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The Next Step

After looking through quite a few Youtube videos, it seems like the consensus converges on one idea: Making a living as a musician is virtually impossible. To make a living making music, one has to virtually be your own music producer, musician(s), marketing department, promoter, graphic designer, photographer, video producer, social media expert on every platform known on the planet, networking guru, expert email marketer, booking agent, etc. Anyone of these efforts, to be done well and successfully, is extremely time consuming. This is especially true if you are not an expert. Those who can start-up with a healthy budget can outsource many of these tasks, but it is no guarantee that you will succeed. I have known independent musicians to spend $100k on just the production alone, only to turn around and be shut down for lack of success. Record labels had much higher budgets.

The first release I put out was on cassette tape, and I chose to manufacture it myself! That included talking to the printer for the j-card design, copying cassettes in real-time, shrink wrapping the cassettes, getting mechanical rights, booking the concerts, selling cassettes at the concerts. It also meant trucking around a sound system and engineering my own live sound. With every new release the process became a little easier, as I was able to secure a distributor. This would mean world wide distribution and radio play. It also meant that I had something of a limited budget to professionally manufacture CDs and also get a little help with the cost of graphic design for the album/CD covers.

It appears that the value of music has been reduced to women’s bouncing butts in tiny thongs and visual and sound effects. This translates to about $0.006 per stream. Trends do change. At one time it was men’s bouncing hair. So what’s the next step for today’s musician? What is the next step for me? I love making music; so if I value the power and beauty music can have on the soul, the music I create will be priceless. It’s value will not be based on how many plays or views it has gotten online.

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Covid-19, please go away! You are disrupting everything!

The Djembe

When I record the djembe, I record with a mic up top and a mic down at the bottom.  Here I have turned it into a stereo track with some live reverb. The bottom mic captures the bass sounds, and the top mic captures the subtle treble timbres.  For this example, I’m playing a Latin based rhythm quickly followed by an African beat.

This drum has substantial sustain for it’s size.  Today humidity has affected the drum a little bit.  Sometimes I use a heat gun to remove some moisture from the drum, bringing up the pitch to it’s original tuning.