I Won!

I recently entered my first remix contest and I’m proud to say that I’ve just been informed that I won. It was for thetruth.com and the contest was held on imeem. I found out about it late and started the remix on the due date. I got a freak allergy attack and had to do the whole thing while sneezing constantly and with a sinus headache. I did what I could and submitted the remix at 9pm.

A few weeks later I was surprised to see that I was chosen to be in the top 5. In the end I got more than twice as many votes as my closest competitor. I’m in the process of filling out some paperwork now, but I’ll let you know how it all pans out. The prizes include a copy of Ableton Live, being featured on thetruth.com’s website, imeem.com, and iTunes, as well as some other pretty cool stuff.

The song is called Typo and I will post the links when the features go up. Big up the truth, and thanks to everyone who voted for me.

How I Got My Website Up For Zero Dinero

So much to write, so little time. In my last post I promised to tell you how I was able to set up a custom website and domain name for zero dinero. First, I have to make a couple of disclaimers. I was once a web developer for the Federal Reserve Board, so I do have some skills in this area. What I have done may be a little beyond someone who has never used HTML, but it’s not hard to learn. There are many free resources, like htmldog, that will help learn how to code your own webpages. If you’re serious about having a presence on the most robust and democratic marketplace available today, you should be willing to put in a little study time. If not, you probably know someone who can create your website for you for next to nothing.

The first step is to claim your domain name. I wanted a full on official web address so I tried to register desmondwilliams.com. Unfortunately, some domain squatter is sitting on that name so I took desmondwilliams.net. This cost me about $9 at Name.com. There is a service called CO.CC that will give you a free domain but it is actually a subdomain. Your web address would be something like “example.co.cc”. This is a pretty good free alternative, but I wanted to be a little more official. If you’d like a free domain name visit http://www.co.cc.

The next step is to find a web host. There are many excellent companies that will host your website for as little as $4 per month, but for the purposes of this blog I wanted to find one that would do it for free. I started with an article on Lifehacker.com about hosting your website with free apps. Though this was a good article, it didn’t exactly have what I wanted so I did a search for “free web hosting” and found free-webhosts.com which had a great list of places that will host your website for zero dinero. I finally went with 07x.net. They offer a boatload of free space and bandwith and they also have excellent tutorials that explain exactly how to move your domain name and use most of their features.

The biggest difference between a free host and a paid one is support. I was able to get my website up without having to use their tech support, which I imagine would not be that helpful or responsive, but I could be wrong. They also offer a paid service and they probably offer excellent support to paying customers.

So that’s the short version of how I got my website up for free. I gave myself a week to do it and was able to come in just under the deadline. Along the way I had to relearn HTML and CSS, but it all went fairly smoothly. If you’d like to see the results, visit me at desmondwilliams.net. So far, I have no complaints. The host appears to be very stable and I’ve had no problems with the site being down or unavailable.

BTW – This site is a work in progress. I plan to make many tweeks in the weeks to come. Also, although I did pay $9 for my domain name, I also set up a free one. I just haven’t posted it yet. I just don’t want anyone to think that the title of this post is false advertising.

DesmondWilliams.net is Online – Almost

It’s been a full week since my last post, but I have a good reason. I feel guilty, like I haven’t called my girlfriend in a week. It’s weird.

Last week I set up my Google Reader (details in an upcoming post – it’s a must have). I was overcome with sensory overload as information poured in from all corners of the InterWeb. Where would I start? One of the multiple Internet Radio sites? One of the myriad promotion and marketing tools? I decided to start with the basics and do something that should have been done years ago – set up my Official Website. This was prompted by an article on Lifehacker.com called “Host Your Domain With Free Apps”. It claimed to show you how to host a website for $10 a year and it did not disappoint. I dove in feet first and gave myself a week to get the whole shebang up and running. I’m happy to report that I finished just under my self imposed deadline.

Actually, I did even better than the article claimed that I could. I found a way to do it absolutely free. It helps that I have experience as a web designer, having worked as a Web Developer for the Federal Reserve Board for three years, but there are tools that allow a complete novice to get a functioning website up and running in a matter of days, absolutely free. It took me longer because I did all of the coding in a text editor and created all of the graphics myself.

Right now my brain is pretty much fried so I will go into the details of how you can get your own web presence up and running for zero dinero in my next post. I’m waiting for the DNS name server change to take effect and then desmondwilliams.net goes live. That should be in about 48 hours. Until then you can see the site at it’s temporary home -

http://desmondwilliams.07x.net.

As Dozer (i think) said in The Matrix – “This is a very exciting time”. The next step is to transfer this blog to it’s new domain – blog.desmondwilliams.net. As usual, I plan to do most of the legwork and then lay out the steps for my faithful readers. Stay tuned…

Why I’m Voting For The First Time

I never intended for this blog to discuss anything but marketing and promoting your music online, but I feel like I’d be on the wrong side of history not to make some statement about the landmark election being held in the USA tomorrow (Nov. 4, 2009). I could probably write 10,000 words about all of this, but I will do my best to be succinct.

First of all, it’s true that I have never voted in a presidential election. Until now, I’ve never had anything to vote for. Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry? Are you kidding me? What do any of these people have to offer me as a president but more of the same crap? Some of you might think that I had an obligation to vote for these guys in order to keep their opponents out of office. Again, are you kidding me? A vote for the lesser of two evils IS STILL A VOTE FOR EVIL! You might need to think about that one for a minute. It’s deceptively simple, as most great truths are.

This doesn’t mean that I’m one of those who pays no attention to politics, or poly-tricks. I am an avid student of history and I follow many of today’s political scenarios quite closely. I just don’t take it personally. I’m amazed that both parties can get away with this “vote or die” crap. What? Participating in the democratic process is important, but we have been led to believe that the only means of participation is to cast a ballot every two or four years and then go back to sitting on our asses. Political participation is a daily activity and it includes being involved in your community, empowering others, raising awareness, and taking positive action (a protest vote or protest in general is a reaction to something – i.e. being controlled by the very forces that you are trying to overcome). In all the reading that I have done about history and great historical figures I can’t think of one that effected the change that they sought by casting a vote. Gandhi, King, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Ben Franklin, Susan B. Anthony, etc. – were all people who took direct action to change the things that they felt passionate about changing.

So what’s different this time? I have to say that it’s the campaign of Barack Obama. Notice that I said the “campaign” and not just Barack Obama. While he seems like a great and very sincere guy, he does not represent the change that I am looking for in American politics. Even though he did oppose the war in Iraq, he continues to spout much of the same rhetoric about Cuba and Iran, etc. – that led to our initiation of that war. There is a huge war machine in this country that insists on being fed and until that culture of domination and subjugation changes, the president will always be the head chef. Unfortunately, I don’t expect that to change any time soon. No matter what party is in charge.

The reason that I support Obama’s candidacy is more nuanced. You may be wondering, “is it because he’s black?” That’s part of it, although I did not support the con-man Jesse Jackson or the Supreme court’s Clarence Thomas – or as I like to call him, Tom-Ass Clarence. You see I don’t believe that a black president will necessarily represent policies that are better for black people. For me, the best policy for black people is to get their asses in gear and stop worrying about all of this external stuff. Handle you business. The change that I see is in the faces of everyday Americans who are actually uniting under a banner of hope and not fear (which is the standard currency of politics). I see Southern white factory workers and people that I would normally classify as rednecks passionately supporting a black man and it warms my heart. It makes me believe that the promise of America might finally be fulfilled.

By the way, I don’t use the term “redneck” derisively. The term was originally used to refer to West Virginia coal miners, who were the first american workers to unionize and demand fair treatment from the big coal barons. It refers to the red bandanas that they wore. There is a good article about it here.

I believe that for the country to come together under a black man, who is hands down the best of the available choices, would do wonders for the nation as a whole and help us all to move on and balance the Karma that 400 years of slavery and systemized racism has burdened us with. I got on the bandwagon after hearing his victory speech in Iowa, which was his first primary win. When he started talking about how “this is the moment” that America would look back on to mark the point when we came together as a nation and decided to move beyond bitterness, division, etcetera. I got goosebumps.

Read about the history of the term redneck.
Listen to Obama’s victory speech after the Iowa Caucus.

Delights of the Garden is on iTunes and Amazon

Finally, after years of hibernation, my debut album – “Delights of the Garden” – is available to the masses for digital download. There is a long story behind why this album has not been available which I can’t really go into for legal reasons, but it’s there now and I couldn’t be happier. Partially because it’s just necessary to be on the playing field if you want to play the game, and partially so that I now have an answer to all of the people who have asked me for the last few years, “how can I get your album?”. Here is what iTunes had to say about the album in their review.

“A delightul debut full-length indeed, featuring singles first heard on the introductory 12″s Um Favor and Theme From a Dream, as well as a composition called “First Touch” off the Cocoa EP. Over 14 marvelously constructed tracks, Desmond Williams unravels a poignant vision of downtempo that quite intelligibly illustrates his understanding of the foundation behind the styles he employs, included but not limited to dub, exotica, jazz, bossa pop, funk and a sound that can simply be summed up with Eighteenth Street Lounge. All the flavors of the garden blend into each other with a rhythmic denominator fueled by Williams playing almost all the instruments himself, producing each beat and the entire album almost single-handedly. However, the standout tracks are definitely the ones featuring exotic vocals from Portia Cristina Joo, who soaks “Um Favor” and “First Touch” in a caressing opiate and guides her contributions to slightly more trip-hopping regions.”

And here is a customer review from Amazon MP3.

“This CD is absolutely beautiful. So blissfully chill it’s not even funny. Each track is special. Vocals are kept to a minumum, and make sure you turn the bass up. Desmond Williams is nothing short of a genius. You will not regret this purchase.”

It makes me want to buy a copy. For those who haven’t heard the album, here is a selection to give you a taste.

Listen to Dread a the Roughest – Get the album on or Amazon.com

Getting Organized With Google Notebook

One of my greatest obstacles on the road to digital domination is my lack of organization and discipline. I am very focused and motivated and I can spend hours and hours on any task that I need to complete, but that tends to turn into a kind of tunnel vision which causes me to lose track of other tasks. In my search for an online solution (it’s scary that I’m finding a lot of answers to life’s larger questions on the Internet), I began searching for apps or websites that would help me organize the many tasks that I need to keep track of. I came across a pretty good little app/website called Simple GTD (Get Things Done). It’s a bit primative, but still pretty useful and well organized. I used it for about a week but i got frustrated when it repeatedly crashed on me.

Since patiences for tech gliches is not one of my virtues, I continued my search. I read something online about Google Docs. This sounded like a possible solution, but on further investigation it seemed that it was more geared towards collaborating on documents and projects with other people. It seemed a little heavy for my needs.

Next I came across Google Notebook. It’s a pretty simple app that allows you create different notebooks with different topics in them and add comments to the topics in order to update them. I don’t know if was designed to be used as a to do list, but it seems to work pretty well for that purpose. I’ve set up a variety of Notebooks like “Music Publishing Issues”, “Managing Online Accounts”, “Blog Material”, etc. The real test will be when I start to amass a bunch of notes. Handling them in this format may be challenging. I’m thinking that I will move my completed tasks into a notebook, thereby keeping my working notebooks less cluttered. If anyone knows of a more elegant solution please let me know.

A Few Milestones

This week marks a few milestones in journey to Digital Domination.

First – my friends list on Imeem topped 20,000. I don’t actually believe that that translates into 20,000 real fans who listen to and will buy my music, but it’s a good platform for reaching new fans and as long as I don’t abuse them with too many bulletins they should continue to respond well when I send out posts about new releases, etc. According to the laws of viral marketing, the larger the list grows the larger the number of people on who become actual fans will grow.

Number 2 – my Imeem presence seems to be going viral. I got good response on Imeem from the very beginning. They actually had an Artist page for me, complete with fans, before I even joined. I got good feedback about my profile page and my music. Then I became a moderator of the Pimp My Song group and started using what I’d learned about Imeem and online marketing to help other Artists. Those efforts seem to be resonating with some folks because it has moved from me promoting myself on Imeem to others promoting me. Someone, or more than one Someone, is passing my music along to lots of people because I’ve been getting boatloads of comments on songs that I’m not promoting at all. That’s a really good feeling and it makes all the time and hard work seem more worthwhile. Also, that really how it’s supposed to work.

C – I found out that my album Delights of the Garden will finally be available on Amazon.com tomorrow, October 29, 2008. This is a big deal for me because since I took control of the album from ESL Music, who wasn’t promoting it at all for reasons that I can’t really get into here (legal stuff) it’s just been sitting around collecting dust. I continue to get inquiries from people on Myspace and in the real world about how they can get it and such. It wasn’t until I started navigating the digital music markrtplace that I found out about how Tunecore.com can place your music in the big digital marketplaces like iTunes and Amazon. The album should be going live on iTunes by Nov. 13 at the latest.

Last – I’ve just about turned the corner with understanding Facebook and iLike.com. I’m not quite there yet, but I did figure out how to add my Ilike Artist profile to my Facebook Musician page. If it works the way that it’s supposed to, iLike should exponentially increase my traffic and my fans, as long as I provide good content to iLike, like new music and free downloads. iLike says that they are the number 1 driver of sales to iTunes. We’ll see how that works out for me.

All in all, this first month of “navigating the digital music marketplace” (should I trademark that?) has been a good one and in many ways the response has been better than I hoped for. There is still so much to do and learn. As Johnny Nash said in the song “There Are More Questions Than Answers” – The more I find out, the less I know.

The Imeem Badge Storehouse

The Imeem Badge is an underused feature offered by Imeem.com. Here is an official definition from Imeem -

“A badge is like your personal imeem business card. It’s an easy way to share your imeem profile and draw people to your page. You can customize your badge and then add it to your other blog sites, your personal website, or anywhere else on the web! “

The customization is limited, but you can change the background color and font color. You can also decide what information about your profile is on the badge. On this badge, you can see that I’ve chosen to include my name, how many friends I have, how many songs and playlists or on my profile, and the most recent song added to my profile. You can create your own badge here, or at this URL –

http://www.imeem.com/createbadge/

The Imeem Badge Storehouse is a group that was created by Nessy a.k.a. Kaoru Kamiya Ookochi and it is one those really creative and useful ideas that I’d love to see more of on Imeem and other social networks. After you’ve spent the time to lovingly create your badge and get the color combination just right and then you post it, recreating the exact same look can be hit or miss.

The Badge Storehouse allows you to create a thread with the automatically generated code for your badge, and then reply to that thread with other variations of the badge. You bookmark your thread and then you can allows to back and find all of the badges that you have created in one central location. Check them out at this URL -

http://www.imeem.com/groups/YcTXsd4l,imeem_badge_storehouse/

My Lost Beatles Remix

Years ago when I was doing a lot of work with legendary Dub engineer, Scientist, we would amuse ourselves during down time by doing remixes of old Beatles, Everly Brothers and James Brown tracks. Since the owners of the Beatles catalog are notoriously anal, we never tried to release them or do much other than occasionally play them out at a club.

During a recent move, I came across a lot of music that I had forgotten that I ever even did. One such piece of music is a remix that I did of one of my favorite Beatles tracks, “Julia” from The White Album. This song is supposed to be a dedication to John Lennon’s mother, who died when he was quite young. You can really hear the longing in the haunting one note melody. I was quite surprised when I found this remix because I barely remember doing it. I’m sure that if I were to do it today, and I never heard this version, I would have a totally different approach to it.

I hope that you enjoy this track and if any of you readers are good friends with Yoko Ono or Paul McCartney or whoever owns the Beatles catalog these days, let them know that there’s more where this came from, including some gems that Scientist and I did. You might even get a finder’s fee

I strongly suggest that you listen to this track on a system that has some bass response. All the fun is in the low end on this one.

Listen to my remix of “Julia” by the Beatles

Pandora – The Musicology Show and The Music Genome Project

Pandora is a relatively new customizable radio station similar to last.fm. You can go on their website to learn more about the very complicated algorithms that they use to calculate which of 400 separate musical attributes a song possesses that will make a user either like it or not. What I would like to tell you about is a by-product of all of that research, The Musicology Show.

Few artists or producers these days have had the benefit of music lessons or formal training as an engineer or a singer. The accessibility of production tools causes many of us to put the cart before the horse and start making music before we actually learn music. Sometimes this is a good thing, because we are not constrained by the rules and preconceived notions about how music should be made, but knowledge is never a bad thing. These podcasts from Pandora are basically a treasure chest of knowledge.

Their shows cover everything from Vocal Harmonies to Constructing Drum Patterns to Melodic Construction. Each topic is explained by an actual musician and expert in the particular style or instrument being discussed. They also provide audible examples of the different techniques that they discuss. So if you’d like to expand your knowledge about music in general or maybe just learn better mic technique this is a great place to do it for free. Shows seem to be added about once per month and the last one was from September 17th so another one should be coming soon. You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes and each new episode will automatically be downloaded to your computer or iPod.

For those who don’t know, podcasts are free and even though you get them from iTunes you don’t have to pay. There are several other instructional podcasts dealing with music that are available, but I haven’t explored those yet. You’ll see links to them under “Related Podcasts” when you are downloading The Musicology Show.

Here is the URL to their blog about the show – http://blog.pandora.com/podcast/