimental’ as a musical definition) was when someone recorded a track playing a Gregorian nose flute with their arse to the rhythm of a drum kit made entirely of kitchen utensils, plastic pipes and a plywood box playing in a loose 16/43 time signature with sporadic animal noises in place of the vocals. In other words the musical equivalent of modern art where the guys playing it really believe there is no other form and anything different is crap and their ‘followers’ by and large don’t understand it but think it’s cool to be around these people.
Wikipedia Description Wikipedia
Alternative rock (also called alternative music, alt-rock or simply alternative; known primarily in the UK as indie) is a genre of rock music that emerged in the 1980s and became widely popular in the 1990s. Alternative rock consists of various subgenres that have emerged from the independent music scene since the 1980s, such as grunge, Britpop, gothic rock, and indie pop. These genres are unified by their collective debt to the style and/or ethos of punk rock, which laid the groundwork for alternative music in the 1970’s. At times alternative rock has been used as a catch-all phrase for rock music from underground artists in the 1980s, and all music descended from punk rock (including punk itself, new wave, and post-punk).
Not a bad description as far as I can tell and pretty much as I thought I understood it. Further down the same page it goes on to describe some of the common elements which make certain musical styles Alternative and on the basis of those descriptions, a lot of my stuff could be considered Alternative too.
I noticed the other day that on the Coldplay ‘Official’ MySpace site they define themselves (presumably) as ‘Alternative/Pop/Rock’. In my opinion Coldplay are about as ‘Alternative’ as Big Brother contestants are talented as are a vast amount of other acts who use ‘Alternative’ in their genre description. (Read the wording here carefully before you get all exited and start slagging me off)
If the Wikipedia description is accurate, then Indie and Alternative are much the same thing but from different countries of origin. So why do the sites also include separate ‘Indie’ references?:
‘Indie – (MySpace and UBW, but on MySpace it can be used with any other two genres to make a different description)
Indie Rock – (GarageBand)
‘Indie’ simply derives from ‘Independent Record Company/Label’, as in – not one of the majors, although strangely, in terms of a musical style, it is actually a better description as most true Indie bands had a style that was not mainstream hence why they were on an independent label. Given that these bands were actually signed and most bands on the aforementioned websites are not, this makes it very hard for Indie to be the correct description.
The thing I have found by listening to other peoples music is that if all that is described as Indie/Alternative is actually that under the current definition, then Indie/Alternative is actually mainstream. This is obviously the exact opposite of the definition above so one of them is wrong – which is it??????
Don’t get me wrong, a lot of the music under the Indie or Alternative listings is exactly that by the current definition, it’s just an equal amount isn’t even close. Unfortunately the attitude I described in my own definition (anything different is crap…) still seems to apply to a lot of these acts (and I suspect mostly the ones who aren’t really Indie/Alternative).
On the basis that if everything else is crap if it isn’t Indie/Alternative – and a lot of these bands aren’t actually Indie/Alternative, does that make those bands crap by default.
No of course it doesn’t, but it doesn’t mean that their attitudes aren’t.
Anyway, nuff said about that as I’m still no closer to figuring out what my own definition should be. I’ll keep thinking and I’ll let you know where I get to in a future post.
If you got this far, thanks for reading.
-JD-
