 Hello, everybody. I decided to do this because I've been a part of the music industry for a long time, and only recently have I started to see the light. So I noticed that a lot of people were going through this before. You've probably heard this similar type of presentation before pitched to you by somebody who may not be even be affiliated anyway, shape or form with either an artist or the music industry. I want to give it a little bit different spin since I've been doing music for a long time. One thing I would like to, first of all, I would like to thank the guys from the Jinx booth over here for giving me this awesome F the RIAA shirt in the RIAA toilet paper. I'm a little bit leery about wiping anything with it, but I might try to blow my nose with it or something, or wipe my dog's ass with it or something. I just threw this up here. I don't know why I did that. OK, the purpose of my presentation is twofold. First of all, I want to point out some things that you may not have known about the music industry. Second, I want to prove to you that you do not need a big recording studio to make a good record. Thanks, Tom. One of the first things is, I'd like to point out, that the recording industry is not about music. Maybe back in the old days of the Beach Boys, even then they were monetarily driven. But really, today, that's all they're all about. Money for the company. They're also about image and product. You should buy this. This is cool. This is the next big thing. When actually, people should be determining what's the next big thing. They don't care about the consumers of their products. And that's pretty obvious. What they do is, they will use you as test markets. They will take new things like anti-piracy software. And they will package it and put it in certain markets. They know full well that this will not work on some of your systems. But they haven't ingrained in our minds that, hey, if you buy software or you buy a CD, you can't return it. That's not true. Not in all cases. If you take a CD and say, this does not play, in my CD player, back to Best Buy, nine times out of 10, they'll take it back. So they actually, I read somewhere that the return rate on these CDs was like 7%. That's a large number. And on top of that, how many people? Because in the presentation right before this, somebody was saying something about not being able to bring things back. I'm wondering, that number has to be a lot higher. If those are the 7% that brought things back, that number has to be a lot higher. OK. More of what's the problem? Payola. Everybody knows what that is, right? Pay for play on the radio. Most people probably have resigned theirself to the fact of not even listening to the radio anymore. The resistant to change, that's pretty obvious. They don't think, they just have knee-jerk reactions. That's why you come up with these lawsuits and everything else. The current system, it's not how good you are, it's who you know. You know, I could be the best damn musician in the world, but if I don't know anybody and I can't get my foot in the door, then I'm screwed. And the testament to that is half the crap you hear now that's signed to these record labels. And most people don't want to hear it anyway. Artists retain little, if any, of the rights to their music. Hence, the reason you see popular songs in TV commercials. Exactly. I personally, I think that's wrong. If an artist creates a song, they should have a say, you know, that new song commercial? That sucks. I don't want my name on that. Pirate Act. Now, I'm no lawyer, the EFF is a lot better at that kind of stuff than me. But the gist of it is, is they want to take copyright civil suits and turn them in to criminal suits. So now, if you have a certain amount of MP3s that you don't legally own, now you're a felon. And that sucks, exactly. I would also like to say that everybody in this room should contribute money to buy Senator Orrin Hatch a seeing eye dog, because anybody who spends that much time with their head up their ass is about to run into something sooner or later. Getting a recording contract is kind of like winning a lottery. Only if you win the lottery, you actually get some money. Usually, if you get a recording contract, you get screwed. 90% of major label releases don't even turn a profit. So now, not only do you have to win the lottery, you have to do a little bit more on top of that to get people to recognize you. And on top of that, it really doesn't matter because you're being pushed by the record label. If they want you to be popular, they'll push you. If you're like, maybe you pissed somebody off there, they'll dump your ass. Companies, and this has happened to friends of mine, I've been in for a long time, they'll sign a band as a tax write-off. So if you're looking for a recording contract, you definitely don't want to get signed near the end of the year because they're looking to write you off as a tax write-off. And then after the first of the year, well, remember we were supposed to fly out to California and record that album? Well, we changed our mind. Exactly. Overpriced CDs. I don't think I have to go too much into depth about that. Whenever the subject of piracy comes up, they always seem to bring up the fact that, hey, you're stealing from the artist. You're taking this legitimate money away from the artist. You don't usually hear artists complaining other than Metallica. And that was something totally different. At least Metallica never actually sued anybody. They just threatened. They were trying to take down Napster. Another thing is, before I get into the rest of this, in September of 2003, the RIAA went to Congress and said, hey, you need to ban P2P networks because they promote child pornography by enticing children to have sex. That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. A lollipop has a better chance of enticing a child to have sex. You know, I don't see too many pedophiles walking around saying, hey, baby, you want to see Casa? Or you're looking mighty fine in those Oshkosh bagaches. You want to see my lime wire? It's about that ridiculous. Now, why does a CD cost so much anyway? If you ask the recording industry, it's because, hey, manufacturing CDs is expensive. That's bullshit. If that was the case, then AOL would be out of fucking business. Mass produced quantities of CDs cost less than a dollar. And you're paying like $18.99 or some shit at Sam Goody. If you actually buy the actual product from there, I mean, obviously, best buy sells them cheaper. And lime wires even cheaper. I would never entice anybody to do something that's unethical. And it's about the real legal. Yeah. It costs a lot to record a CD. That's also a change. It used to be true. Not recently, in the past few years, recording equipment capable of doing 16-bit, 44-1 resolution, CD quality has become really affordable. Very affordable. They resist change. They fight tooth and nail to keep things the same. They want everything to be the same. You know, it seems funny to me that we as humans can do amazing things. In just 66 years, the Wright brothers went from flying at Kitty Hawk to we put a man on the moon. But if the RIA was in charge of the show, we'd still be flying by planes. If companies, what happens to other companies that resist change? They go out of business. And what if they're in a tech business? I mean, can you imagine trying to even compete in that way? Their only advantage is they have a bunch of old men who don't understand the technology listening to them. And that's their only foothold. And once they lose that, it's all gone. And I kind of compare them to the buggy industry. At the turn of the century, or well, in the early part of the 20th century, in the dawn of the automobile, you had the buggy, the preferred motor transportation. Well, they started enacting all these stupid laws. They started saying, OK, if you're driving an automobile and you come up to an intersection, you've got to jump out of your car, run around three times, holler in every direction, and then you can go through the intersection, kind of making it hard on you if you owned an automobile. But the fact of the matter is it was just too damn efficient to use automobiles. And next thing we know, and some of those laws are still enacted, which is really funny. That's pretty much that. The industry releases 100 songs per week to the radio playlist. And only approximately four get added. So they're releasing 100 songs a week, but they're only pushing four. Exactly. Let's move on. Hit top 40 songs are often repeated over 100 times a week. Even if you like the fucking song, why do you want to hear it that much? I mean, even your favorite song, you don't want to hear that much. To me, that would be a deterrent from listening to the damn radio in the first place, especially if it sucks. One of these companies, Clear Channel Communications, which I have a huge problem with for multiple reasons, other than just music, they used to have a radio program that promoted local artists, gave them airtime, let them do different things. They decided that they'd rather make money instead. So they just pulled the program all together. So that's why Clear Channel sucks. I don't know if you see my sticker, but. Why don't people buy CDs anyway? Well, you can usually group them into several categories, if not all of these categories. But I found, believe it or not, it's not usually the last bullet point. Getting it for free is not the biggest deal to them. A lot of people will still buy CDs if it's something they like. The biggest thing is, I think in my mind, and obviously this is different with everybody, is there's just nothing worth buying. They've gotten to the point where everything sounds the same, or they only like one song. Why are you gonna buy a whole CD for just one song? It's too expensive, that's pretty obvious. And the last one is, I can get it for free. And there are some people out there who just, you know, prefer to never pay for anything. And that's, the people have been like that since the dawn of time. Well, that would be good, but most people don't understand that this is going on. So the smart people are out there, you know, digging in and doing all this. And it's up to us to educate people on the problems. One of my biggest things, as being an artist and doing this for a long time, is applying formulas to artistic works. Now, approximately 90% of all singles get to the hook. Did everybody know what the hook is? That's the catchy part of the song. Within 20 seconds, approximately 98% of all number one singles are less than three minutes and 30 seconds long, which is the nice little compact measurement that the recording industry has given to these songs. And labels often ask artists to change content that they either find offensive or won't sell the record. When Marilyn Manson first came out, first album, obviously Trent Resner found them. They had a song called My Monkey on the very first album. And Interscope was like, uh, you know, that's kind of offensive we want it taken off. Marilyn Manson actually stood up and said, no, I want that on the album. Well, obviously him being a nobody at the time, they said, okay, well, screw it. We just don't want the controversy. We're going to cut Marilyn Manson from our label. And Trent Resner stood up and said, if you cut him, you cut nine inch nails. Next thing you know, you know, Manson's here and they won that. Food for thought. What if we did this to older classics that we've had? Stairway to Heaven. Can you imagine packaging that into three minutes and 30 seconds long, getting to the hook in the first 20 seconds? It would, or Hotel California, or my favorite Bohemian Rhapsody. I mean, what would happen to that song? Trying to put it in nice little compact spaces to fill radio time. How would this have changed music history? And what are we missing out on right now? The old days. In the old days, you needed a contract for distribution. You needed to have your outlet to get people to get your music. Recording equipment was expensive. The recording was expensive. Reproduction was very costly and radio was impossible to reach without record labeled backing. What has changed? Recording equipment capable of 44.1, 16 bit 44.1 is very affordable. Distribution can be done worldwide over the internet with little or no cost. Reproduction prices are cheap. I mean, I can go to S&J CD duplication in Jacksonville, Florida and get 1,000 pressed colored CDs printed, shrink-wrapped, final cost to me is 12.75. And that's only for 1,000. If I do 5,000, I can get that under dollar a package. There's plenty of college and internet radio stations willing to play just good music that don't have to buy the sponsors and everything else that regular radio does and the Clear Channel machine keeps trying to steamroll those. And recording can be done pretty much for free if you own your own equipment, which is my favorite subject and I'll get to that later. More affordable, high-speed internet connections. You no longer need to tour the country and go broke and no geographical limitations you can live pretty much anywhere. And the old days as an artist you used to have to focus on small groups. First you start out in your hometown, then you'd work on your state, then you'd work on your region, then United States, then you'd take over the world. Well, with the internet, you can start World Wide Rift to begin with. I started catching on to this early with two bands ago. I started catching on to this when MP3.com was up. You know, it was very new, but people were going there because they knew the name MP3. So I was like, oh, MP3.com. And they would go there and I was receiving an email from people all over the United States that were saying, hey, we dig your music. This is great. You should play a show in Lincoln, Nebraska or something like that. But you have one or two, they'd be scattered throughout the world. But when you put them together, they equal a lot of people. And that's a lot of potential CD sales if you're gonna sell your own CDs. The future. If independent music levels the playing field. Basically, it's no longer who you are and who you know, it's how good you are. Now my music is reaching people and they like it and they want more of it. Artists retain rights to their material. Obviously if I don't get my rights away to anybody, I retain them. There's no formulas or templates to apply. You have more variety and there's less competition between groups. Local bands are just notorious for getting in fights with each other because there's this notion that there's only one recording contract out there and everybody's competing for it. That couldn't be farther from the truth. Usually when more bands get signed, it creates a scene and then more record labels try to move into scoop up bands. I mean, it happened with Seattle and everything else. So that's not necessarily true but bands still see it that way and then you have club owners who try to fuel that by creating battle of the bands and everything else, which is really stupid. So now I'm gonna get into the part if you're an independent musician, what do you need? What do I need from my recording studio? If you do electronic music, basically all you need is a good computer and a good software program and a good audio card and something to listen to it on that's reasonable. If you're gonna record instruments, vocals and bands and stuff like I do, then you need a little bit more things like IO boxes and stuff of that nature. Some systems will bundle these whole things together and sell them all as one unit. So now you have a final price, the final cost of a unit. As far as your computer recommendations, you should check the software vendor's website for the minimum requirements. Maybe it only runs on certain type of software. No less than 512 megs of RAM. I mean, pretty standard stuff. I'm gonna go through this a little fast cause I started a little late. Updated drivers, same thing you do on your regular system, hopefully. Now as far as the sound card goes, just to give you an idea, this is just a regular sound card. My favorite sound card that I've used and I swear by it is the M Audio, Audio File 2496. You can get it off a musician's friend for 149 bucks and I actually master audio with this card. I don't record my audio with it but I will send it the outputs to it to master it. You can also do the audio track Maya for 199 and anything made by army audio is really good but it'll cost you more. Sound card considerations, you wanna consider something that's low latency, that's at least 2496, that should be right on the card. Most modern things should be 2496. You should check out your system compatibility and nothing made by Sound Blaster. I have yet to hear anything good about anything made by Sound Blaster for recording audio. It may be fine for playing video games but when you're trying to stream 32 tracks of audio through something it usually craps out really fast. Studio monitor recommendations. I like anything that Event makes. I worked in a recording studio for a good many years. I've used the Event BAS 2020 powered by amplified studio monitors for a long time which are a little pricey but they're still under a thousand bucks. Event makes a TR8N which is the ones that replace the ones I currently use and you can get them for 499. I mean that's not bad. They're near field reference monitors. At least this makes an active monitor and so does M-Audio. They're all around the same price. You wanna make sure they're near field reference. Remember the bigger the speaker cone the better bass response you're gonna get and that can be important. I know my events, if I start here in bass bumping in those speakers I know it's gonna be a lot when it gets either on a computer or in my truck. I know it's just gonna overwhelm it. So your users will actually get used to listening to your monitors. You usually listen to music from about three feet away. So that's one good thing you wanna train yourself on and you want active monitors because they have the power amp built right inside the monitor so you don't need an external power amp and they're a lot quieter because their package is one unit. You won't get a lot of annoying home or things of that nature. For vocals, a lot of times if you look at a really good vocal mic they're pricey. I use an AKG solid tube which is a $799 mic which is still under a thousand bucks. You must be a fairly strong vocalist if you're not pushing your vocal tone out there if you have somebody who's not very strong vocalist you wouldn't wanna use this mic. You'd probably wanna use a Neumann TLM103 which is a little bit cheaper. And remember eBay, I mean don't be afraid to buy things off of eBay. I've purchased samplers and things off of eBay and I've never had a hard time with it yet or had something that I had a problem with. And some fairly decent condenser mics can be used for recording audio. You can get them for about 150 bucks but I would just put a preamp in front of them. You can get a focus right preamp for about 150 to 170 bucks too. For instruments, you can usually mic things like mic amplifiers and stuff with anything made by Shure or AKG. Condenser mics for instruments like acoustic guitars. When recording drums, they usually Shure sells a drum kit for about 299 bucks and it's not uncommon to use. Remember if you're doing a really in-depth recording and you're really trying to compete with commercial audio it's not uncommon to use 10 or more mics on a drum kit. For guitars and bass, now I'm in a lot of the forums, recording forums, and I hear people complain about this all day long and they will cuss me out and everything else because I recommend this product to people. The Line 6 Pod, what it is, is it's an amp modulator. So basically it's a little box and you plug your guitar into it and you say okay, I want my guitar to sound like a Mesa boogie. You know, I want it to sound like it's playing to a Mesa and you tune it in. I think it's great and the way audio works is if your ear can't tell what a good guitar sounds like with an amp then you're not gonna tell what one sounds like with this either. So basically you're screwed either way. If you don't know what a good guitar sounds like then doesn't matter what the hell you record with it's still gonna sound like crap. Shure SM57s are probably the standard for mic'ing guitars and bass. Drums, usually like I said, pre-packaged drum kit, $199 and up. Sometimes you get what you pay for, just remember that. And if you have a Pro Tools system like I do, sound replacer will save you a lot of time. Other people complain about this too but the standard person can't tell the damn difference between a good kick drum that's a real kick drum and one that you've sound replaced. Most of the things you hear on the rate, I mean, most recordings you hear nowadays don't have a real drummer on it. Most people don't know that. They save money by doing that. They'll program out a drum loop and the band will play over the top of it and most people can't tell if it's a real drummer or not. I did that with three songs on my last album and I took it back to the same place I worked at for years and the main producer there couldn't tell that that wasn't a real drummer. Plus you usually find out too that drummers bitch more than any other band member. Now you gotta admit that's true. Even my old drummer used to do the same thing. He would always complain, never wanted to move his equipment, thought everybody else had to move it for him. So I think Lars did, fuck Lars. Of course I was saying that not because he was a drummer because he's an idiot. Now some things I would recommend and this is purely from my experience standpoint. I know there's other things out there like some people that use Logic that program I don't wanna sit there and fuck with a million buttons just so I can create one little sound. I mean come on, it has to be realistic. I'm an artist, not freakin' rocket scientist. So when I wanna record something, I wanna get my idea down fast. I wanna be able to express my idea and if I'm sitting there tweakin' a bunch of damn things to get it to sound good, I've lost my inspiration and my ideas. So I swear by Propellerhead's reason. It's a self-contained music product. I think it's like $3.99, I can't remember because the first one was given to me as a promotional product and the second one I upgraded so it only cost me 89 bucks. But this program is a self-contained music program and I sequence all my drums with it. When I do fake drums, I sequence them all out with this. Acid, I really hate to recommend this product to people because people use it wrong. They'll grab loops that are already pre-made and then they'll make a whole song using these pre-made loops. Now there's two sides of thought to this. One is like, hey, you didn't really create a song. You just took a bunch of crap that everybody else didn't put it into one song. But they're royalty-free. So I mean, if you get royalty-free loops, you can use them and make your own songs with them. I personally only use it if I'm gonna remix a track and or VST instruments because I quit using Cubase. And the next one is Cubase SX. It's a very good, very solid program. Like I said, I was only using it for VST instruments and I actually, I owned a copy of Acid and I didn't feel like upgrading to Cubase SX. And when I upgraded my operating system on my computer, my old version Cubase didn't work and they wanted me to pay to upgrade it and I decided to go with a different product. But it's still a good product. Did you design Pro Tools? The industry standard. If you're gonna go out to LA to record an album, they're gonna use Pro Tools. And you can buy a cheap Pro Tools system for if you get an M-Box for like $5.99. And you can use some of the same stuff that these big guys are using. And I also swear by WaveLab. It's a wave editing program and you can also master audio with it if you have the right plugins. Now, I didn't know how musically versed people were. So this is very generic and some of you might laugh if you've actually dealt with like recording people. The engineer is usually the person who gets everything ready and tracks the album. The mixing engineer is the person who mixes this stuff. They put all the levels in the right spot, make sure that the vocals aren't too loud and the bass isn't too loud. The mastering engineer takes the product of mixing and when you're done mixing, you're gonna end up with two tracks, a right and a left. And they take that final two stereo tracks and they make it to where all the levels are right and so it can be played on systems and you don't have to worry about putting this CD in and it's quiet as hell and this CD in over here and it takes your fucking head off. And the producer is the person who makes sure that everything's good from start to finish. Make sure all the ducks are in a row. Problems with the indie system. I didn't wanna like leave this open and say, okay, independent music production is the best thing on earth because you don't have to worry about getting sued and all this other stuff. Advertising and promotions will always be a problem because you don't have big budgets to spend to get your name out there. There's misconceptions. People think because you're not signed that, oh man, when you're not signed, you must not be any good. What record label are you on? Oh, you don't have a record label? Oh, you must suck. There's no rating system. It's mostly peer review. So if you are looking to get your music, say listen to by a producer, most likely it's not gonna happen. You're gonna have to put your music on like garageband.com and you'll have people reviewing your music. But the problem is you don't know who these people are. And a lot of times my problem, I love GarageBand, they're a great outlet, but my problem is is I get in arguments on there because you have somebody who's reviewing your music that's trying to slam you because they're in the same category. And that's something that GarageBand has, they don't care. They're just using that as an outlet and they'll rank people. And there's no good standard way to collect money for plays of your song. The tips I would give to an independent artist are have a good website. Because I mean, everybody's been to a website that they're like, holy shit, this sucks. You know, you don't wanna be the end of that guy's website, you know. Present yourself well. You know, that goes along with the website thing. I guess I just need an extra bullet point for this thing or something. Present yourself bigger than you are. Okay, I'm not just one person. I know a guy who used to do music and people would get dubbed into this all the time. He would use his name and make different names for himself and say all these people worked on his album. So he really wasn't lying. He was just using his nicknames or whatever. Like there's an old hippie thing where you find out your drag queen name by your mother's maiden name and your pet's name. Or your pet's maiden name, or your pet's, well, it wouldn't be your pet's maiden name unless you were really weird. But your pet's name and your mother's maiden name, so he would be like, hey, Blackie Duncan did this, you know. My favorite one was, one of his friends was Lady Hernandez. I thought that was kind of funny. Communicate with other artists and make friendships because the people who do this that are really serious about doing music and that they really care, they wanna help out too. Because there may be something that you can do that they can't do. You know, like me, I can master audio and yeah, I don't like having people work on my songs without me overseeing it because they always do something that I don't like. But shit, I hate to sit there and master my own tracks because it's the worst part because I never think it sounds good. Create independent music networks and know where you are and what you need to do to improve because if you really aren't any good, it doesn't matter how many people listen to your shit, they're still not gonna like it, you know. But that doesn't stop the recording industry from taking something that sounds like shit and playing it in your ears 100 times a week. Tips for an independent music producer. Don't get frustrated. When you're first starting out, there's a lot to learn. Remember, it's always easier to add than to take away. So, you know, if you're putting EQ on something, you don't wanna load it down with EQ and then try to take it off in the end, because that sucks. Listen to your mixes in as many different stereos as you can. Because you may find that it sounds great coming out of your monitors and it may sound great in your truck, but man, when you put it on a boom box it sounds like crap. So, you wanna try to strike a happy medium between that. You wanna get accustomed to your studio monitors. Even your ears, you know, you'll get used to them. You wanna listen in a realistic environment. If I sat in my control room of the recording studio and I put carpet on all four walls, the ceiling and the floor, that's not a realistic environment to listen to music in. I don't know how many people listen to music in a carpeted box. If they do, they're probably dead. You do? I wanna know what your job is, man. Your ears will deceive you from time to time. So ask your friends, hey, does this suck? Does this sound good or what? You know, I used to get criticized all the time because I'd spend so much time working on my songs and I'd be tweaking things out. And there's things I hear that most people can't hear because they haven't listened to it all the time or they don't listen to it that way. You know, as a matter of fact, my friend Gene would do that to me all the time. He'd be like, man, that sounds fine. What are you hearing? You know, so you have to think about it from that way, because there's no way to get it 100% right. Just as soon as you get something where you think it sounds good, you wake up the next morning and you're like, man, what the hell was I thinking? Exactly. Layer your instruments. That's something that most people don't do. If you're gonna record a guitar, don't record one guitar doing the same thing. Record four guitars doing the same thing. You know, and you'll pan them all the way left and all the way right and that way you create a real stereo image. I would never record anything in stereo. You make your own stereo images and that's how the big boys do it. And that's, I was watching a thing with Lincoln Park, who's basically a band that was put together. You know, they picked and choose a bunch of people and threw them together and all their songs are underneath three minutes to 30 seconds long and all their songs get to the hook in the first 20 seconds. But it's not too bad, I guess. I gotta admit, I bought one of their albums. I don't listen to it, but I bought it. But he was saying, well, there's a lot of things we do with the guitar. And it was like on the DVD that came with the CDs. Like, well, there's a lot of things we do with the guitar that we really can't tell you because it's like secret stuff. That's bullshit. All he was talking about was larynge guitars. I mean, that's how you get that wide guitar sound. So I don't know what fucking secret that he thought he had that nobody else had, but I think everybody knows that shit. Sometimes you may sound, something may sound like crap on its own, but it may sound good in a mix. When I get to my project later, the project I did for Def Con, I got really drunk one night and I plugged in the microphone and I started singing. And I bet you none of you can tell that I was like all whacked and shit. But you may, now that I told you, you're kind of like the cat out of the bag. I should have sent him an email later and saying, hey, you know I was drunk? Create stereo effects, I already went for that. Don't be afraid to experiment. This is one problem I see, like when I do independent music reviews, when I review artists, this is a big problem. Be mindful of effects that make your music sound dated. Reverb, if used incorrectly, will make your music sound dated. You'll sound like you're coming from the 70s or the 80s. You don't want to do that. I mean, even if you are going for that sound, man, it'll still sound bad. Clean, punchy, and equalized, right to the edge, will make your music sound modern, even if you're playing some old school shit. You know, that's another thing that gets people. Chevelle has an album called Wonder What's Next. And if you listen to that CD, it's fucking loud. And I mean, there's digital distortion all over it. They just set out to make the loudest CD they could. And they pushed it right to the edge. And most of the people that I know in the music business are like, oh man, I can't stand that sound. It's distorting. I think it sounds good. Just right to the balls, just maxed out. Learn what each EQ range does. If you don't know what bass sounds like, if you don't know what a certain megahertz frequency sounds like, there's no way you're gonna be able to EQ your tracks. The best way to do it is to sit down with an equalizer and pull up a track and crank it all the way up and all the way down, and you'll learn after a while right what it's missing. Now I've made my own music, so now what do I do? Post it online in as many places as possible. That's very easy to do. There's tons of people willing to post your music online for free. They get advertising. Share it through P2P. Get people to notice. Talk to other artists. Get CDs made. Sell CDs and share the knowledge with the community. It's been a proven fact that if you give your music away for free, you'll sell more CDs than if you don't. It's a proven fact. And you won't have to worry about getting sued either. Find internet and college radio stations willing to play your stuff. Find places like iTunes. It's actually possible as an independent music artist to get your music on iTunes. I don't know why that's a misconception too when I talk to other artists and stuff. I don't know why that is. You can get on there. You can use a distribution facility like CD Baby if you're selling your CDs. Use your songs to promote your website and yourself. I mean, maybe you don't wanna make CDs. Maybe you wanna sell t-shirts. Give your music away for free. Draw attention to the t-shirts. Sell the fucking t-shirts and be happy. Collaborative recording process. You can work with people in other places. My last album was mixed in Orlando, Florida while I sat in Jacksonville, Florida and listened to everything the mixing engineer was doing right over a high speed internet connection. I mean, people are doing that nowadays. You don't have to know how to do something to get somebody online to do something for you. A lot of people would be willing to help you out because, I mean, it makes them feel good. I mean, hey, you know, you're really good at what you do. Can you help me out here? You'd be surprised how many people would help you out or mix your stuff. I mean, I've mixed stuff for people in different parts of the world and sent it back to them and they're like, hey, thank you. Sometimes there's nothing I could do for it because it sounds like shit, but, I mean, you can only do so much. I mean, come on. Plenty of help through music forums and I've got some in the links. Streaming audio, that's what I was talking about, about sharing your talents. And now you have a worldwide grouping of people who are talented at what they do that are more than willing to help you out. What does the future hold? Maybe instead of the billboard charts, we have the internet download charts. Different royalty collection methods. More quality independent artists. As artists see that, hey, they don't need a record label to do this, they'll start not accepting record recording contracts. When you see, I mean, if you sell 100,000 CDs and you're signed to a record label, you're getting shit on. If you sell 100,000 CDs on your own, you are banking some serious cake. More variety. You know, if you're not getting rules imposed upon you, then hey, we have more variety. System structure changes and progress that actually moves forward. What needs to happen? A service that is reasonably priced that pays artists. That's one possibility, that may not be the solution. Attention needs to be drawn to the advantages of an independent system. People need to understand that just because a band isn't signed doesn't mean they suck. It just means that hey, maybe they didn't suck hard enough. You notice, I'm not signed. Investors for a new system and willingness to make a change. Okay, now I'm gonna get into a little bit of my project and I may have to change my hosting after this is done because I don't think I'm supposed to host MP3s off my website, but what they don't know right now until they start getting slammed, I'm not sure. But I did this project to basically prove the point that you don't need to spend thousands of dollars on a recording when you can do it yourself at home for free. What I did was, I started doing this thing. I wanted to redo In Your Eyes by Peter Gabriel. Usually I don't do cover songs. I do all my own stuff. But I thought it'd be fun. You know, hey, do In Your Eyes. You know, I wanted to rock it out with some, you know, electric guitar and all kinds of stuff. Then my friend Gene calls me from Atlanta because I don't listen to the radio one and two because all the radio stations in my town are owned by fucking Clear Channel. That's the second one. So, which is everywhere. He called me up and he said, hey man, you're never gonna guess, but I just heard this song on the radio. SR-71 redid In Your Eyes by Peter Gabriel. And I'm like, fuck. Now I'm gonna look like a fucking goon, man. Oh, no offense. No offense. So I got to thinking about this and I'm like, well, maybe this isn't such a bad idea after all. Now maybe you have something to compare it to. You know, keep in mind, I did this project in my fucking living room of my apartment without disturbing any of my neighbors. They spent thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars at a recording studio in California. So if mine might not be quite there, maybe you think mine sounds better. I mean, that's in the ear of the beholder. I put it on my website and you can get this off the Defconn CD. I put up very detailed things of what I did and it's not totally done yet. I'm up to the mastering part because I fucking hate mastering audio. But, so I'm up to that point and I hate even describing high master audio. It's just, I'd rather master bait. But who wouldn't mind. But I put the details on project.html and you can click through there and it tells why I did it. The next step is exactly what I did, the whole process, how I got from point A to point B. My version is available on my website for right now but don't be surprised if I change the link if I start getting nailed with bandwidth chargers. So it all depends. And you can compare the two. I mean, if you wanna go out and buy their CD or whatever they have a clip of their song on their website that you can download and not have to worry about. I didn't say clit. My site is loopbackcomposter.com. I don't have a lot of papers up because I do write different things. Recording guides, so to speak. My music from my project is up there which right now it's only me. I'm back to not having a band anymore. Reviews, I do reviews of groups. So if you have a music group and you want me to review it and tell you what I think I'll be more than happy to do that. I have some resources on there and my contact information. I have some useful links on here. Musicians from GarageBand. This is by no means, oops. This is by no means an all encompassing set of links. There's far too many of them. And what I wanna say is if there's anybody out there willing to, if they wanna work with me on putting something together, I wanna put together a resource that you can go to and that somebody who doesn't know shit about music can go there and look and say, okay, I like this kind of music and all these artists are given away their music for free. I wanna know how good this person thinks they are from on a scale of one to five. I wanna know where I can get their music and I wanna maybe a short review of them. And hey, not only that, but I wanna compare it against bands that they sound like. I think that would be the first step into getting the normal average listener to start saying, hey, you know, I don't wanna be sued by these people and this is just as good. So if anybody wants to give me a hand, please see me after the presentation and we'll work something out and we'll put something up and try to make a difference. Like I said, I got caught up in the system and I almost became a clone until one day I woke up and realized, hey, man, these people are ripping people off. And if you're a musician and you have a group and you get offered a recording contract, tell them to shove it right up their fucking ass because you will get ripped off, you will not have a future. Anybody have any questions? There you go. Yes, thank you, thank you. He just reminded me something. He said, what do you think about the Beastie Boys anti-copy protection software that gets automatically loaded on your computer without your knowledge? Well, that's happened with a few albums. The new Velvet Revolver album also has that, hold down F5 when you put the CD in your CD tray so it doesn't auto load that. It will go on your computer and you won't be able to make any MP3s out of it or copy the CD in any way, shape or form. I think it's bullshit. What else do I think about it? I think it's bullshit, man. I think it's wrong. I think that anything you put on somebody's computer without their knowledge is just wrong. Oh, I definitely think you should be able to make a copy. Who hasn't lost a CD, had one scratched beyond repair, had somebody stolen, had it stolen from you or in any other way in shape and form lost? Does that mean you don't have the right to listen to that song anymore? And you, in the current system, you have a right to do that still. So they're infringing upon your right to duplicate that CD. There's only a few record labels who are doing it right now but you can bet your ass more, I'll do it. That's bullshit. Exactly. Not to take your line. Can you get with me afterwards? Cause I gotta take a couple of questions, I'm almost done. Yes. Oh, it's 100%, the question was, is it the label or the artist that's requesting this? 100%, it's the label. Actually, some of the artists are actually very upset about this, very upset. So whenever you hear somebody doing something, like if you hear Hotel California being played in some stupid Nissan commercial or something, don't ever get mad at the artist cause guaranteed they're pitching a fit. If you're running, it's not a virus and it's not malware, you actually, there's a little thing inside the CD that says I understand is putting this on my system but I will tell you, if you run AdWatch, which comes with the pro version of AdWare, it'll detect all registry modifications but I would still hold down F5. Yeah, you should have Auto Run disabled anyway but that's, in a realistic world, most people don't do that. No, if you hold down F5, that disables Auto Run in a Windows system. Yes. Copyright, you- How do you copyright your own stuff? Form PA or form SR, copyright your own material. No, that's a publishing house. Copyrights, the question was, what do I do for copyrights being an independent artist? You can download the forms off the US copyright website, it costs like 35 bucks to register copyright. I will tell you one quick way to get around spending, because it's 35 bucks per work of art. Well, if you copyright it as a collection, you can actually sneak all of those songs onto one copyright form and then put in a form P-A-R, or P-A-C, which is a performing arts correction form and say, oops, I made a mistake, I wasn't supposed to put all those songs on one collection. I want to individually put them out so now you've taken a 14 track CD and copyrighted it for the price of two works of art. And I will tell you too, it's taken a long time. I copyrighted some stuff around the time of September 11th and it took them over a year to get me the forms back. Yes. The question was, are there any record labels that are actually doing something positive? Well, they're all monetarily driven. You'll find small independent labels. Now, the RIAA lists a list of record labels that they're associated with on their website. Now, I would say, hey, don't buy anything from these record labels, but that would be almost impossible since the big boys are on there.