Category Archives: Internet

Facebook Contacts List

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I had intended to post everything sequentially, but this latest hot idea I’ve gotten will only take a minute, and is something you can implement at whatever stage of this process your band is currently in. Hopefully by now you’ve heard of this obscure little site called “The Facebook,” yes? Well, like a number of other musicians, back when I first joined Facebook, I also created a separate “page” for my band. A page is pretty much the same as a user profile, except it’s for businesses. You can actually manage your business page just by logging into your normal user account, so this seemed like a fantastic concept.

It turns out this is actually not the greatest idea in the world. If you’re like me, you’re wondering why your band is still sitting on 39 likes even after months and months of sending off “suggestions” to people for them to like it. Even picking random strangers to send requests to accomplished nothing. The problem is that people ignore these, for whatever reason.

A much better solution was pointed out to my by a buddy of mine. You simply set up another user profile as the name of your band – a little juggling might be required, as in my case I was ditching my “XT Force” business page and setting up a new user profile as “Xt Force, i.e. they wouldn’t let me capitalize the T, but who cares – and then you are off to the races. Now instead of sending “page likes” suggestions as yourself, you are “friending” people – and folks are about 20 times as likely to approve a friend request, as it turns out. In a month’s time I soon had about 4 times as many “friends” as I ever had page “likes” under a year and a half of the old method.

It should be noted that Facebook does offer a one time only opportunity to switch your user profile over to a business profile. You should avoid this at all costs, as you will be right back in the same boat. If you made the same initial mistake as me, actually, you already have a user profile and an old business page, so you don’t need to do this. Plus once you make the switch, you can’t switch back, and then you’re back in the nightmare scenario of sending “like” suggestions instead of friend requesting people.

One final note concerns exporting your friends list information out of Facebook and into your email account. One advantage of doing this is that you can send exclusive downloads, deals, a regular newsletter, whatever, to a mailing list. There are a bunch of applications you can use with mixed results, but there’s one extremely simple method that doesn’t even take 10 seconds. Open up a Yahoo Mail account if you don’t already have one, and they will prompt you with a little Facebook icon to import your friend contacts. Bingo. Or, if you already have Yahoo mail, go here: address.yahoo.com

That’s it

Getting Tunes On Facebook

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Now that you have a cleaned up version of your file saved as a .wav, it is time to get it converted to an mp3 and get that song online. Either Cakewalk or Audacity will work for converting the .wav to an mp3, but for the sake of simplicity (there’s a separate program you have to search for and download online with Audacity), go ahead and open up your Cakewalk program. Import the .wav, and then under Tools, click Mixdown Audio, and select Export As Mp3. When it asks you to fill in the IDE tags, it’s important to go ahead and do this – these represent the song title, album name, year of release, etc, and will forever be linked to your track.

If you are the paranoid type, and are worried about copyright, you may want to find an online site and/or application that you can instantly upload your song to for sale. One relatively hassle free site that I know of is greatindiemusic.com, where in the space of about 5 minutes you can get your songs uploaded and have them available for sale. And while it’s not a bad idea to get your songs uploaded here anyway, I personally feel perfectly comfortable with emailing myself the track (this comes in handy down the road, too, for various other reasons), and then getting it immediately onto the much more crucial and prominent sites.

One site that appears low budget at first glance with which is absolutely essential would be ilike.com. Go ahead and set up a profile for your band here, and upload your songs, as well as a profile picture. This step is your springboard to getting music on Facebook, a must in today’s online landscape. Enter at your own risk, however: actually getting this stuff onto Facebook is reminiscent of a Choose Your Own Adventure book. One false move and you are back at start, game over.

Start by logging into your Facebook account as usual. Then, turn around and enter facebook.com/pages into the address bar. Once there, you will see a grey button a short distance down with a plus sign and the words “Create Page.” Click on that. On the next screen, under Official Page, mark the tab for “Artist, Band, or Public Figure,” and scroll down to select “Band” of course, then type in your band’s name in the box provided. Don’t forget to check mark the box saying you are an authorized representative of the band, then click “Create Official Page.”

Congrats! Your band now has a Facebook page. This is the easy part. You can upload a photo, edit your information and so forth, and then comes the really confusing, maze like corridors of actually getting some tunes on here.

In the search box, type “songs.” One of the first results that comes up, if not the very first, should be the bright orange ilike icon. Click on that, and once you’re on their Facebook page, over at the left select “Add To My Page.” At this point a pop up box should emerge, showing your band’s page. Click to add them.

Now, up in the search box, type the name of your band. Go there, to its Facebook page, and now find the blue “Music” tab in the top middle of your page. Under that, you will find a pink tab that says “Artists – bind your tab here.” Click on that, which will take you to another page. Type your band’s name in the box, and click Save. Now, where it says “Back to (your band’s name)’s Profile Page,” when you click on that, it will take you back to your band’s Facebook profile. Under the Music tab, you should now find all of your songs that you had uploaded to ilike! Voila!

For good measure, you may as well get yourself off and running by clicking on the “I Like” thumbs up icons for each of your songs, as well as your band itself. Now, you are off to the races, and the trick now becomes promote, promote, promote.

Up next: getting your music on internet radio, and every music store in the known universe.

The Clean Up

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Now that you have one or more audio files imported into Cakewalk and saved, now it’s time to briefly move that file over to Audacity. With these two programs having so much in common as far as what they can do, it might seem a bit redundant to have to use both. However, in over a decade of using this exact same Cakewalk program, we have yet to find or figure out any sort of static cleanup function on there. Conversely, Audacity does this simply, but there are other functions (more on that later) that are a lot easier to figure out on Cakewalk. With both programs, you’re going to figure out everything you need to know basically on the first day you are using it, and the rest you can forget unless you graduated from MIT or are extremely bored. The Cakewalk program for instance comes with a book that is huge and is actually written in plain English, which would make it seemingly easy and convenient to use, except that seriously in ten years of having it, it has not come in handy even ONCE, because everything you try in that book does not work. As it is quite thick you might soundproof your studio wall with it, but that’s about it.

Ok, enough about that, now onto the fun stuff. Opening up your file in Cakewalk, you will want to export the song to your desktop. Click on Tools, then Mixdown Audio, then Export To File(s). Type in the song name, then click Export. Make sure it is a Wave file for this step of operation, by the way. You also do NOT want to cut out any clicks or scrapes or static just yet from the beginning or end or for that matter the middle of the song – for the time being, these are your friend.

Open up the Audacity program.  Here you will want to click on Project, then Import Audio. Choose the song you want to import, which will now show up as a Wave in Audacity. Now, find a stretch of pure static and/or unwanted noise in your song – chances are this comes at either the beginning or the end. With one finger of your left hand, hold down the Alt button on your computer keyboard. With your right hand, left click your mouse and drag across the entire section of static. Let go.

Now go up to and click on Effects, then Noise Removal. Click on Get Noise Profile. What this is doing here is analyzing the section of music you’ve just highlighted and saying, okay, this unwanted noise, we are going to delete this. After this is finished – and it only takes a split second – now left click into the little tan box to the left of your track. It should turn grey, which means the entire song has now been highlighted.

Click on Effects again, and Noise Removal once more as well. This time, however, you’re going to move that slider over to the left a little (this step of the process will take some tinkering, so don’t obsess over exact placement) and then either “Preview” or “Remove Noise.”  If you click on “Remove Noise” it is somewhat time consuming, so “Preview” is probably better until you get what level of static you’re trying to wipe out dialed in. However, even if, after going through the “Remove Noise” process and finding that you don’t like the way the finished product sounds,  you can simply click on Undo up top, make an adjustment to the slider, and try again.

Once you have a static/noise free track that you are happy with, go under File and Export as WAV this file to your desktop. Your work is done here for now. Next up: converting the file to MP3, tagging it to be recognized in cyberspace, and all that fun stuff.

Having the Right (Low Budget) Gear

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In this post I will officially begin my series by discussing some of the programs/tools we have stumbled across, all either free or fairly inexpensive, that will make getting your muisc out there tremendously easier.  As I’ve alluded to before, this isn’t to say there aren’t better and more modern solutions out there. But the whole point of what I hope to accomplish with  these posts is to provide some terrific low-tech and/or low budget options for those of you who are like we are, either cash strapped or not exactly computer proficient.

One constant I have found that seems to hold true when dealing with computers or the internet is that you are almost always better off finding the OLDEST program you can that works and is compatible with your computer. This would seem to fly in the face of common sense, but it’s a mistake to think that to keep up with a hyper modern landscape, that you need the most cutting edge tools.  The reality is that a software update often only makes for more confusion, or provides a bunch of bells and whistles you don’t need, when an earlier version would provide exacly whay you’re looking for without the distractions and hassles.

Unless you’re Mac users, most of you have operating systems that come factory loaded with the Windows Media Player program. This is an okay accessory that does have its uses, but for the most part is a prime example of exactly what I’m talking about – unnecessarily complicated and surprisingly little use in getting your music released.

Which brings us to the point now of discussing what I feel are some absolute essentials. Again, if you are living high on the hog with top shelf gear and Pro Tools and are a computer whiz, you would surely laugh at the  advice given here. And lord knows if you are one of those fortunate souls and are reading this and have some SIMPLE input to offer, we’re all ears. But this isn’t really aimed at such an individual, and chances are few of you are reading this.

Start by downloading a free program called Real Player. Again I would recommend finding the OLDEST version you can, and even better, if you can download it onto a computer that you don’t need for internet access and can thus disconnect it from the internet, even better – fewer distractions and a lot faster load time. Real Player is an easy to use and handy device for converting “mp3” files to “wav” files and vice versa, which you will need.

Next up I would recommend finding a Cakewalk Pro Audio program. The one we’ve been using for literally a decade is the same old Pro Audio 9 disc, which has been copied probably onto a dozen different computers at our various members’  households through the years. Either you are recording music onto a computer program, or you are recording music onto tape and thus need a means of importing it – either way, you can use this program, and you should be able to find it dirt cheap on e-bay at this point.

Lastly, I would recommend trying to find a free version of a program called Audacity, available as of this writing at audacity.sourceforge.net. It’s still the best thing we have found for cleaning up  static. We’re kind of in the middle in that we record directly from our p.a. onto the hard drive these days, but at the same time have a bunch of old tapes we’ve slowly begun importing and cleaning up with this Audacity, and it really is a breeze to use.

Armed with these three, and a normal 1/8th inch cord, a flash drive and a couple rewriteable CDs, you bascially have every tool you need to make your music sound as good as it can on this end of the equation, and with almost no headaches at all. In my next post, I will discuss what to do with all of this.

Help for the Self Published Musician

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Considering the confusing terrain of today’s landscape for the average up  and coming musician, I believe I have finally devised a purpose for this blog that the website wants me to run. I will attempt, through these posts, to steer you through some of the pitfalls to avoid, and, more than that, to help you realize your dreams in getting your music out there, attracting fans, and (hopefully) getting paid.

When we started recording a new Goofy Guys album in early 2001, we had been inactive for four years. During that time, the world of online music had exploded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams, and so it was during our lengthy recording sessions (those of you familiar with our work are aware that we finally got around to releasing Butcher’s Premium: Chop House Originals in 2008) we were able to spend a great deal of our downtime educating ourselves about this process. As a result, I feel we have discovered all sorts of great resources available to the today’s musician – and, perhaps most importantly (because we are lazy and dense ourselves) the easiest and least complicated methods of making this stuff happen.

So stay tuned. In my next post I will attack what I believe to be the first and most important steps to take when you have a brand new CD (or for that matter, even one brand new song) that is about to be released. From there I will be posting a series of these pieces, and while I can’t promise that they will necessarily be in the proper sequential order, it’s all tried and tested stuff that works as of now. Some of this is probably way too basic and feels like spoon feeding, but I know there are some of you out there that are as internet illiterate as we were, and so hopefully this helps.

Like I said, stay tuned…