JustDave

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-