Hi,

As the title of this blog suggests, my name is Desmond Williams. Some of you may know me from my own work, some know me from my work with Thievery Corporation, some know me from my work with Midnite, some from my work with the legendary Dub engineer, Scientist, and some of you don’t know me at all.

This is a short and very basic bio for all of you. I consider myself to be very lucky as a musician. I’ve been able to support myself, more or less, for the last twenty years primarily as a musician, engineer, and producer. Along the way I’ve been blessed to work with such musical geniuses as Scientist (pioneer of Dub Reggae) and Ron Johnson (a little known producer in NYC who introduced me to digital audio and using computers for music production way back in 1988). I’ve also been blessed to have a very good relationship with the people at Cakewalk, the makers of Sonar. Particulary Carl Jacobson.

I also had the good fortune to link up with Thievery Corporation just as they were really starting to take off. That relationship allowed me to release some of my solo material for the first time and to begin Dj-ing, something that I never thought about doing but came to love. I was able to travel all around the world with Thievery as their engineer, and later, on my own as a DJ. This relationship also taught me some hard lessons about the ugly underbelly of the music industry. More on that in later posts.

About a year ago I was forced into the world of Myspace and Social Networking when a friend told me that he had visited my Myspace page. Since I had no Myspace page I looked into it and found that a fan had set one up for me. I decided that it would be better for me to control my online presence than have a stranger do it so I took over that profile, created a couple more, jumped into Facebook and Imeem, and now I’m here on WordPress.

Having had a couple of bad experiences with record labels, I’ve decided to take charge of my music and promote myself online. This is a growing trend that seems to have varying degrees of success for different people. I have a pretty good background in computers and the web in particular so I figured that I would try my hand. So far, so good.

I’ve done a good deal of research and the one thing that I keep coming across is how important it is to have a blog. This was something that I was not looking forward to. What would I say? Would anyone be interested in what I was having for dinner or what TV show I was watching? Doubtful. Then it occurred to me that my blog could actually have a storyline and maybe do some other people some good. So I came up with the idea of chronicalling my journey through the land of online marketing and digital distribution. Would I be able to successfully buck the system and find my own path to success in the digital arena? We will all find out together. I plan to post my progress in this endevor on this blog and share all of my successes and failures with my readers. Along the way I might get some good advice from some of you and I might also help some of you who are on a similiar journey.

So that’s the idea. A sort of online reality show that will follow me through the ups and downs and all of the potholes on the road to success or the other thing. Your participation will be critical in helping me plot my course so please don’t hesitate to post comments or links or whatever might be useful.

My next blog will be a general blueprint of my master plan for online domination. See you there…

Peace…