Transcripts
1. Introduction for SkillShare Advanced: Ok. Hello, and thank you so much for signing up to this course on Advanced singing, aiming for a record deal. And this course is very much aimed at people who would like to be professional singers or are interested in the advanced elements to singing or the business of singing. So we're going to do some exciting things in this course. At the start of the course, we're going to recap the basics to make sure the regimen to write and to monitor how long you've been singing and high experienced GR, We all need to do that every now and then. So we'll look at things like breathing, projection, ranch warm ups, cool dogs, vocal qualities, which are the signs associated with different genres of music. The brake and the massage, or your voice goes from the lower part of your voice and to the higher part of your voice. And old fashioned terms, chest voice and head voice. And say with constriction, singing with retraction so that the voice isn't tight, will also get things like movement and posture. Then we're gonna move on and look at some case studies of successful vocalists, especially people who are currently successful, so that we can look at industry trends and vocals. Because the point of this course is to help you create your own unique, commercial solid, your musical identity. Then we're gonna move on to some quite involved performance techniques. We're going to look at very complex things like vocal fry, whistle, register. We're going to look at improvisation. We're going to look at stage presence and then move on to recording studio technique. After that, there's the business elements of the course. So we're going to look at things like getting life Gates, getting airplay, getting press, and we're going to look at record contracts for different kinds of record contracts, different kinds of record labels. And when I'm high to find one, they'll also be an element of managing your online presence. Look at things like social media marketing and maintaining an email list. So after that, we'll talk about further study and places that can help you if you need support and achieving your goals and your musical career. I'm always happy to hear from you at any point in the course. Feel free to ask questions, post questions in the Q and a or San Louis PMs. And feel free to send mp3s of your singing for feedback because I love to engage with students. So I hope you're excited to get going and let's dive in.
2. The Basics: In this section, we're going to go over some of the basics of signed singing technique. And why are we going to go over the basics if this is a course for advanced singers? Well, if you're looking for a record deal, you're asking a company to invest in your voice so you'd need to be using it properly. I'm looking after it properly. So in this section, we're going to look at things like breathing, projection, singing with retraction. That means avoiding a constricted style of singing which can damage your voice. We're going to look at voice qualities, and that's the signs associated with certain styles of music. And we're going to look at posture. So I know that you might think you've mastered these things already and I'm sure that you have. But no matter how long you've been singing or what point you've got to. We all get into bad habits. So I really highly recommend that you do use this section so you're ready to go. Let's get started.
3. Breathing: You should consider. We're going to start with looking at an efficient method of breathing noise. We do not want a breathing style that sounds like this. Rom estate. That GASB be signed in the studio. That's a catastrophe because when the vocal is compressed, it will make the breaths even lighter. And performance wise, that leaves you with no stamina and it's just not unpleasant side. So we'd want breathing that is basically silent. Also, you may remember back in the day they used to tell singers, sing from your diaphragm. Well, that's all well and good. But your diaphragm is the muscle that separates your abdomen from the thoracic part of your interests. For want of a better phrase, you actually have no conscious control over it. So what some people misinterpreted, this is Maine. I was suck your stuff again for dear life. What happens if you squeeze the tube? The contents of the cheap come back up. And many an opera singers career was ended by acid reflux when they sucked in their stomach muscles and that acid from your stomach burn their vocal folds, this can be a serious injuries. The vocal folds, so the kind of breathing we're going to use is called intercostal lateral breathing. And what that basically means is we're breathing between the ribs and we're breathing. Light works trying not to have tension and the abdominal area, and that is called splat. Singers, please listen abdominal tension. So the first breathing exercise we're going to do is go to take a scarf. A stretch band would be even better if you have one for more resistance. We're going to tie the scarf, not Rhine jurist, not under your armpits, but somewhere in-between, right in the middle of your ribcage. So give us a nice tight for a bit of resistance. What I want you students breathe in. So the scar from Ames outwards died R3. Then what I want you to avoid doing is this. Do you see when I raise my shoulders and my voice becomes pinched on, I haven't actually done anything in my voiced cause laptop. And so we want to give your shoulders a good amount of cracking. Give your shoulders a good shrunk and shrunk and listen to leave them nice and loose. And then that's breathe into the scarf. And now the next time when you breathe on it, I want you to let your air on top of your lungs in a gentle hissing sound like this. It's time how long you can do that for? Most people can do that for about 15 seconds. So if you do that for 15 seconds, that would be a sign that you perhaps little unfit where you need to do something to improve your lung capacity if you help us mug or any kind of respiratory problems, that doesn't apply. So I'm going to breathe in noise with the stomach breathing into coastal lateral breathing. I want you to count how many times I breed before I sing this whole. What would we do that I couldn't say, ooh, we do with the drug can say hello, but when we do the drawing, once, you will not do the same thing. So take a breath and your scarf, I'll give you the rhythm radar. There should be some breath left at the end. What I want you to do over the course of this week, use a metronome. Start really fast, say 110, 120 BPM. Then slow the song right dawn until it becomes, couldn't say, well, we can say 11. Now Rome wasn't built in a day. It will take you maybe a week, a couple of weeks to achieve this. But you won't to get to the point where you can sink like 65 BPM in one breath. Another thing that happens if we don't have good breathing, inset pitch tends to slip. So especially if you're going to be recording a lot, you're, if you're performing a lot, you don't want that to help them. So working on breathing, I'm working on it on an ongoing basis is very important. Another little exercise I'd like you to do and get rid of the scarf. No, I wouldn't want you go out in public without scarf tied Rajit. People might ask questions. I want you just to take a deep breath and then let the air out right to the nth your breath. And notice what happens in your body when you get to the end of the breath. So stress. Do you notice? I'll do it sidewise. I'm just taking short breaths, time, stress. Let's do you see my stomach muscles, my stomach pumped light and air was derived into my body because your body never wants to be with art oxygen. This is what to do if you're singing alone France and you run out of breath, he just let those muscles go. Let me go. I know we're normally told to suck button that will drive air into your body. You'll be well supplied with air and it will be silent. So I'm going to try this singing a phrase unused. This is called splat to stop signals, please Wasted the abdominal tension. I'm going to try that with a France. The life that drew em enough breath to get me to the end to the next slide. And I didn't have to take a baby, Gauss be deep breath, or a brand that was going to disrupt the timing of the friends I, so if you want to rewind to a batch and practice doing that. But the important thing is to get used to what your own body does. Get across wires and making sure that you are supplied with oxygen. And basically we're going with those things rather than working against them.
4. Range: The Siren: And desires. Exercise NIH that weren't sure range on also takes your voice through its entire range of movement. So any muscle that we stretch becomes more flexible. Also, this exercise will help you identify if there are any problems through voice, if you maybe got a cold coming on. Because if there are bumps on Creeks as you do this exercise, that would be a little sign that your voice is just not in the best of health at the moment. You can't clear up the bumps and quakes quite often though, by just having glass of water as they count, signifying dehydration. So this exercise is a very standard, very important singing exercise called the silent. So first of all, I want you to say seeing, sing. So say that again. Seeing how that pesticide to your nose, take the ass off the start. And if you hold your nose, the sign should disappear. Okay. So let's move our voice up and D9 through its range of pavement and that anxiety. That's why it's called the siren. Try that one more time. It's important to move it through your own range. Movement on not mine. Not any note that you can hum through your nose. You can sing. So if I can say, now this will work your range, give your voice a good stretch. If you've watched those X-factor kind of shows, you see people singing arpeggios doing all kind of mad warm ups. The siren really as they warm up that you need and that it takes your voice through its whole range of movement, especially if you're pushed for time. Obviously there's warm ups for other things, for projection, for addiction. But this is the best warm-up exercise, is another little exercise for increasing range as the sliding faith. And it sounds like this. So it's not sliding up and don't want to hear every note on the way, et cetera, et cetera. If you've got quite a wide range, it does take some time to do that, but very well worth it. You'll notice that we never just stop on the top note. The point of going up and coming back down again is that restriction with voice but never leaving it on its highest point. We never want to push the voice on if it's tacit terabyte of its range. And you can't injure your voice. If when you get to the top or at the bottom, you just push it one note beyond where it wants to go. The voice is like the elastic in your pajamas. You can never say today I'm only going to stretch one that would benefit when you stretch it, you must stretch at all. So if you go up, you must come down. Noise. Everyone's aware that if you're singing along with something and you hit Nope, it's a bit too high. You might hurt your voice in the field sort, but you can actually injure your voice worse by pushing it too low. You can stand your larynx, which is not a good and Drake. So when we come down, we can dine in very small steps like this. Zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom, sing, sing, sing. X2, x2 zinc, zinc, zinc, zinc, zinc, zinc, zinc, zinc. And when it becomes low and rumbly what we would call vocal fry, where it's a bright cookies on that point, you really must up doped to push it beyond that. So just to recap, siren, that as an exercise you should be doing every day. You can do it in the car, you can do it in the shower. You don't have to block out time to do it. And if you possibly have time every day, the sliding fifths and sing, sing, sing, sing, sing, exercise. If you're getting a lot of your recording, a lot will keep your voice very flexible. It will keep your range as broad as we can get it. And have had some students who have increased the range by as much as an octave and a month through using the siren exercise.
6. Projection Arm Anchoring: Hello, Stress, running. To try. But doing. So, we've looked at some YouTube videos, all very famous singers using a method called arm anchoring on art. I pray what it basically does gaps you to engage your lats in order to make sound better and live the mistake a lot of people make about singing is that they think their voices or instruments only partially trade actually the whole of your body as your instrument. And I'm sure going to use my trusty max down here. You've seen the kind of Ozzie Osborn stamps like this. Or when you think of the Shirley bassinet, go to faith in God, it's the use of the arms to make solid beggar. So I'll go to demonstrate that. I'm going to connect to it. And I'm going to pull my arms back and forth a squeezing my lats together. And when he here, what happens? 1234567. It so that caused a naturally increase in volume. I'd like you to do that with me. 1234567. It so do you feel your lats nice and engaged? Let's do that one more time. 1234567 years. Actually, I pulled them back at five rather than four to nine. Sorry about that. Now let's do it singing rather than speaking. So it will say 123456. Let's try it together. 12345678. Okay, so let's try singing a phrase doing this. So from the chandelier, this chandelier. So I did that. No, our slideshow to try it with arms from the chandelier. So you can try doing that with whatever phrase you want from whatever song you're working on, you can use that one from C as shadow layer if you like. This is called RMI. Great. When you're watching performers on YouTube this week look like for just how many people you see doing this. There is another form of our great call mechanic right now. It so happens that I have the form of arthritis to this fused my neck from the base of my skeleton, my c4 vertebrae. So I'm actually going to show you Freddie Mercury doing this might be a better example of a mate. But what it's like as you almost pretending, you have a pH of your chin, you're pulling your hand back. So 1234567 is my neck I'm hearing is more associated with classical music than commercial music. The reason I'd rather use our monitoring is obviously because of my neck, but also because it gives you that slight double chin. And as you're very, very thin and I'm just don't happen to like that. I like the freedom of movement of my arms up at more. But if you want to try the neck right, by all means, go ahead.
7. Retraction: You'll find. So as you can tell from the videos we just watched, retraction is the opposite of constriction. At constriction is a tightening in your voice. A lot of people experience constriction in their voice between a and F of F sharp five. That's the place where we have what's called the brake and the Posada where your voice changes gear to go into your upper register. So some people find voice gets a little tight there. I'm the problem with that is it won't remain limited to that one area. If you don't do something to combat the constriction, the whole of your voice may start to get narrower. You could do it his ranch and half constriction and more places of your Edge. So we're going to learn high to loosen the voice. So just to demonstrate the principle and what uterus shoulders and dropped them. When we want to loosen a muscle, we tighten it first. So with your voice, that sounds like this. And that exercise is called the Darth Vader. So we wouldn't make it start with a hard k assigned to that, like TV static. So just watch what happens in my neck. Tighten and then the basin. Try that with me. Do the art movement take because it helps you visualize the closing and opening. And what I want you to do is feel what it feels like when there's no constriction when you've listen to your voice. That open failing, you want to maintain that open failing while you're singing. So let's try that exercise again. So something that might be useful for you to do if you do have a lot of constriction and your voice is to sing a phrase such as them do that and sing it again. Maintaining that wide space. And you want to maintain that feeling of space. If you through the space closing over and constriction starting to kick in, then stop and do the little Darth Vader exercise again. So very short exercise, not a complicated thing, but it really is something important to master because as well as constriction melt Simon grit, closing notes to be swallowed affecting your orange. If it goes on for a long amount of time, it can cause nodules which are like little blisters on your vocal folds and alcohols, you to speak like this. I may have to be addressed surgically, so it's something we really want to avoid. That kind of gravelly signed, that re-associate with singers like Rod Stewart on Tina Turner. Sometimes Bono uses it. That is actually constriction. That's, it's purposeful construction. And it doesn't atoll sign BAD. It gives the horse a unique quality. But some people's voices can handle it and some people's kept. We'll look a little bit later on at high to make that Bradley saw and how to broil and how to use purposeful construction. But constriction should be a choice in those circumstances. It should never be a default setting of your voice.
8. Posture: Your posture can very much impact how your voice signs. Remember I demonstrated earlier that if you raise your shoulders and we don't have a big space here, the sine becomes pinched. So we won't have a few shoulder rolls backwards and forwards. Want to keep the shoulders nice and loose. Then restores, dropped them with the shoulders and drop them. Air shoulder. Nice stretch here. I'm back up here to shoulder, my stretch here. So we also do obey, you know, the human question mark. There is a real thing. If physio told me this is a real thing, it's text match. Where if we become very Ron Dodge because we're constantly using screens. And also guitarists are wilds for putting their music on the floor in front of them. And that kind of practicing like this, have up back rounded. This will do you no good. I'm will actually make your next or after a while. So there's a grant exercise that we can do to counterbalance all this. It's calamities exercise. So what I want you to do is find a wall and lean up against the wall. Bandura knees slightly keep the knees soft. Protect your back. Feet. Avoid a foot and a half and wall, depending on your height. You 555, that works for me. If you're over six feet tall, maybe about two feet from the wall. What we're going to do is pretend there was a big strip of salad tape behind your head and it's being peeled off the wall. So your chin comes on to your chest, and your upper back, your thoracic spine, comes off the wall very, very slowly because we don't want to rush of blood to the head that all the way die. So your whole spine is off the wall than just hi. It's a deep breath and tear and can't let your tailbone. Back of the wall. Coming up slow, maybe don't want to hit her head. Then stuck your vertebrae, stack your vertebrae one by one. Lakh ohms and the wall and stand up and shake it out. That leaves you with a good singing posture. And it's also quite comfortable. It's nice. It feels like having your bokeh ironed. If you are a guitarist or if like me, you're also in a case they are. And you're often sitting down to saying, think of what we did and the arm anchoring video, keep your shoulder glands slit dawn towards your waist. That opens ICT. Your shoulder and chest area allows you to breathe properly and makes assigned to bet stronger.
9. The Break in the Passagio: So I'm going to talk more about the break and the best socio. So that sounds like a very musical flurry term does not. What that means is the place where your voice shift scare into your upper register. An old fashion singing parlance, smelt and the method of teaching I use but some moral fashion teachers would use the phrase chance to voice and head voice. But I don't use that terminology because solid does not come from your chest or from your head. Your voice comes from your larynx. But if I try to sing a scale and a very speech quality signed close to my speaking voice. This is what happens. Do RE, MI FA, SO constraints in it? Because the voice travels up and it hits a wall, I need to be able to tilt it for it to travel up further. And for that we have to make a slightly more operatic resonance side. If you don't want to be an opera singer, that's fine. We're not talking about turning you into classical singer, but everybody has to master this to get over the break and a massage him. So in your finest, most polite voice, if you could sink me and scale, DO Re be fossil. Nothing stops at that. You could also do that in twice. Just to Indiana. Yeah. So we're picking a voice quality and we're going to go on and talk about voice called links later that we can use through bite the orange on the song consistent. So if you want to practice scales, and I don't actually like just saying scales up and up and up. It's best to do it this way. So I crossed the break and Masaccio there I went to G5. And the reason we do just saying a scale and on the top because when we go to the high part of your voice towards the end of your tessitura, your range. We want to come back down again so that you're never leaving your voice on the ties note on what you want to avoid doing is just pushing it one little low tire that it really wants to go because you could hurt your voice doing that. So if you have some problems with the whole of your voice not signed a consistent that's actually completely normal because that's just the way biologically the voice is made. If you want that consistency throughout the range. Practice, that little exercise that I've just done in Twine and in that more operatic sound. And it's good to do them fairly often as well, at least a couple of times a week.
10. Pitching: I'm going to talk a little bit in this video. I'll buy pitching, knowing, I can hear yourself saying, but this is a course for advanced singers. And surely if you don't have a good sense of pitch, you couldn't possibly be an advantage singer. Well, yes and no. What makes a truly awful singer as someone who is quite frequently, I don't pitch. But even the most dedicated singers with a grid and title air can lease pitch under certain circumstances. If we start to get tired on the breathing isn't what it should be. If your support starts to go pollster isn't great, then you can experience lapses in pitch. And some of the most successful singers in the world have on occasion Spain auditing sometimes as well, the technology that you're working with can affect your pets if you don't have monitors when you're onstage and you can't really hear what you're doing. That won't help an awful lot. So it s goods to work on the breathing, which has an impact on pitch as we discussed earlier, but also to do a little pitching exercises. So I'm going to give you a couple of those. This exercise teach us some really basic intervals and it's a good thing to do every nine man just work in your ear. So we're good to go. That's a little three-note scale. That afford it scales. It's just a three note scale, a four-note scale, and finer scale. It went up, et cetera, et cetera. Another really important thing to practice because it will help you a lot with improvisation. And just with your general ear is a chromatic scale. Very difficult. Now that was beginning on C. And I really recommend that you do a different chromatic scale every day. That little semitone interval is obviously pretty fundamental in the whole of western music because we have a major border minor chord. And the difference between major minor as the stimulus. So it's pretty important that you can hear that semitone. I'm actually some people have incredible difficultly pitching a semitone more so than pitching an octave. So just to recap, the three note for note and five note scale exercises. And the chromatic scale, or something that you should be doing quite regularly, at least a couple of times a week.
11. Diction: So the whole topic of diction could be a course in itself, but we've just looked at the little example of hard consonant sounds in English, or walk, make a sentence, make sense. Italian is the language of opera because it expresses emotion through viral songs or more, right? And whereas in English we have things like shock, anger. And if you've been listening to a song and you said yourself, I can't make up words. It's normally because some consonant somewhere is flipped. On the other hand, when you record egg, especially using a condenser mic, you don't want to hit consonants really, really hard, especially its essence because that just won't Mozart grid. So we're gonna do a couple of little exercises here. They're like tongue twisters. So the first one is Monday making Monday morning make some Mary Martha lined. So I'll give you the words on the screen. So just read the applied money making Monday morning mix. A merry, merciful mind out of rhythm. Mommy, that King Monday morning mix up marrying my phone might man-made licking Monday morning makes him marry my full life money-making Monday morning mix of Mary Martha mind. Grids does know I will sing it. Money making Monday morning May exam Mary Martha, my iPhone by eBay again, Monday morning makes a Mary Merkel mind. The law AMP side pulls your life forward and hopefully the signed comes forward. Take an L sound like lovely Lotus lilies lie along the lilting lyndon Lee pulls your mud back into a smile and it might pull your voice back to you if you're not careful. So let's try bad words on the screen. Okay, lovely Lotus lilies lie along the lilting lyndon Lee. Lovely Lotus Lily's life, longer lilting lyndon Lee, lovely you though to slowly lie on longbow lilting lyndon Lee, lovely Lotus lilies lie along the lifting. Lovely, lovely lot israelis lie along the LA Friedman doubly. Seven swamps go swiftly sailing to the sunset. In the West. Seven swans go swiftly sailing to the sunset and the West seven swans were swiftly sailing to the sunset and the West. How that see how that can not on my side. So let's sing those last two. Lovely logins. Lilies lie along the lilting London. Randomly. Along the lilting lyndon lady. Seven slides go swiftly sailing to the sun, certain know last seven or so. Though West, swans go swiftly saving to the sunset and though west, okay, NADH, we're going to talk a little bit about a vials. One thing I completely hit is voice modification, or never enough from the greatest showman thing or things for May instead of for me. I personally don't like that. I believe in going with the bottle as it is. And I remember hearing someone's saying once and they kept singing the words, hail and baby instead of hill and bell. And it made the song feel fake it away because it's not the way that people spake. So I personally don't go in for any kind of file modification. The one exception might be the diphthong. That is the AI side because it's made up of awe and eight. And where you change between a and a has a great impact on the side. So I wouldn't so on right at all. And so with no Vienna at all, would wreck the side. So the diphthong is something that we occasionally have to think of. And I'm thinking, especially if there is an extended note. So this is just a little bit to think about addiction. I haven't clicked it. A diagnosable resource if you're interested in this topic. And I hope you enjoyed doing the tongue twisters.
12. Lightening and Darkening Sound: Let's talk about lightening and darkening signed. Neither are fads and fashions for voices. You know, gametes the EMI Wine High stuff. A period where a very dark voice, especially for female vocalists design at the moment to read the aura is very much in the Billboard Hot 100. Her voice is much lighter. Nice. People will not actually have certain signs of the voice, but it can't learn to lighten and darken it. For darkening aside, we use SOB, which we're going to talk about in the voice qualities. Well, so a facade, but lowering of the larynx, so just saves me. I'm sorry. That's the whole Nina Simone side. Birds fly in food. So you know, you, you, another way of darkening solid is to simply pull your tongue back. Listen to this. So I'm making a nice, sweet likes on deck. And I code my tongue bike on the side, darker LOTRO port where your accounts fake, but just slightly. So I'll put some marks to luck. And then coal mine you're talking about. It really darkens the side for a light source and we use speech quality, a style of singing, but it's very close to your own speaking voice so that we access through doing this exercise, we're going to come to it and start singing at 512345678. Now the larynx isn't tilted or lowered. The status singing, and that's really what dark and so on. So let's try that again. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Mom said to me, my mother who owned my phone. If you want to keep a light area Faroe side, that speech quality as well as bass. We want to avoid pulling the tongue back. We want to avoid any kind of assigning, any kind of lowering the larynx. And then solid will be quite light.
13. Voice Qualities: Speech: Now we're moving on to quite an exciting topic, and that is voice qualities. So we're going to start with speech, and I'm going to play you a little video of what speech quality sounds like. Okay? Speech is a very pure signed. It's used in folk music a lot because folk music comes from an oral tradition at storytelling. So it's within the range of the spoken voice. What happens if you tried to take speech little bit higher? I demonstrated earlier the WHO DO RE, MI, FA, SO LA. Tight stops. We have to change this odd. We want to go a bit higher. But within its context, it's a beautiful signs being Irish at something we use lacunar, put music. Mom said to me, my mother won't mind. Won't you? To go out and has it hasn't gone well and not. So how do we make this beautiful side? I would like you just to count to it and start singing at five. So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. So it's sitting in a speaking style. Let's try that again. 12345678. Okay, so let's try singing happy birthday and that speech quality style as if you were basically saying happy birthday to someone, Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, Happy birthday, Happy birthday to you. And to make it a little bit easier, to make it feel spaceship, go ahead and use your own accent. So let's have a go at that again. Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, Happy birthday, Happy birthday, Happy birthday to you. And that is speech quality singing.
14. Voice Qualities: Twang: Lady, you see the, the, it's not okay. In the empty span over these gamifying their fellow Jew was sent from that you would mean never had so much more rational. Say, Show me in a way. The end, I wonder how it's run. You can use. I know we talked about twine when we talked about projection, but it really is a very important vocal quality because it's the only way to increase volume safely and keep your voice protected. So let's again make that little tiny sign, that note you'll have observed in the video that we just played that when Anastasia changes her voice from speech cold day to twang, it's almost like it's two completely different singers. It really changes the sign of your voice. So let's try that again. Somewhere up high. So more low, no, no, no, no, no. This kind of songs. It's used in a lot of kinds of music. I talked earlier on about her that she used and classical music, music, theater, all z OS born, you know, pure twine creates had signed on this dish as well. Very much associated with music theater. It's not big. No, no one's wife, but nasal twine. Think American accent, Australian accent. Your own accent doesn't Tableau. The twang is if you have a very hokey English accent, it's actually easier to learn to put it all than it is to take it off and do. Speech quality is so maybe like twice. And if your accent house twice. So we're going to do another Happy Birthday, not we're going to sing happy birthday as if you ran the stalls out a sports match. This is going to be a lied twice eight, Happy birthday, Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you. Happy, happy bag. Again. Practice that signed then sigma happy birthday. Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you. Happy, happy birthday to you. By the way, sing happy birthday and we'll ever pitches comfortable for you. Don't follow my mezzo soprano voice. If that's not what works for you.
15. Voice Qualities: Falsetto: So take a look at this image. You'll notice that there are trade vocal folds. I refer to them because they're not courts like you again, and I can talk. The white things basically. And above them are the false vocal folds. So when you sing in falsetto, the true vocal folds don't complete, become together, hence, air is escaping, but the false vocal folds j, hence falsetto, creating that lovely, breathy signs, but we've just heard and the Marilyn Monroe song. The next quality, falsetto, is a much misunderstood term. Falsetto does not mean men singing really high. The Marilyn Monroe excerpt that I just play J is the most famous example of falsetto. See un, use fake or you say, your vocal folds come together like this. And above your vocal folds you have a pair of flaps called just spoke of votes, ready to use falsetto because an awful lot of air is escaping. Your true vocal folds don't quite come together, but the false vocal folds do, hence falsetto night we need falsetto just as we need twine to control dynamic. It's really the only way to hit a high note quietly. Let me demonstrate. If I don't want to say luggage falsetto and saying, so, let's sing Happy Birthday like Marilyn Monroe. So what I want you to think is half boys, half are. In fact, we'll start with some cars because really helps can just go. Brilliant. So let's do the Mr. President top, Happy Birthday. And hopefully you'll enjoy doing that. Happy birthday. Happy birthday. Happy birthday. Mr. President. Heavy. So knock yourself out. Doing that. I have to breathe a bit more than normal in that style because a lot of air is escaping. So let's try a large quiet lodge using that. So if that you've just made some pilot light, which would be speech quality, falsetto speech quality. And the higher you get, the harder it will get. False setter is assigned we really want to master in the context of a song. If you suddenly go into falsetto, it can be very, very emotional. It can be sultry like Marilyn Monroe. It can actually be very sad. It can be wistful. It's a brick color to have in your palette.
16. Voice Qualities Sob: You now have the sun in the sky. You have 10 ohm that, you know, it's a new dawn is a new day. It's a new law from me. Some new then new for me and unfeeling. So we've just listened to Nina Simone singing feeling good. And despite the fact the lyrics all, are all by filling good to feel slightly sad. She was in terms of something Melancholy by the gods because she's lowering your larynx like she's going to cry. Can you just do the same thing? Say for me, I've had neither the larynx is what's called a sympathetic organ. So if you hear someone else's slightly tucking up, like they're going to cry. They've lowered their larynx and your larynx will Doherty, so you will physically feel sad night there was a period in history where that kind of Saab signed was very own Vogue. Though wins. Not so much at the moment. You wouldn't sing an entire song in salt because basically you depress the audience. But I think you could hear in the neatest among track that if you use it in the right place, it's very powerful. It has an emotional impact. So I would want G9 to sing Happy Birthday, like it's terrible birthday. It's the most miserable birthday anyone could imagine. Bi birthday to you. Two, you two very hand up there, but you know what I mean? So you can pause the video saying it yourself. Okay. As well as creating that saddle motion, the salt also as useful in darkening signed birds fly in through the skin. You love. It is a beautiful sign. Friday, useful in jazz and all sorts of music actually. So lesson ICT for it and see if you spot it while you're listening to music this week.
17. Complex Voice Qualities: Opera: So this next voice quality is referred to as opera or tilts, because in order to make this side, we tilt the cricoid cartilage or the front of our larynx forwards giving a kind of sign night. If you're not intending to be a classical singer, don't be scared by that, but everyone needs to learn to make this resonance side. And it is sometimes used and caulk, not to that extent. Maybe not to the extent of the center Bregman video that we just watched. But the sign is that the exercise we do better. You will hear it and a very recent pop song. So in order to get the side, we're going to start off with the twine because trying as a component of it. So could you just make a 27 through your nose? Okay. Nine hmm, three nos. Very tiny than a hard GAS signed were closed the Port I'm forced assigned by it through your mind. Dee. Dee, that I want you to drop your jaw and your larynx. So Let's try it somewhere but higher and your voice. And lower your chin on the highest note. So we're low in the worst night. Let's sing happy birthday in that style. I don't mind. You really have it up. Take the Mickey, I love Katherine Jenkins have you must, but let's go for it. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday. Happy birthday. And we especially want to hear it on the higher notes. Those should really be ringing.
18. Complex Voice Qualities: Belt: You know, that that is mainly demonstrated when you are ready. One more book withholding and that is bent. If you watch foods kind of X-factor, the voice shows there are people that believe belting the living daylights out of everything is good singing. Not necessarily, but it is obviously a really impressive signed when used in the right place. And so if you've felt an entire song, It's a bit like typing in capitals. It would make the audience feel yell dot, know it. There is a difference between twine and about 20 with side like this way. Whereas belt will sound like this. One. It's a high intensity, high volume solid and it's completely safe. If you do it with good for it is not safe at all if you do it with Blackboard or if you just shocked. So if you're doing this exercise, we're attempting to belt, you feel any pain, any scratching this new voice, stop. Message me and I'll try and work out what's going on. But any discomfort, you just don't want to go back. Okay. But honestly it is safe. So what I want you to do is to look into the distance, find a spot to Sarah and say, Yay. Yeah, let's just say that again, EDA. And then let's turn that in tune. Note. You know, when we make that solid, what we're doing, it's tilting the cricoid cartilage at the back of our larynx. Remember when we made the operatic cell injury, we're tilting the thyroid cartilage at the front. So if life actually help to lean back on your back foot, pull your arms back a bit. Yeah. Okay. So let's add some notes to that. Yea, meaning back yay. Note you can't felt through the whole of your ranch. There is a point where your voice will just flip until felt center because it can't go up high because tilted backwards, your larynx count trouble up that far. So let's just try it somewhere. But higher. Say if you can do this. Yeah. You count also about 200 dying, but try it somewhere lower. Good stuff. If it's too high for you to bounce me big mountain, just use Antoine a strong dwellings and actually I think goes it was about that till try them at higher. And I just use Twine at the top because there was no way I was going to be able to belt that pie. So you should be able to belt on onscreen UP melting your voice should be clear. There was one fins contents to form the X factor in the UK who belted write a song. And afterwards she was speaking like things. That is a sign that you would have used bound form. So people often mimic crystalline because I've heard on recordings, but we really do want to pay attention to your form in the sand. So if you want to break it down and do that for a couple of days, if you haven't already mastered this side, then the wrestled adding more nodes. Yeah. And then progress on the same boat she counted and content and belt. That would be a good idea. And remember in the recording studio, mike is just going to hit bound to be. There are ways of recording it, but that is problematic and sometimes actually to use a strong twine signed count will be the better option. But live belt is very, very effective there as well. That fellow, New Jersey, et cetera.
19. Identifying Voice Qualities: Let's see. Hi, hi. Key, cathode. My brothers so and share, the sky. Failed. Fiat and smile. So keep watching over. You then.
20. Cool Down: Now I'm sure you're used to doing vocal warm-ups, but you also want to be CAFO to codeine as well. I'm high, the codeine is like this query. So there's no real voice coming out. There's just the vocal folds coming together, tightening. I'm listening. It's the same as doing this with your shoulders. If we want to relax muscle, tighten at first. So let's do that creek again. Corey. Nice hard KB and you should see my voice least like one more time. R3. So if you'd been recording for ours, if you've been on stage, it doesn't really take a long time student, oh, codeine, but it's really worth doing. It's an essential part of your voice care.
21. Recap of the Basics: So we've just had a look at the basic elements of seguing, breathing, projection, retraction, vocal qualities, posture, pitching. And at this point before we move on to some more complex things, it's good for you to work out which of these areas are your personal weakness? And no matter how good a singer you are, we all find some of the basics more challenging than others. So keeping working on that area is going to make you a better, more rounded vocalist. We're going to move on to looking at creating your own unique vocal identity. All great singers are great singers because you can hear them on the radio, on, you know, instantly who they are, whether that be frank Sinatra or Dusty Springfield, you know, anyone who has a great singer. So we'll be moving on to look at things like recording technique, performance Tech, make some more complicated vocal exercises. But just keep working on the basics you need to work on while we're doing that.
22. Introduction to Performance Techniques: Welcome to the performance techniques section of this course. In this section we're going to move on from the basics of the last section and look at some more complex vocal techniques. We're going to look at things like constriction and grilles. Free as a vocal fry, coloratura, whistle register. That's true. Mariah Carey, kind of really high notes. We're going to look at a lot of in-depth vocal technique here. But we're also going to look at who you are as an artist and creating your own artists persona. So who you are as an artist.
23. Improvisatiion: Hi. In the South, being able to improvise is a very important skill for singers. Especially if you're singing covers a lot on their songs that people know well, you want to be able to put your stamp bulb up, creating your licks and just mixing it up here, nine them. So we think if some really great signals that Eva Cassidy, obviously dead or a bag with an awful lot of music. But sometimes we can't give a little bit too far with the vocal gymnastics and actually irritate people. We don't want to go back. So it's pretty important that ornamentation and he kind of improvising mission, decoration to the song makes sense with the text. It has to add something to the sense of meaning of the song. If you listened to Aretha Franklin singing Amazing Grace, It takes her bite five-minutes to sing one verse. But everything she does, main subject and how some kind of intended impact. It isn't just about showing off. In order to be able to improvise, you need two things. One, a very good ear. You need to have a good ear, not just for melody, but four chords harmonics. Because to be able to improvise on who knew notes into the chain, you're going to have to take them on record. And for this, you will need a bit of theory. Scales and chromatic scales are pretty important for being able to improvise. And again, a knowledge of chords and that's not just major minor course, but things like sus4 chords, you're nights your thirteenths, knowing what the effect of you're adding a certain note is going to be on the overall music. So as well as learning the chords, you're going to have to practice that. You're going to have to record yourself into your phone every time that I just say, hi, you're harmonizing has worked. So here's an improvisation exercise I want you today are going to play a series of four courts. So I just want you to sing something over the top with those four quarts. Eight has the start. It's just piling on the route to note the Court, but try and make up something a little bit more in plastics. And and here come the courts gag. And let's make up something different. So just keep playing if you can, if you are an instrumentalist, series of courts, I'll write these courts like for you. I have here E minor, a minor, D, and J. If you don't play that, I'll just play the chords for you. And you can just keep playing them on a lake and put notes that you hear forming a little chain on that is helping you to start listening to courts because a mistake singers make is to only think in terms of melody and never actually pay attention to the court and not mix for not great musicianship on the likelihood of heading a Docker when you do that is quite high. So let's just listen to these gourds and you can make something up to this loop. So enjoy this exercise. This should be a really fun one. So speaking of Amazing Grace, because it's a chain that people know very well. I'd like to do a little improvised nation exercise. Arrived Amazing Grace. So the first thing I want you to do if you know this song, is to saying the first bars of Amazing Grace, just straight, no ornamentation. Gray. The head, say it was change the chain anywhere that you want to change the train. My feeling would be to do something like this. Red. Square. The head say wretch, well hose with c. So just saying it again, a byte four times. And every time you sing it changed something and one line add in some higher notes that are n, the original melody. If you want to add in some lower notes. But be sure that you're keeping it in time and that your improvisations aren't throwing AI to time. It might be a handy thing to use a metronome for this lab. It's sad it to maybe a byte 65 just to make sure that you're not going on at a time, I'm using the phrase I.
24. Phrasing: Here's where we've been very much street. And so singing is all about freezing, unfreezing mix the text have emotional impact on really guides the meaning of the song. So I'm going to sing the same phrase three different ways. I'm bored. I'm basically going to do as stress a different word in the sentence each time. So I'm going to take the second verse of taken other metal piece of my heart made famous by amor Franklin. And I'm going to slightly stress a different word each time I, I sang it. You'll the street the you know, do done and you'll hot that a ride. So I was aiming for straight that time. Second time, you know, on the street. And you know, who do you down and you'll hear that a rat and aiming for no, that time. Third time, I go to him for heart this time, you're on the street, the game about it, then, you know, do dad and Yamaha betting red hand? So each time I sign that, there was a slightly different scent. Singers have to engage with text, especially when you have a line that's very difficult to fit into the chain, such as the example that I played from a dial Skyfall through what you have to do is work out what is the most important word in the sentence? What is the emotion that's being conveyed here? And really am to reinforce that word or not will shift the phrase I. One thing you have to be careful of in phrasing is where you breathe. Because if you breathe in the middle of a sentence, basically you break up the sense that sentence and you wreck the phrase I'm on. This side may not good. We don't want that kind of thing to happen. So breathing goes very much with Fraser. So when you have a text in front of you, you have to think about where you're going to brave to carry the free is the way that you want it to go. And what a phrase is going to constitute to you where it needs to be broken up for effect and where it's got to float. So these are the kind of things that we have to think about. So I'd like you to try it, but take another little piece of my heart exercise. The first time, stress the word straight. The second time, stress the word no, the third time, stress the word heart, and just see which one feels most natural to you. There is no right and wrong. And just have some fun with this exercise.
25. Whistle Register (Coloratura): The notes about Topsy are referred to as coloratura notes or coloratura can also refer and classical music to an awful lot of short notes all bounded together. Mariah Carey is probably the most famous pop singer who uses a lot of those coloratura notes. They are not usually part of the actual melody of the salt, but usually used as part of an improvisation. As good an improvisation to be able to use as much of your range as possible. You know, we all love to hear those high notes and last are a bit too frequent. It's impossible to hit unknowns above Topsy quietly, and it's very hard to articulate words up there. That's just something to be aware of. So if you already have notes up there That's grit at, you need to use them. It's possible that you have them on. You're not using that. If you do the siren and you just open your mice at the top of the SAR moves aside from your nose and your mouth. You might find that you can hit some really cracking notes. Don't force your voice up really, really high right to the edge of your voice and then open your mouth and basically scraped mode because then you will really damage your voice. I'm just demonstrating that if you can hum something through your nose, then you can sing it. It is very important that we use the whole of our range because even if you have notes up there and you think they're gauche and you don't really want to use them. And you just sort of stick in the middle of your voice, then your voice will continue to narrow down and narrow die. We have to stretch the voice both up on dy. So I'm talking about coal returning notes in this section, but also by vocal fry, which is the very bottom of the voice. Some of what you hear. For example, Nicole Kidman and so on. Talk to me on race. There's some very high no, it's not, but they'd been added digital age. So some of what you hear on recordings isn't the Singer's own voice. There has been some studio enhancement. So maximum, try and sing songs that were never human voice in the first place. But if you want to extend your range, I'm able to hit these notes. Go back to the first section to the ranch exercises. And if you ever happen to hit a high note, your voice that feels scratchy or tight or in any way uncomfortable. Don't go there until you've worked on your range a bit more. That should basically never happened. You should be able to hit high notes comfortably and there shouldn't be any kind of pan. The other thing is, they should of course, be in the right K and the right musical place for the patient. They should be contained within the court if you're using them for improvisation purposes. If you want to go over the improvisation section that's in this part of the course and perhaps add some of your coloratura notes in there if you've got them, That's grit. Night guys. You're probably thinking that this video is just for the girls. It's actually completely possible for man to sing coloratura notes that happens quite frequently in the show, Jesus Christ Superstar. There's some recordings of that where you'll hear man singing above top S8. And it does involve a very specialized technique to do that, which we're going to look at in the falsetto versus thin volts section of this course. And easy and safe way to hit color a terminal nodes with a quieter dynamics, you're not really batsman is to use the siren knife. Edge size will be dead, so you basically humming them through your nose also helps to affect them in to the context of the song.
26. Vocal Fry: Look at some vocal fried by the amazing dominant sky, the lead singer of GVD IVF. He would use vocal fry very much as a choice. That glottal side, constricted side as we start a note, which is really the use of the very bottom part of the voice, should definitely be a choice. It should not be a habit you fall into because there are certain risks associated with it. If you push your voice lower than it wants to go, you can just stand your larynx. You can basically sustain a very bad injury to your larynx by doing that. That's why when we did the ranch exercises before, we can come up and beg jumps to the fifth. But we can join. And the very small steps, the sing, sing, sing, sing, sing. So that kind of mays, May using grays. We'll also talk about that in the video. For offsets. It has a very earthy quality and the right musical context, such as we've just seen it used. It can be very powerful and very effective. It was used quite often, the score of the greatest showman. And there's some very low notes. I'm going to show you how to do it. A lot of singing teachers don't recommend that. I wouldn't recommend this unless you are a very important singer. You have a lot of performance experienced behind J. You are exercising your voice regularly. I'm doing vocal exercises using the siren, et cetera, and that you are properly taking care of your vocal health. But you're having a SAS regulate that you're drinking a lot of water and that you have no pen and your voice, no constriction, no breathiness or hoarseness, that your voice isn't very good health. If you take all those boxes at only a few tick, all of them will have a little look up vocal fry. So we're going to do that same, sing, sing, sing, sing, exercise gap. So sing, sing, sing, sing, sing. Starting at middle, say, zoom, zoom, Sing, Sing, Sing, Sing, Sing, Sing, Sing, Sing, Sing, Sing, Sing, Sing, Sing, Sing, Sing, Sing, Sing, Sing, Sing, Sing city starts to get with them and rumbly, that's what we call for. I. Sing xa, xa, xa, xa, xa, xa, xa, xa, xa, xa, xa, xa, xa, xa dot S fried the variable of your voice. You don't want to sing that for any extended bear period of time. But the odd note like that used as an onset does have a powerful effect, especially in the studio. But I would say go lightly with it. Don't use it a lot.
27. Onsets: Let's talk in this video obiter onset. So we've talked a little bit of white vocal fry, which is arguably an onset. But there are three main types of onset. There is a glottal onset with the vocal folds are very close together. When we started note, there is an aspirin all such where the vocal folds are cart and there's a lot of air when we start to load. And there is a smooth or balanced onset. Like I had, had a classical singing background and an exams I did in those days, the only onset that was considered acceptable walls are balanced or smooth. Onset. Aspirin onsets got along sets were done on in commercial music and hope a global onset can actually be a very useful thing. And our aspart onset can be quite emotional siding and a whole lot of different kinds of music. So let's start with a quote, long touch with the vocal folds are tight together. We're going to start with the vial. So all I want you to do is sing it almost a slight Twine. The vocal folds are close together. That is a global OEM set. Let's try it out together. It's a big store, two-note nor the aspart onset. We're going to get into by using an edge sign. So now I take the edge off the start and still make it aspart. Okay, I'm ER, the smooth ER bones onset, the vocal folds coming together in unison. Very balanced, a smooth start to the side. We're going to achieve this by using a yes, sorry, but we're not doing it in the same way we did in the belting video. It's going to be acquired or science? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. One more time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then with the Y at the start. So let's put those onsets into a piece of music so you can hear how they change the side. I'm going to use Amazing Grace, the user for a lot of things for this course it seems, because it begins with an app again to the vile. It makes it a good France to saying so with the gospel, many grades, with the asteroid. Read a case and with the balanced, may raise. So high, you begin a word or you begin a phrase with the onset really does impact the signs of the tone, the kind of sense that you're giving.
28. Growl and Purposeful Constriction Sounds: The second row is determined. No. I love that broiling sides. It took me 20 years to learn how to do it simply because I had originally come from a classical training background where you are never really mapped to make songs like that. But hopefully I can impart it to you in the next few minutes. I played you some videos of Tina Turner and other singers and have that kind of gravelly broiling side. And that is basically constriction. So I know you're thinking, but in the basic section of this course, you said not to use constriction. You said learn retraction. This is trade. Constriction should never be a default position, not in some people's voices. For example, Tina Turner, Ron stirrups, that kind of really gravelly voice. It might be, but their particular larynx is equipped to cope with that. Most people's art, constriction can lead to damage to the voice that can lead to modules to all kinds of difficulties. So when we apply it, it should be a choice, a moment default position. So that kind of gravelly broadening saw it. Very cool. It adds a little something to some songs, I believe. So. We are not going to do an exercise to teach you to do the girl. Like if you fail any kind of scratching us and your voice, any tightness or any kind of pan. We never do anything that hurts. Stop, and don't attempt this video or this exercise band without contacting me to describe what's happened along, try and help you out as best I can. Again, like any other form of physical activity, singing with incorrect foreign count calls, injury. So always be aware of them. So now let's do a little exercise to get that broil going. I'm going to use a line from the Weather Girls song is raving man, sorry, labs if you're into that one, but it's just a grid for us to use together brought under inhere. Why the second photo, first time, R3. R3, R3. And that at the start is going to help us to get the girl. So loosing the whole line. And when you get to the blow air, blow airlock, you're blowing bubbles on slightly, bring the vocal folds together so well, the first R3, R3, R3. So let's just try it wasn't ready to help really blowing air, history, history, but also tightening the vocal folds the same time I'm asked to do this in Twine, so okay, first of all, we'll sing it with Twine. R3. R3. Then taking off the Twine, blowing some air at the edge. Re, re, not having the constriction purposely tightening in our array and that is high. We make the grilles side use it omega where necessary. Don't get into habit of segment with constriction all the time. And just repeat scratchy this pan, any hoarseness of the voice after doing that. Don't use this video again, message me. Describe to me what happened. And I'm happy to walk you through the steps of doing this, but if you follow this exercise, you should be fine.
29. Falsetto Vs Thin Folds: So this video is going to be especially good for the boys, but girls pay attention here take as we're going to be talking about the difference between Saturn and then falls. I've just play G of videos of the inimitable Dominic sky, the lead singer Guevara, in my opinion, one of the best singers, like they're at the moment singing very high, but not using falsetto because falsetto is the Marilyn Monroe. Happy day. Very airy, signed on as we talked about in the video on call center. When you make a falsetto side, the true vocal folds doped completely come together. There's some space between them. An EHR scanning motivic, hence the breathy side, but your false vocal folds above the true vocal folds are coming together, hence, falsetto. This is side, this is what's called thin fold singing. So that's when we create a soft dynamic NAT threefold setup. I'm letting air escape, but just by allowing the vocal folds to come together thinly. So instead of sounding like this, it sounds like this. But it's still a fairly quiet dynamics. I want you to sing those two lines in a pitch that suits you to feel the difference. So first we'll do it with falsetto, would start with an H, So that a lot of air comes up. Annoyed with the thin folds where there is no air escaping, but it's still a gentle side. If the book of bulls aren't coming together suddenly, if they are really pressing together, the song will be to laudable, solid like this, which is not what we want. So one more time with the bend both. No, I don't want you to try the same exercise with some were quite high and your ranch, don't follow my orange juice, something that's comfortable for you but quite high in your range, so or maybe a bit higher. Falsetto, Ben, Ben photos. So if you put your hand in front of your minds and the falsetto, you'll feel a bone marrow escaping and then the benthos you shouldn't. So you would know you've got the thin phones going well, when the sign is quiet and you can't feel air. And guys, this is a great way to access your upper register. It swapped dogs. Guy was using there to hit some higher notes because felt sever is the first way that we learn to get up to those items, especially if you don't want to hit behind note. Very hard. But if you're going to be singing on extended phrase in a higher pitch and you just want a slightly different song. Do you want a slightly stronger, solid and falsetto? Then focuses the light go.
30. Movement: So the first example of movement and posture we're going to look at as Freddie Mercury, what our total star. So there's quite a lot going on and what he's doing here. He's using arm anchoring and he's also using neck anchoring, which is something that we talked about a little earlier. So the way that he's moving his body is actually making the sign very bake. But at the same time, he's shaping his body movements. Take the big drum on guitar sign that's going on a runtime, so it looks appropriate to the genre of music. He's also responding to an interacting with the audience. When he swings his arm, he's building up energy and the audience and getting people to sing along. So interestingly, here he has no shoes on, so it's quite easy to center. I personally find it quite hard to center onto hub, just the right balance for second. When wearing really high hails, we're going to look at Tina Turner in the minute. She can sing and any Haida behavior, that's maybe just me. But for some paper, they need to find their center of gravity. And if you're one of those people, it's about finding what works for you. Okay? So this is a very, very high energy track from Tina Turner and she goes beyond movement into dancing. Although you'll note that she's not always dancing to the same extent that the dancers on stage are, because you've still got to be able to sing. If your movement is so high energy that you become out of breath or you're not able to access the whole of your range, then that's counterproductive. Some people get over that by using back-end tracks in mind, man, but we are not even going to think that day that, oh no, that is not good. You'll also notice as well as her a high-energy body movements that she's got grit, facial expression, really engaged. Aware that not only is she in front of a big audience, but there's also cameras on her at the same time. So she is, as I mentioned earlier, wearing really high heels on this. She can get away with, and she was brilliant legs. So what you wear actually has an impact on how you can move. And then that has an impact on your overall performance and on the side. So that's something to be aware of. So those two interests, me. Most. I came to light. So I wanted to add in a quiet or song, Nicole Sharp singer. And this song is not just standing still looking into space, because that's what makes for a terrible performance and actually makes you that completely terrified. Even when you've got a softer songs sing and it's not appropriate to be bouncing all over the stage. So the way she's moving here is contributing to the song. She's using arm. I'm crying. When she lifts her arms, that contracts are lots thought Nixon stronger as we discussed earlier. It's also completely in keeping with the character because this song Don't cry for me. Argentina is sung by the character of Eva Peron. And if eta, she was basically a deck two tricks. So a politician, celebrity, a former actress. And so someone who would have taken up a lot of psychological space. So I think her arm movement and taking up space for the RMA, but mixed total sense for that. She's also got a great use of facial expression. Like she's really engaging with the text and not something that we always want to aspire to, to look like we're feeling what we're singing. I would make one small little comment and that is a bite. Her dress. I feel sometimes like she's being pulled forward a bit and able to stand completely upstream because she's scared of perhaps popping out of the dress. And as we mentioned earlier, what you wear will definitely have an impact on your performance and on your side. So something that has to be thought about very carefully. Also the fact she's got the really big earrings here, which would mean that you couldn't turn your head to click right. But that's fine because that wouldn't be appropriate and the song. So we've looked at some very different kinds of movement in this video. The movement that you make will be dependent on your own genre and your own personality. But there's definitely plenty of things to think about here.
31. What You Wear: So we talked a little bit in the movement video about HIV. What you wear kind of impact, you're singing because it impacts on your posture and your ability to move. So now I want to talk about what you add in the context of your brown dying on your artist persona. For example, when I did my monster of Music degree, one of our course tutors showed us a picture of his band. And they all work completely differently dressed. I mean, they didn't have a consistent style going on somewhere. T-shirts somewhere in suits. And by image, no money because it wasn't clear who they were aiming out, what their message wells. Then they got some brown taken place. They decided what their artistic message walls. They have a dress code that was in keeping with that. And they also call it a logo, which they featured on their website, all their social media called their branding and order. And in one year they made 4 million US dollars. So I'm not saying you'll go at MC $4 billion by getting the right fit right. But it is important to have a consistent message and keep giving people a consistent idea who you are and what you wear is a big part of that. If you're Jane Bright, classical music, you might want to work really formal wear for certain kinds of rock. You might want to wear a lot of leather. You won't to work OIT. What clothing is going to go with your branding? And we talked about branding, having the three words that describe you as an act, and keeping everything consistent with that. There are some items of clothing which quite frankly don't photograph well. Patterns that very small patterns. I know I'm wearing a counter, know I, but it's large pattern rice little patterns will come out sometimes confusingly or glaringly and a photograph liked colors, unless you're very thing can make cubic bigger than you are. Anything that's a very shiny fabric, silk. So sentence reflects light, so we'll make you a little bit bigger just so as you know. And ladies, the best foundation that you can wherever we photographed it is old fashion pound stick because anything that has an SPF on, of course, we should be wearing sunscreen and have SPM from our makeup. But additive as an SPF can reflect the light and may not be too flattering and photographs and that's just a little tip to follow.
32. What You Say Onstage: So performing is not just to bite singing. You're going to be communicating with the old hand this in other ways while you're on stage. So we've looked at the whole issue of movement and posture. But you'd also have to talk. If you're the senior year, the front person of the band, you're up there. You might want to tell some stories. You might want to hold people into the performance by really connecting by fun. But you don't want to talk for too long between songs because it's really the songs that are the center of white people are there. And if you talk for five minutes between songs, you actually bore people. Different performers have a different approach to this. For example, I went to see baby came a couple of times and constantly he was an amazing rock called tire and he can talk for half an hour and you would be fascinated. And then the other extreme, I went to see Eric Clapton who really didn't talk at all. But he's such a genius and a legend that you're there to hear him play. So you don't necessarily need him to tell stories, you know, PVS. So there are certain things that you want to avoid saying. But when you're on stage, I've heard artists that I was going to sign whenever I worked in an R. But then unfortunately they would say things like, Oh, I don't do cheerful. You know, I only do miserable songs. So you're telling me that you're limited on what you bone make people feel bad. Because I want to assign people are going to make people feel good and enjoy the experience and want to come and see you live. And want to use your music and add some because you have brown stoke their brown to be associated with people feeling bad and miserable. They won't upbeat, positive vibes, which doesn't mean we can't do the occasional sad song, but it's not good to say that your music is always miserable. And last year aiming to very specific audience. Also never get up on stage and give hallway when you practice this for half an R or any other little jokes that might actually make you look unprofessional and that you haven't put the African kids. Don't forget most of the time your audience, I'm paid to hear you and it is disrespectful to them and we are basically paying you, paying your cape. If you say yes, I took your money but I didn't put any effort. And even as a joke, that usually doesn't go down too well. So some people are absolutely terrified by the idea of speaking, even though they can easily sync to an audience. But really the key evidence conversation. We saw a Freddie Mercury in the movement video drawing hippo n. So what you want to do is get people on your side, have them reading for you, have them feel that they're part of the experience. So make eye contact with different people in the audience. You can even pick someone from the audience and tell him you like for sharpening earlier place to see them tonight. But be engaging, be positive, and let people have fun.
33. Your Stage Persona: So talking about yours stage persona on who you are as a performer, that's got to be based, at least in part on who you are as a person. So you basically want to be yourself. You may be a bigger, more flamboyant version of yourself. Or you may want to completely be yourself and be valuable Atlanta. But I know we talked before, like there's her two kinds of orchestrating. There's the aspirational, the sort of larger than life they, David Bowie is that he's star dust days that just take us to another word that's escapism. Or there's the Tori Amos, very, very visceral, emotionally wrong, really lead you into her world and into some of the private things that have happened to her. So which one of those directions you go and will very much be based on who you are as a person and the sign of your music and what you're trying to achieve through your music on its messages. So again, we've talked about the branding exercise a lot, but it's those three words that describe your music. And, you know, can you think of a mission statement for your music business, for your brand, for your stage persona. What is it that you want to make people failed? What is it you want to achieve? Do you want to make them feel hopeful? Do you want to make the realized things that are happening in the world around them and be a little bit political or socially minded. Do you just want to make them feel good and happy and have a good dots. What is it that you're trying to achieve with your music? Because once you have the answer to that, then creating your persona as a performer and you're brown to as a music business entrepreneur, which is what you're basically going to bake if you become a professional singer, would be an awful lot easier.
34. Recording Techniques Introduction: Welcome to this section on recording techniques and high. You use your voice and a studio has a certain technique tip that's slightly different from life technique. And this section is going to be useful to you, whether you're going into a studio to record, or whether you're recording remotely and sanding vocals through to a producer. I hope you're going to find it useful. We're going to look at things like working with condenser mike studio condenser mics, which are slightly different from the directional bikes that we use when we perform live. We're going to look at the kind of effects that are used on vocals when recording and things like cold by the vocal and adding compression to the book go to high that dictates your initial performance. So I hope you're really going to enjoy this section.
35. Directional and Condenser Mics: I'm sure you're used to working with these kind of likes. This is what's called a directional mic that we would use for performance. It picks up sign from the top and you sometimes need to be quite close to it before it will have its full effect. I've got it set up here to record courses on Udemy, which means that I have a little pulp folds are with us in the studio. We use a different kind of like we use what's called a condenser mike. So this is a condenser mike, the kind of Mike we use for recording. It is slightly different from a directional mic and that I can pick up sign 360 or you can set it to pick up sign to different ways. We have a reflector shield with it. This reminder that the moment has a terrible echo, but that takes away the side of the room and gives us the dry aside possible. So that affects can be added digitally. And very important we have with this thing, which is called a pop filter. And that takes away that annoying patents, kinda consonant noises. The side we call a plosive. And if there's a plosive and the recording, it's an absolute nightmare to take back, right? So we want to use a pop filter to prevent that. Actually, a coat hanger with a pair of tights of root will have a similar. So when you record with a condenser mike, if you stand a little bit too close to the Mikey, get put back in here as an example of clipping, but you don't see it. You've jaw. So what you want to do is second to the mike. Thus, we want to lean away at the lightest point of the song way. To try and avoid. It also has to be borne in mind that condenser mics are very, very sensitive. So whatever sign is going on just outside the room or nearby will pick up on the mic. So we want to be a little bit mindful of that.
36. Comping a Vocal: The term comparing a vocal refers to taking several ticks of the vocal, normally beginning with recording choruses and then going back and recording versus a Geng, at least 34 takes and everything. And then putting together the best of all those ticks to form the final vocal. So that's what we're going to look at in this video. So we're going to start by looking at a piece I've recorded. We're going to listen to two different ticks. And then we're going to put together a cult vocal. We, we, we, we, we, we will broadly, we will, we will. So say, I decide I like the first part of the second track and the second part of the first track. This is high, I'm going to add them together. So I've put in a little edit to that. I'm going to move it up onto the FastTrack. And then I'm going to add an ELA across FAD so that we don't get an ugly added, a kind of jump between the first, second parts of the track. Using the smart TO course. This isn't a production course. We're talking more about vocals. There's lots of very useful courses on DAW is out there. This one is protosun case. I haven't mentioned that before. So here we have a vocal coped added together. We will ground we we we we.
37. Vocal Effects: So I want to add some reverb to the track. We just count to give it a little bit of sheen and sparkle. It's the green track marked Vaux three, you can see in the middle of your screen. Now this is not a production course. There are many production courses out there, but just to give you some idea, so we're going to Vaux three. And I've added a bus. You can add reverb onto the tracks, straight onto the track, but it's better to use bus, have a bit more control. So I've added a bus and then I've added an ox. Am. So I've got 4x3 to go with books three, and I've added, as you can see, a little reverb program in here. And I can turn the reverb up and die by clicking on the bus. So let's hear what that signs like. We we. So the next thing I want to demonstrate as panning, and that is when you move the signed ICT right or left. So I've just gone in to the mix window here. And I'm going to basically twiddle the little knob on walks three to take it wide. So let's hear what that sounds like. We, we we we there are some other effects for you to be aware of. This is not a production course, so I'm not gonna go through the mall on Pro Tools. But just so that you're aware, a very common one you might find maybe auto chain or Melodyne. Melodyne is a better program and the auto chain just change the voice to the right pitch if it's gone off a bit. And that gives you a sort of tinny sound. Whereas Melodyne mimics the way a real voice work. A real voice vibrates. It doesn't just hit one note at a time. So if I sing, I'm not just saying that one note, there's a lot of little notes involved and that's what melodyne does. So that's something you might encounter it in context. And there is an effect called T panning, which gives you that really electronic signed. I'll play you an example of that later. And certain genres of music you might want to use t painting and a host of other effects that can be opposite the voice, such as auto harmonization. So you may encounter a number of days. I'm on a boat. On a boat.
38. Consonants: In this section, section we talked about consonants and high words don't actually make sense unless you can make out the consonants when you hear a song and you don't know what the words are, it's usually because some consonant somewhere is missing, but there are certain consonants to be very careful off when using a studio condenser mike. Signs are very irritating. We want to keep acids short. The pop filter is there to take out the plosive P. And we just want to be careful, uh, by elongating consonants at the end of words, the producer can fix that digitally, but it's better to Just sing it right in the first place. So say I've got a line music of the night. So we have the hard Sagan, hard t there and satisfying, help me make the music of the night. That's not gonna side grit and recording, recording context. So you want to hit those continents. But in a very short way, helped me make food music. Right.
39. Harmony: Tv show, as she calls. So from the examples that I just play, JI JO realized that mostly singers harmonize with themselves in the studio. Occasionally, you may have other singers in session singers to create a certain side and add something about recording that I love. I love to do harmony parts. We're going to look at a little minute at high, harmony parts are recorded and balanced and mixed in with the man vocal and the effect that, that creates. And we're going to listen to my voice and three parts. But first of all, let's just take a little bit of the theory of harmony not going to go into in too much depth. Some of you will be graded at harmonizing, but we're just gonna do a little bit of the basics. So basically harmony is based on courts, and you don't just want to sing, you know, random thirds and fifths and pull a harmony out of thin air from the melody. You want to listen to the chord when you're coming up with the harmony part. So I won't do it with harmony exercise. The first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to play a chord in several different inversions. And I want you to pick ICT, the tonic, the man note of the chord each time. So here we have C major. How you saying the same? Or did she say? And automatically hit the dominant? That's what a lot of people dying. So let's play a coordinate and see if you can still hit the, say, no, I want you to hit the dominance, the highest note by playing it and that last inversion. So now let's try a minor chord and see if you can hit the end of the court. This is just teaching your air to PO note side of the cord. And I want you to hit the center. Again. I asked him if he can keep playing this video back and back. And I will drag another magical art. And I want you to hit the third. So I want you to hit that note when I play this chord and it's repositioned. I would like you to harmonize this simple melody that I'm about to sing with the chords. And remember, listen to the courts, not to the melody that I'm singing to create your own harmony line to this chain. So keep going practicing that and have some fun with that. So let's look at recorded harmony here we are again, in Pro Tools. You can see I have a compressed vocal as a box, and I have a low harmony, harmony labeled here. So these harmonies have famous compressed. They have been panned ICT. So in a minute we'll go into the mix window and look at that, why we listen to the track. So you can see here we're in the mix window. You can see the high and low harmony. Near the left. You can see that loves turned so that they're pandemic and you can feed that. They had buses in them for environment. So they have been worked on as much as a man vocal would be, and then lowered in the mix like a load of the main logo so it stands out more. So that's what I've done here. We will, we will not grow. We will ways. We can do.
40. Studio Etiquette: Let's talk about studio at a kept because we have to remember that studio time costs money. So we have to behave in a way that's consider it in the studio and try to not unnecessarily waste time. So always be on time. It really annoys producers on a definitely a noise record labels. Whenever people are lit, be properly rehearsed. You don't want to go in and be learning songs in the studio. Learn everything you need to learn before you go. You also want to have your voice the best naked campaign would be hydrated, have had a proper night's sleep. Don't go into the studio. Half cut are hung over it. That goes without saying very small thing. Remember to turn the slide off your mobile phone. Very annoying when you've just done a grid, taken something and all of a sudden a Facebook message alert goes off. That's just know, operate failing. Take an interest in what the other musicians or dig. It's not just a by adding your part and then disappearing off for a t brick, you to be part of what's going on, engage with the producer, unfollow the producers directions. Even sometimes you might have a difference of opinion with the producer by being willing to try different things and take direction. And that's going to cost you in a good light on hopefully help come up with the best product that you can get.
41. Care of the Voice: Let's talk a little bit nicer by care of the voice. And this is important because your voice is going to be your livelihood if you're a professional singer. And if you're expecting company to make an investment and your talent basically in your voice, then you have a responsibility to look after that voice. The single most important thing you can do to look after your voice as to drink plenty of water and keep your voice hydrated. Especially if you've got a gig or you're going to be in the recording studio. Your vocal folds that come together when you speak or say are covered with mucus membranes, culture mucosa, they are fluid membranes. Why did you drink a glass of water? It's got to filter on all the different parts of your body that need it. And it might take a couple of hours to get to your mucosa. So if you've got a gig, you should be drinking water all day or at least a couple of hours before the gig. If you just have a big gossip water before you go on stage, all of it's likely to happen is that you need to pay during the performance and that's never good. That's a very unpleasant to be stuck on stage in that situation. So you also want to avoid certain things and far be it for me to tell you what you should do with your lifestyle. But just so you're aware of the consequences of certain things, if you smoke cigarettes or any other substance that you smoke, you are passing hot smoke over those mucous membranes, which will completely dry them out, which will leave your voice sounding hoarse. And I can't over time do damage. So just so long as you're aware of that, if you are a smoker, drink a lot of water, you also want to avoid an awful lot of caffeine. And I'm a total hypocrite saying that because I could relate diet coke addict when I studied to be a singing teacher, they always told us that for every cup of coffee that you had, you would need to have four glasses of water because caffeine is diuretic, it causes your body to lose fluids. And anything that causes you to lose fluid is bad for the voice. We want to avoid yelling. Shark. And West bring any extreme use for voice which might damage that. We can make big signs through using twine, through using belt, through using falsetto for the quiet was re-signed. We want to avoid anything that actually puts a strain on the voice. The sign of a healthy voice is clear tone, a clear sign. That means the vocal folds are coming together properly when you finish it, when you speak or when you say if any hoarseness appears in the voice or any air is coming out when you speak or sing, that would be a sign that the vocal folds are not coming together properly. That would be assigned that something was wrong with your voice. And at that point you really should consult a doctor, especially if it persists for any length of time.
42. Common Vocal Problems: Here are some common problems with the voice to the ICT for one would be that she suddenly lost the top part of your range. So that's suddenly cuts ICT. One possible cause for that can be acid reflux. If you've been eating a lot of spicy foods, if you've had stomach upsets, if you've been vomiting for any reason, that acid can produce a lot of mucus which blocks your larynx, is ability to travel upwards, or it can actually burn your vocal folds, which is a very serious injury to the vocal folds. If that happens, consult a doctor, tell them that you're a singer. You've noticed to loss of range. Now I once went to the doctor and said, I can no longer hit G6. Your average doctor will not see that as a medical problem. So sometimes she will have to consult someone who specializes in the performing voice. Asked me he talks about in the last video, any kind of order, so this can't be left unchecked, that must be checked by a doctor. One cause of horse this can be what's called nodules. Julia boundaries, as you remember a few years ago, had surgery for nodules. They are on a dal has also had problems with nodules. They are little bumps that grow the vocal folds. And those little growth stop the vocal folds from coming together properly. I hence the hoarseness. They are a serious problem with the voice, but they're totally treatable. Sometimes they do have to be removed surgically, but there are exercises, speech therapy exercises you can do to burst them so they can't be addressed. If you get a little bit of resonance and your voice a little bit of warble, I would call it a wobble in your voice that isn't normally there. It could be that you have a stranded on that you must rest your voice. But basically if your voice signs of different and its tone than it has in the past. This is something to run past the doctor or to run past your vocal coach just to work out what the cause of that might be. To stay aware of the health of your voice. It's good to do the siren exercise everyday life. If there are bumps on crackles there, then that might be an indicator that your voice isn't completely how they usually it can just mean your voices dehydrated or you might have an infection coming on. My one word about infections of the voice, don't say with a sore throat, you may have a big gig arranged. You might have a day in the studio. You may have something you don't want to miss, but it's not worth risking permanent damage to your voice. If you have a sprained ankle, you would not go out and run a race all that. So it's the same kind of idea. If there's any kind of pan rest, you can't sing through flat. If you have a chest infection. But you cannot sing through any kind of pan. And actually if you've got any kind of respiratory infection and he kind of problem going all that, it's probably best to rest and then resume singing whenever you feel better.
43. Recording a Demo Introduction: In this section, we're going to talk about recording a demo or making some kind of recording. And there are several reasons why you really need to do this. You don't want to just be emailing promoters and record labels and anyone who you'd like to work with say i saying that you need to give them some example of your signed and you won't bump to be the best representation of your sign, but you can possibly get. And we're going to look at the section about how you achieve that. You're also going to want to have something to sell or give to your fans, to the people who are interested in your music. He won't trucks that they can listen to you and share and turn your funds into your marketers. Let them be sharing your stuff and bringing other people and to the world of your music. You must have recordings to create a presence on the likes of Spotify, on YouTube, the places that people go to look for music while you count, of course, play live on YouTube and live on Facebook. And a lot of people create a found this three j, not three live recordings, but you also really need to have studio-based recordings as well because the sine of a live performance on the signed to a record of work are different and you need to cover both those basis. You also need to have tracks that you can use to get airplay, possibly starting like on local and community radio. But if you're aiming of actually to have national airplay or international appetite, then watch you have recorded, must be recorded to broadcast standard. You might also want to have your recordings and several different versions. You need to email links to people because it's generally annoying when people send you MP3s aware of. So if you get enough, those are the day it will crash your inbox. So you're gonna have to post them somewhere online. And if you're getting a lot, it might be worth looking at having physical CDs that you can actually sell, but we'll talk about that a little bit later. And I hope you're excited to get started with this section.
44. Preparing to Record a Demo: There are several things you'll need to have in place in order to record. The first and most obvious thing that you'll need to have a place as the pieces that you're going to record. You probably want to start with say, three or four tracks. And I also like maximum five. You're sending out demos. They shouldn't be full album length that will get listened to it. And you need to be careful that you don't run into any kind of copyright infringement problems. So you count to be posting things online that weren't written by you to which you don't own the copyright, acknowledging the copyright owners. So we're going to talk a little bit later, a byte, sourcing original material for you to record on what to do if you're recording covers a posting covers online. The second very important thing that you have to work out in your recording is who is going to produce the recording? The producer side recording is like the director on the film. The final product will very much mate their vision. So you need to find a producer who's signed, tallies with your own idea of what you would like the recording to sound like. Or who might take it in a different direction, but you're going to love what lj. So this is going to, and listening to a lot of stuff that's out there. And finding the kind of production side that really works for you. Also, if you want to get airplay with your demo, you want to post it online. If you're selling it to people, really want to have it broadcast standard. But it doesn't necessarily mean spending an awful lot of money or traveling, but we'll talk about that little later and the finding a producer section. The next thing that it's going to be important to have a board is the right musicians, the right people to play. No point having a brilliant set of songs and the great producer, if the people who are playing on the recording arts, making the signs, that goes well with what you're trying to do. Night. It doesn't necessarily mean going out and source of loose musicians yourself, producers will often use session musicians, or you might have a band that you're used to working with that you'd like to bring on board. You understand your signed. The really important thing that you need to think about before recording is the brown diet. We talked before about, I know I keep mentioning at the three words that describe who you are as an artist. Do the songs that you've chosen represent who you are as an artist in the direction that you want to go in. And do they represent the niche that you're trying to fill with them? The music industry. Do they signed a little bit like something somebody else could have produced? It's something to think about tourism unique to you. Do the quality of the trucks reflect where you want to go in the music industry. These are all something to think about very carefully. The production Again, us to make the brown dying. Because if they production side, if you're aiming for a very acoustic sounds, you want to pick country artist, there's no point going to an EDM producer. So does the production of the mix reflect who you are as an artist? Does the album, are they release artwork? Reflect who you are as an artist? Does it reflect your brand and you want to keep everything consistent on all message.
45. Finding a Producer: Gonna talk a little bit like how you find a producer. And it's possible and this edge to work and a local recording studio with someone who works nearby or to work internationally and sand files off to be mixed. So you would need to be running on DAW or Digital Audio Workstation in order to do that, records your vocal and send it off to be mixed. I've personally done both. And there's pros and cons of both, but finding a producer is one of the most important tasks. And making a recording and a getting your music right there, because they're ultimately going to be in charge of the final side. Now it could be that you're a position yourself, which is grids. But if you're not, there are several ways of finding a producer. Finding other artists whose sines you really like. Discovering who it was that mixed and mastered their work, is a great way to start ICT. It's also possible to go on sites like signed Clyde and just listen to a lot of different artists and your genre. And you try and find out what you really like and production what you don't like in production, what side you're actually going for. You can also find producers to work with on sites such as music gateway, music industry networking sites. When you find producer and you like their side, approach other artists who work with them and make sure that they were happy with their services and that they were happy with the final production. It's also good to find like, hi, good that relationship was with the producer. Some producers have very much gotten a fair idea of what the signs of the song should be like, which is great if they're very experienced, but they might commit a bow those over the way that you want to decide. And if you're the artist and it's going on in your name, you want to make sure you've got some input over the final product. I always think if producers as being a bit like hairdressers, more expensive does not necessarily mean better. No, I, there are some big man producers who might charge quite a lot for a track. And there is no real standard fate of a musician she didn't rates and the UK are 3250 and art. And so one song should generally work on a byte, two to 300 pounds. And it could be considerably more than that if you're using a big man producer. And some producers will ask for 20% of the royalties if it looks like the release is going to make money. So that's just something to be aware of. You will have more face and just the fates. The producer though, you may have to pay session musicians. You may have to pay, see deduplication. You may have to pay for artwork. So before you enter in to an understanding that you're going to make a record, I be sure that you can afford it. And I know that that sounds really perfunctory, but sometimes people get themselves into trouble through agreeing to make a recording and then discovering halfway through, I can't afford to have this finished and I have no laptop and just wanted to talk a little bit of home record night, working in a studio may seem like a better option, but actually, with the progress and technology at home recording and programs like Pro Tools and logic, you can actually get a very good sign from a hub recording. It really depends who's behind the digital audio workstation, who's doing the producing what songs you'll get light to dark. Turn your nose UP. If someone says, Well, I have a home record I set up because in some instances you kind of get it right, get signed out of that. Learning to produce yourself is a great thing to do because it seems an awful lot of money on production phase. There are lots of courses available to help you choose which DAW would be best for you, and to help you learn to use that DAW, it does take some time to refine your skills as a producer. I have been working as a singer and songwriter. My for about 15 years on, I would have to say if I was going to release something commercial release or I wanted to release precinct, which means that it would go into a TV place of a door, online advertising or TV advertising, that kind of thing. I would never think of mixing and mastering it myself. I might record it myself, but I always get somebody else's air and box for the point of view of sending demos and trying to showcase your side. If you can't record it home to decent standard, there's no reason why you shouldn't do that, but it's good to run it past somebody. And just for their feedback on the quality of the production. And another good thing to do after you've produced a song yourself or after you've been sent songs by a producer, is to include those songs on a playlist of songs in a similar genre. And ask yourself, is this stacking up? Does it signed? Similar to the commercially released songs that I would like my music to be able to sit alongside? Or is there anything really glaring in it that needs fixed?
46. What to Include on a Demo: So to include in your record ID, if it's a demo, I would say I'd like four tracks would be more than sufficient out. These tracks should really showcase your ranch is a book list. They should showcase your position and the genre that you're aiming for. They should be the strongest tracks that you have. The ones that you get the strongest audience reaction tape when you play them live, basically. And they should be all message with your branding. They should really describe who you are as an artist, put the strongest truck first on the collection, especially if you're burning it TCD because quite often and I know this from working in ED or myself. I'm, if I'm sent a link to four tracks, receding four tracks, I'm actually quite likely to listen to half of the first track because, you know, people and not area are very under pressure. So always put what strongest first when you're deciding what are your bass tracks? Yes, go on your own opinion because, you know you're an artist, you know what you're doing, but seek other opinions and form dependence. So you can ask anyone you know, who is an established artist. You can ask a music teacher, anyone who's a producer, just get some feedback on what are your strongest tracks before you go into the studio and spent money on recording them. All the text. Whenever you're producing a CD or you're posting tracks to sign poet in the description, be sure to acknowledge all the writers of the track, the producer of the track. And it's also good for to acknowledge the musicians who played for you as well. So these are all things that you should really be, including.
47. What to Exclude from a Demo: So what to x grades when you're making the record? I'm very importantly exclude anything that you're not sure, but the copyright, if you don't own the copyright or you haven't got the permission of the copyright owner to record the song, vent doubts, put it out there, it could lead to a world of trouble later on, Xcode songs that you personally really like, that you feel fall off, but they haven't got a great audience reaction. Or nobody's really sharing much online. You want to go with the songs that are the strongest and the broadest opinion, but you can get light and we talked a little bit about that. And the last video exclude anything that is insulting to any great. And I know that sounds crazy, but I have actually, when I worked today and are being sent songs where I've listened to that thought. Know if, if I release this, if I put my name behind this, there's just gonna be a world of trouble in certain genres. It's totally fine to have a bit of an old swear. But in other genres that smelt on quite often, companies when they're looking for something for Sync, which is when music is placed in films, TV ads scans that kind of thing. They will specifically say no swearing. So if you've got a bit of a swear ESOL, have a clean edit over it. And it's better to send like the clean edit as a demo because it can just be used in a wider range of opportunities. Absolutely exclude. I'm never put OID anything under your name that is less than professional saw and dying. If there's crackles in it. If there's click bleed, if there might be the old Duff note. If the production just as clean of it hasn't been masstige, then don't send it all to just make sure everything is the kind of quality you would want it to be, to make you seem as professional as you can possibly be.
48. Finding Material to Record: Let's talk about finding material to record because we've mentioned the whole topic of copyright in previous videos. I'm actually hi, I came to be a songwriter by professional, was that I initially when I was trying to find gigs as a singer and going out there as an artist. I didn't want to get into copyright problems by releasing covers and I will always love you or whatever. So I realized I was going to have to either create my own material or find people who were writers to create material for me. And so happened, it turned out the, I loved writing and so I became a singer songwriter rather than just a pure cigar. Not may happen to you. Not be brilliant and maybe you're already writing stuff. But if you are giving a lot, songwriters are going to want to work with you because every time you perform one of their pieces in public, that could be paid royalties at no cost to you. So long as you remember to log your performances with what's called the performing rights organization. Or you tell the songwriter when you've performed their songs and let them do that. So people are actually going to walk to work with you. So if there's been a great song that's being released especially locally to you that he loved. And you e-mail the rider and say, I really love this song, would you consider, reckon with me? Unless there's some contractual reasons why they can't do that. Nine times out of 10, they're going to bite your hand off to be able to do this. I personally love working with up and coming cigarettes. I've worked with three so far, this share. I enjoyed every minute of it because it's a songwriter. There's nothing nicer than working with a really good voice and being able to help produce something that really showcases that voice. So you can find people on Facebook grapes that are local to musicians in your area via the likes of saw implied, or you can message people. You can basically just look up songs that you love. See the credits, who's written them on Google, that was people in email them. And, you know, whether this certain reasonable level, I mean, if you are e-mailing people who like Calvin Harris, who are working with very major labels. You know what the start, that's probably not likely to padlocked. But there will be plenty of songwriters like that that you can find two you're going to want to work with you. You can also approach publishers. And the UK, there's a website called Music Publishers Association online, MPA online, and it gets.org. It's in the list of useful organizations. There are similar organizations internationally. So you can actually approach a music publisher and say, I'm an artist, I'm getting an artist. Have you got anyone on your roster? Be interested in writing thing. So this should be totally achievable. Be sure when you're looking for a writer that you find someone who really understands your genre. And it's good if you're a singer to find a rider who really understands voice. Some song writers are principally guitarists, are pianists, and their vocal lines can be a bit tricky. The lyrics can be a little bit crushed. You want to find someone who you feel really understands voice and is likely to understand your voice.
49. Writing Your Own Songs: Now let's talk about writing your own songs, which is enormously exciting to me because as I said in the last video, I will center on became a singer-songwriter and I absolutely love song, right? I'm, we're just going to talk very briefly in this video about what's due if you'd like to try your hand at starting to write your own stuff. And this might not be applicable to all of you. Some of you might have been writing your own songs for a long time. One of the first things you need to do is learn the song forums in your genre. So if you're writing commercial pulp or commercial country, those songs tend to be an a verse chorus, verse chorus, bridge chorus form a, b, a, b, c, b, otherwise known as the National formula. In say, jazz and swaying songs tend to, they enter verse, verse, bridge, verse, so forth, which then repeat sometimes the bridge. They last verse. So folk chains quite often don't have a chorus. So there was some today that are in what's called a Form. So Learning song forums as really the first place to go. And you might find if you listened to a lot of music and your genre, that actually comes quite instinctively. Though, we've got to think of things like harmonics and what fits with the mood of the song, and the kind of language that you're using in the lyrics. Are you aiming at your target audience? Well, are the lyrics appropriate for the genre of music that you're using? Do they reflect you as an artist and the kind of messages that you want to get like that. So songwriting yourself is amazing. It's a whole world. The best way to start after you've learned those basic things is to get like that code, right? With people with singer-songwriters, unsolved writers in your local area or you can make people online via music Gateway, I've mentioned before, they send up a lot of collaborations. It's great to meet people on side car to collaborate with. You know, it's, it's a really fascinating world to get into other really highly recommend that little note, if you're a singer and an instrumentalist. So you're not going to be writing the chords, but mostly the tuna, the melting thoughts grids because people who are singers tend to write things that are fun to saying that singers enjoy singing. So I'm, they tend to write bold or intervals with sometimes when people start right Eigen, say there were guitarists, they tend to pick out the root note from the chord up first. So it's not a disadvantage to primarily be a singer and not an instrumentalist. It would be good to find an instrumentalists to work with so that you have the right series of courts going with the melody and the words that you've created. And it's always a good thing or I'm primarily a cigar. That's my man instrument. I also play piano and guitar, and I'm not a genius playlist or guitarist. I really loved piano, but it's good to just get that knowledge, of course going. So you can start that out by just learning what notes go into court and what chords go into a key. And not basic bit of music theory will set you up well because I think singers think they don't really need to understand cores wrong. In the studio, you will be expected to harmonize. And if you're going to write, you have to write. Courts. Singing is not about being a karaoke star and everybody else who's playing is just that back you, you are a musician. So I'm going to include a little bit of theory information with this video and talk a little bit about what loops go into a chord, what chords go into key, that kind of thing just to help you start with the writing. And I really hope that you have some fun with this.
50. Physical CDs: So a question I get asked is, do you really need to have physical CDs? Well, quite often when you're approaching music industry professionals, you'll be emailing legs because posting C days all over the place is just going to cost a lot of money and it's much easier for people to get an email and their phone and just play the track. But if you're getting a lot and you want something to sell to your audience, good to have a physical CD. And also some radio presenters would much rather be sent a CD, then sent a lot of links and they can just play it. It's good when you're sending music of various opportunities to just check what the submission processes are. But you do need to have a certain number of physical CDs so you can sound waves and make some money back from the cost of the recording. Other, of course, CD sales are a lot less than they used to be. And really that's something that you'll only achieve if you're getting quite a lot. If you have a CD, you want it to look good. I mean, you don't want to be sending silver CDs. I'd have task goes scribbled on and pan, you can't actually buy a CD predator. I'm sitting beside me here. As you can see, it just looks like an ordinary printer. It hasn't little tray in it which produces CDs that look a bit like this. So you can see what I've done here is I've got an image that's off-center. And I've used what is basically the cover of my album so that I can have a demo version with the sand brown dying, but with fewer tracks all that when I want to send it as a demo. If you're selling CDs having been printed out well professionally is a good idea. You could see my CD there. It's been barcoded. That's very important because if you want record stores to take your CDO and Ansel it, then it must have a barcode on CD Baby online. We'll do Cdg application for you out of a good rich, you can upload all your artwork and they will supply you with a barcode that also supply you with gold, what's called ISRC codes for all of your songs which are important because then if they're played, if you remember the right organization, you can make royalties and we'll talk about performing royalties in a later video. Another thing that you can have created if Cdg application that's a bit extensive, aren't dying. These are styled cards of my last album. So what happens is people pay me for the ys and they're much, much cheaper to produce. And C days, you Salvo's to the person or you give it to them for free and it has a dilute code on the back of it. Yeah, go ahead and use that diamond code to download this album if you want. And the person can go online and have the whole CD so you can pass those ICT at music industry events, you can sell those and it's much cheaper than producing CDs. But some people like to have a physical CD. They like to have all the artwork. So it's useful to have some of those. The one thing I would say is usually when you have CDS printed, there will be a minimum print run. You might not be able to get less than about 200 or maybe 500 CDs. So make sure that you actually are going to be able to get rid of all of those. And that you're not just going to be tripping over them. Learn when you first release a recording, you might need about 30 CDs to send to radio presenters, bloggers. You might want to give it to certain people. So it's probably going to be easier to get rid of those CDs and you think, but a certain number of them you will be giving away for free. So you've then got to work out what you're going to charge to make up the cost of the rest of them. I do get some physical CD sales through my website. I offer physical CDs or MER and you know, it doesn't happen all the time, but every non-man people randomly buy them from my website. But the most effective way to sell CDS is to get regularly because people are in the moment they're enjoying the music, they quite like it if you sign the CD. So it's really at live events that people are most likely to buy CDs.
51. Recording a Demo Recap: So the recording process is a really fun one. It's collaborative, it's artistic. It's something that should be really enjoyable, but just a few things to check before you jump into that process. First of all, be sure that you can afford it costs to properly and advance and make sure that your whoever you're recording with, but you sign a contract and you have a very firm agreement of high much it's gonna cost so that they can't come back to you and say, I spent more hours on this and I had originally thought I was going to end it all spiral out of control. And anyone who's a reputable professional and the music industry will be happy to sign something, run a million miles from anybody who vote. If you can't currently afford it. Think of launching a crowdfunding campaign on the likes of Go Fund Me, slice of the pie. There, there's also a great site called Patreon or Patria. When you think back to musicians and classical days, the likes of Haydn and Mozart would have had patrons. It's sort of the modern idea where people can give you a handful of dollars, but it's every month and they get rewards for that. So you might give them t-shirts and merchandise. You might send them tracks that nobody else has access to. You might send them sign postcards from wherever you're getting, that kind of thing. So that's the site well worth looking at intake. And also before you make a record, I don't just make a recording for the sake of it, have a plan of what you intend to do with it. Who do you intend to market to and sell it to? The industry? Do you intend to send it to what contacts have you got? And with those two things in mind, what will you do with the sidewalk tracks? Will you include to progress your current music industry goals?
52. Are you ready for a record deal?: In this section we're going to look a bit at high to find a record label and whether or not you actually need a record label. Let's first of all look at the kind of things that you would need to have in place to be approaching labels or to have labels approach sheet. For a start, you need to be able to draw a cried. Imelda May got her recording contract. Well, interests are days, which is unusual because she was able to bring 3 thousand people ICT on a Tuesday night and London. So can you draw a cried? Are you gigging? Is there clearly on market for your music? That's something a and our reps will be intensely interested in. So you also need to have a strong brand to people wrongly think a record label will do all this for you. You need to have a brand going at clear message, some kind of indication of what your, uh, bytes. And then an INR rap artists and repertoire that people that do the signing can work out how you would set alongside their current roster. Do you have an online presence? So not just a lot of people following you on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, but are those people are actually engaging with you? Does it look like you have basically a tribe of people who are willing to support your music and spent money on coming to see you. You need to have a gigging calendar up on your website and up on your Facebook that shows that you're working regularly. That you are basically not just sitting at home dreaming of music career, but you're doing the work. And then user happy to work with you on people are happy to come right on C U. A very important thing to remember about an RX is that they look for a reason not to signing. So I think to think by that this point is, what are the reasons that they might find not to sign? Yea, um, what can you do? But those things, are you not giving enough? Is your branding and imagery not strong at the moment? What is it that you really need to work on?
53. What a Label Should & Shouldn't Do for You: There are certain things that labels should do for you on certain things they definitely should not do. And label should be responsible for producing and releasing your music, for arranging live performances for you, for getting you press and promotion, getting you interviews, all that kind of thing would be the responsibility of a reputable level. They will take up to 50 percent of your income for royalties for That's just be aware of that. Sometimes people are offered record contacts and think they're being ripped off where that is actually completely industry standard. And a lot of money is spent on producing and promoting your music. So they have to recoup that last some way. There are certain things that record labels should definitely not do. They should not ask you for any fees up front, there has been a sort of scam that's still kind of operating within the law, but it's still a scam that's been happening in recent years where companies will say, yes, we'd like your music. Sighs, great, we'd be interested in signing you, but it needs to be produced better. So we want a couple of 1000 points for you to produce an EP with our producers. That is basically a scam that shouldn't happen. You shouldn't be charged up front for anything. So just to make sure that any company that you come into contact with as reputable, contact artists on their roster or former artists and ask those people how happy they were with their services. And just remember, if anything seems too good to be true, it probably is.
54. Types of Labels: So there are different kinds of record labels, and you've probably heard of some of the major labels, such as Sony, BMG, island, chrysalis, virgin. You're very unlikely to be signed to a major label when you're just starting out. When I had discussions with a major label a few years ago, the A&R wrap sad, Come back to me when you saw the 100 thousand units and that is the kind of money you would need to be making to be of interest to a major label. Sometimes if you do well in the independent label, a manager might come along and buy up your catalog. And managers have sort of priority lists from a today. So a might be the likes of Beyonce. And you're actually sometimes better to be signed to an independently above, rather than be a low priority at a major label, there are some amazing, quite big, and dependent labels. One of my favorites is rough trade, have released the lights at e-reader and smartest that I really like. And there are some amazing small independent labels I loved one called Ruby Wax, best and Ireland. But the label of that will be of interest to you, will be dependent on your own genre. And of course, we never want to approach a level that doesn't work in the right genre. The independent labels tend to be more specialized, whereas the majors will have departments for everything.
55. Finding a Label: So the big question is, how do you find the label? And you've probably heard this before, but it's more likely that a label will find J if you're giggling a lot. If you have built up an audience online, if you've got good social media interaction, then it could be the allowable will approach you. There's nothing wrong and you're approaching labels though. So long as you approach the right label, don't employ these companies that just send your details willy nilly, to a database of contacts. Because if you're a country artist on your details are being sent to a methyl labels. That's really not going to reflect well. So there are some music services online such as music gateway. The details for music Gateway are included and the useful organisations section of this course, who will tell you which labels are currently accepting submissions? No, I most record labels don't accept unsolicited material because they would just be completely swamped. And most of them are even though they don't accept unsolicited material, but some of them date. So if you're interested in approaching a label, just be sure and check their submissions policy. If they asked for lakes, don't Santa C, D, and vice versa, because it makes it look like you haven't paid any attention. And also never just send like a blanket emails, generic emails to whole host of labels. You want to look like, you know something about the label you're approaching on, what kind of artists are assigned to that roster. So there's some things you should include in the email if you're approaching a record label. The very important question you have to answer is, why should they sign you? Do you fit in with their current roster? Very importantly, do you plug a hole on their roster? What is it that you have to offer them? Something to really sit down and think about it that you want to send links, music. And last I specify, otherwise some companies have a Dropbox and some would rather have a CD. Mostly it will be links. You don't email MP3s or waves, because if someone gets enough those in the day, I will crush their inbox. So it's a pretty anti-social thing today. And again, you want to show that you know something about their business when you email and give a bit of background information about yourself and who you are trying to do this as briefly as possible though, because A&R wrap scat, many, many e-mails and awake and they're not going to read through some die by looks like it's going to be a thighs and long. So that's just something to be aware of.
56. Inside the Head of an A&R Rep: So having been an A&R wrap myself, I thought I'd give you a little bit of insight into high ANR at stake. And R stands for artists and repertoire. That's the people who actually do the signing. They are very, very concerned a byte money because they're responsible for spending a lot of money and that money has to be earned back. So they don't want there to be any risk involved that the project might lose money. So you need to prove that you have an audience to sell to already, up and running. And we talked about high, you do that by having good interaction online, by gigging frequently, and having an audience who are willing to come out and hair, you pay for tickets and to buy your music. Basically, they want everything to be as low risk as possible. And, or reps are also very concerned with commercial viability on markets. No, Not might slide very crass. You might be thinking, oh, but we're artists and if I am a gifted artist, should not be enough, know your music will have to follow some kind of trend because the NRA has to be reassured that it will actually sell. So it has to fit into some niche within the music industry. Artists who say, I am unique, I don't have a niche, genre less and are actually don't like that an awful lot. So that's just something to be aware of. Of course, you should have original siding music and you can't be a carbon copy of someone else's thoughts, just a bit pointless. And they do look for originality and it's something fresh and new. But there's also got to be a clear market for your music. After all, the music business is a business and like any other business and exists to make money. So that is something to be aware of. Another thing, and our maps we'll look at is how do you behave? Are you professional art basically, are you going to be a nightmare to work with? Are you consider IT person who turns up on time, he replies to emails, and he behaves in a professional manner because it's not just your talent. Your behavior is also something that will give companies and, and business people basically who are thinking of working with you. Some idea of high professional, you're going to pay you high A's eight. You're going to be, how much they're going to be able to market you because no one wants to put forward someone who's going to be representing their business if they behave in a way that is rude or unprofessional. So these are just a few of things to think about when you're thinking of approaching and record level.
57. Live Music: The most fundamental thing you need to be doing to pursue a career as a professional singer is to be ICT there, gigging. So if you're not doing that at the moment, it really is essential to get started. With sales of CDs and downloads falling. Live music is many musicians primary source of income. And I do know singers and musicians who make most of their income through having residencies and local bars and restaurants. So never looked on and that kind of dig because a good living can actually be made that way. So different venues you might want to consider, bars, nursing homes, which is great because you're actually providing unessential community service. A lot of studies suggests that when our short-term memory starts to go, the music and the words of songs are so ingrained and our long-term memory that it connects people with earlier parts of their lives on really improved our sense of well-being. So it's an amazing thing to do. There are online sites like concert window where you can basically bus go online and people can tip you and by your music on those sites, they're a bit less popular since the advent of Facebook on YouTube live, but still well worth considering. And they can help you to grow your fan base. Support slots for other artists, either on her local venues are a great way of patching and to quite big artists audiences on growing your own fanbase. Record stores I've played at HIV and had a great time. And all that involved was contacting the manager of my local HMP coffee shops. And I've put here, if they pay, there is one well-known international chain of coffee shops who recently posted on Facebook and my part of the world. But they were looking for musicians to play. Please post a link. And all these, mostly young people were posting links to their YouTube. But what are you getting out of it? You'll bring along your friends and family. They'll completely fill up the coffee shop so there won't be any new audience for you there. They'll be buying coffee and cake and you don't get paid. That's basically exploitation to me. So there are ways of finding gigs, approach venues yourself. My friend who makes a good living from Jake residencies always says, Never email if you can just walk in on chat to somebody. If you're going to do that though, dude out a considerate time. I mean, if you go into a restaurant at lunch or dinner service, you're just going to make a pan of yourself. So infra byte three in the afternoon or pick up the phone, it's harder for someone to say no che when they're actually speaking to you. You can use a reputable promoter. And the way to find a good promoter as to find out which promoters other artists are using. Or you can hire a manager to help manage your life career. So putting on the basket egg possible, we talked about this a bit and the performance technique section that play with the right musicians for you and for your signed and have the right setup for the venue. For example, if you're in a small coffee shop or five piece band is just going to take up half the floor space. Dress appropriately for the venue that you're in and let the people. But can you know that you've made a bit of an effort? I'm very importantly know the audience, what kind of people hang out in this venue, and what are their expectations likely to be? Thinking of working for free? Do you think it would be great exposure to play a certain game for free? Well, think very carefully about it because when people work for free, it actually damages the whole of the industry and venues can get people into play for free. Why should they ever pay anyone? They know they can get someone else to do it for free. And that way music is devalued and live music pitches one of the strands of income and music, which is actually doing quite well, will be damaged. So the musicians union and the UK have this handy little chart for working out whether or not you should do a gig for free. Of course, if it's a close friend's wedding, if it's a charity you support. There's always exceptions, but I'm going to include this little chart as a downloadable resource with this lecture.
58. Solo Gigs: So the easiest kind of gigs to get are going to be solo gigs on the grip saying invites solar gigs is but you don't have to share the money with anybody else. If you don't plan instrument, especially guitar or a case, you can use backing tracks and some parts of the world that's not really considered very good form. It wouldn't see much be where I live, but it really depends where you're based out if they're good quality backing tracks, so long as they're not sort of cheesy midi, you can't actually find some really decent tracks to go out and get with. So you need to build a repertoire of things that you can play and perform on your own. Then do up a little menu of those songs which you can present to their news and how some videos of you playing the songs live. Because if you're looking for live gigs, what you started like on a recording is not as important as whether or not you can actually pull off a live performance on some people saw and grit Mr. do, I'm alive, they don't cut the mustard, so you want to prove that you can. So have well kept regularly updated YouTube site where you can show the people who would be bucking you videos of your live performance. So don't look down on any kind of solo gags bit, nursing homes, coffee shops. Every time you play, you're refining your craft and you're exposing your music to new listeners. So it's well-worth thinking outside of the box. And we talked a little bit about basking websites such as concert window. There are also a great thing to get involved in as a solo performer. And just be sure that you actually ask people for tips. Another great thing to think of as bus gang. And in certain parts of the world you can make quite decent money and bustling. When I lived in Bath, England, buskers can make 200 ponds and awake and it's more like 40 pounds. Now that I've moved back to Belfast, it will vary, vary depending on where you live, but at something well worth doing because if you can make people stop and listen to you when they're very busy on the straight. You know that you've got something that's working.
59. Duos: In my part of the world, they changed the licensing laws and recent years. That means venues have to pay more money to be able to hire a band than a solo or a Jew artists. So hiring Jews and the UK has become quite a popular thing to do because you can get a little bit more energy than you might be able to do with a solo performer. And it's still a cheaper license. So it's great to form a Jew as someone, especially if you don't play an instrument, you can also get a vocal harmony going when there's two of you, which really adds depth to performance. Joe's at the moment are actually really popular on craze ships as well. So I've seen a couple of cruise ship entertainment providers looking for Joe. So that's an interesting thing to get into. A popular issue at the moment is of course go Varda, who we've looked at earlier points in the course. So if there's someone else that you know, who's willing to form a partnership with you. It's a great thing to do. You can share each other's contact, so it should be easier way of getting gigs.
60. Forming a Band: If you're looking for gigs, a great thing to do is to form a bond. And there are several ways that you can look for band members. First of all, of course, by asking people you already know that you've worked with in the past. You can also make people through Facebook grapes, especially in your local area, and through the likes of gum tree or Craigslist. So don't be afraid to turn people away though, when you're looking for band members, if they're signed, isn't what you're looking for. And Eve fail, that is going off in a, in a different direction than you'd rather go. So you have to have some common goals with the people that you're end of bandwidth. So just make sure that you all have the same goals. Because if you want to say to her, and there's someone there who maybe has children and their circumstances won't allow them to travel. You know, at some point there could be some conflicts. So it's good to make sure at the start that everybody has common goals. So when you are the singer in the band or the front man, you're communicating with the audience, but do remember that you're a musician. You are not just a karaoke star on everybody else is there to support you. So think like a musician, be part of the band, be interested in what everybody else is doing, and have a great time.
61. Grass Roots Venues: Let's talk a little bit about grassroots music venues. And it could be that when you first start gagging, you'll be doing open mikes on free gigs and small venues. That should really only be at the start of your career. And you don't want that to last too long because if you want to be a professional, well, IT professional is someone who gets paid, but it's a great place to refine your craft. And usually these venues are open to contact from artists themselves. Just be aware, sometimes they do offer slightly odd time slots. I know there's one open mike and my time, which is great, but it doesn't kick off until about 10.511 o'clock at night, on a Wednesday night. And if people are working, there's likely to be quite small audience at that time. It's a good thing to bring an audience with you, to bring some friends and to bring some bounds of your music. But it's not a good thing to be expected to bring the audience. For example, I once did a gay guy was told, will only let you have this gig if you bring at least 12 people. I wasn't being paid for it. So I brought along people they felt venue, they bought drinks and I didn't get paid. I ended up feeling predict exploited. It was quite a cool venue and I got some nice photographs my website, but was not really worth it, but something to think about it. In fact, with any gig that you're doing, you know, there's a certain amount of work involved in rehearsing and getting matter of setting up. So you need to ask yourself, what are you getting? Ict of this gig? High is advancing your goals in music. But at the start, any gig is great. Refines your craft, lets you see which of your songs are the most popular and high strong your stage presences.
62. Larger Venues: Let's talk a little about progressing onto larger venues. And the best way to do that is to find support slot. And there's a lot of advantages to doing that. It helps you to expose your music to that artists found this. So hopefully you'll find someone similar enough to you, but different enough that you don't side to like them. And that's really going to help you grow your audience. You might need a promoter or a manager to help you book about like that. So you should have a really well-constructed APK electronic press kit. And that's pressed quotes, photographs, bio, something that says that you're going to be able to work in a large venue and come across as professional Ana Dan, you should have some grit footage of you playing live up on YouTube that you can include in your APK. Not you're going to need a bigger sign for a bigger venues. So it was just you and your keys and your in your guitar. That's great. Just make sure this side is high energy enough for a bigger venue, or else maybe get abound together or a couple of other musicians to come in on Bacchae. So you need to be very, very well rehearsed to play and a larger venue. Pull things off as professionally as you can. Spend some real time pulling things together. Know the audience. So if you know who you're going to be supporting or the gag that happens in this larger venue, that kind of people who attend it. And your music at that specific audience.
63. Cool Venues: There are some venues that aren't particularly big, but they definitely have the cofactor somewhere where there's real kudos to play. The ones that come to mind are the blue bars cafe and Nashville, the alley cat on the water rots. And London, the 100 Club and London, Kobe, oh, and donee Gaul and Ireland. And I'm sure in your country and in your area, there will be venues like that somewhere where people really want to play and it's quite competitive to get in. It's possible to contact these values yourself and ask about playing. For some of them, you need to be touring internationally if you can't get a gig. And the Bluebird Cafe, and that's your touring internationally. And I heard that from the mouth of the manager Astar. But if you apply for the open mic, which you have to do about two weeks in advance. You can play it, be able to get some great photographs, great thing for your website grit thing today. So the thing to do when you get one of these gigs is just get lots and lots of photographs and videos to sand light to your mailing list and put up on your website and your social media. Another really cool place to play I was, I think has the cofactor is HMV. The record store on there may be other record stores in your area that might be open to having artists play or have artists play a lot. The nice thing about playing in a record store is that people actually go there to buy music. So that's filled with people who are willing to spend money on music, and that's not the whole of the population at the moment. So great thing today, I played Mitch and via few years ago, It's great being photographed in front of the HMP logo because it's a known brand. So if you've got a cool venue, coupla is to play near, yeah. Why not contact them and see what happens?
64. Festivals: It's a great thing to play at festivals, even if you're not one of the headliners of the fast vote because they tend to draw a crime. It's a great way of exposing your music to a new audience. And it generally a very enjoyable experience. So you need to apply in Iran December or January for the summer festival season. And there is a whole host of festivals that you can apply from the small local ones, right the way through to the big national ones in the UK, the biggest one would be Glastonbury, um, and the biggest festivals are not impossible. Navigate got because they don't just have the massive stages. They have some smaller stitches and things going on during the day. So it's worth finding out about those and applying for those. In the UK, am magazine, the magazine of PRS, gives a list of festivals that are happening with their websites. So mostly involves just going on Google and finding art which festivals are realistic to apply for. There are some festivals such as the Edinburgh Fringe, which has a real cofactor which you can actually pay to play out. So that might be something you may or may not want to consider depending on what your stance is. For that. You definitely want to join a PRO Performing Rights Organization before playing at a festival. Because the way royalties work for a festival is that you will be given a percentage of ticket sales. So PROs are for songwriters rather than for performers. But I know many of you, there will be some writers also look for a support slot. If there's an artist playing at a festival you really want to play, maybe they'll let you do have five-minute opener. That's always possible. But have fun during the festival.
65. Promoting Your Gigs: So if it's playing live, you are going to have to promote your gigs. Don't expect the promoter to do everything. So creating a Facebook event is obviously your first port of call for promoting gags in this day and age. And you don't want to do that. Take close to the gate black Mel, two days before you're going to lose people and you don't wanna do it too early, otherwise people will forget and make other plans. A byte two weeks before the gag as good time to start promoting it. And then sort of gently reminding people in the run-up to the gig, offer people an incentive to come to your gig site. It would be great to see you there. I'll sign a CD for you. I'm looking forward to chatting to you, interact with people and make them really want to come and see you and parson your life. Career is going to be a mainstay of your income. And also you need to have the ability to put people in live to get a record deal. So you can't just leave that in the hands of other people. You really do need to have a strategy for promoting it. Talked about facebook, also, very important to have a mailing list. We'll talk about that later to have a gigaton calendar on your website. And we'll talk about that in the website section. And just to let people know and as many ways as possible that your ICT they're playing.
66. Your Fanbase: Let's talk about your fanbase. You really want to use your music to connect to people. That's what music is all a byte. So you want to have a certain aligned to the interaction with the people who come to your gigs with the people who chapter on social media. You know, people like to know that they're dealing with an actual human being. I'm not just a music marketing bought. So that's very important. And once you form those positive relationships with people, they will basically become your marketers. They'll start sharing your tracks. They'll start inviting people to your gigs. So it's worth investing that time and actually getting to know people. So there is a time commitment and that it's time controlling to maintain your social media and to answer people back and keep chatting to people. So it's good to block guide some time every day or at least a couple of times a week to be able to do that.
67. How NOT to Get Airplay: I've attached with this section a resource that's based on some interviews that I did with radio presenters. And they told me what really put them off playing somebody's music. So I'm going to introduce this section by looking at ways to make sure that nobody ever wants to play your music. The first way nobody's going to want to play your music is if you send out Hurley produced tracks that aren't broadcast quality, that aren't mastered so that they're really quiet that just haven't had enough attention go into them. That's obvious, that's not going to get played. The second thing is to send ICT drugs that are purely packaged. For example, sampling, plan, silver desk, scroll down and pan and the postbox melt. Going to give the most professional presentation of your work. Something that the radio presenters I spoke to fight really annoying was with someone sent a truck through or a lake, but no background information about who they were. So note biographical information whatsoever? No, I'm not saying sand really long emails, but a little bit of background white, who you are and what you're currently to egg is helpful to presenters because they don't just want to play your track. They want to be able to introduce it properly. Introduce an audience to you. Sanding oil generic emails that you've obviously just set ride a whole load of stations is very off-putting. You want to show in your email that you know something about the show, but you're sad that you're tractate and it doesn't really take very long to do that. For example, you might be able to say, I heard you play to track by Carrie Underwood last week. Well, I have a track that I think is a little bit similar or dissimilar. They love of lab, just some little indication, but you've actually listened to the ship. And if there's any kind of like running joke, Go Michaud are like competition. Say, Oh, I train them for money, question, time, or whatever. The gimmick might be, sounding like tracks when you have no web presence, so that when the presenter looks for you online, they can't find anything because that's frustrating to them because they won't be able to link to you all marrow webpages on point other people towards you. So one of the radio shows that play my tracks all the time, quite often tag me on Facebook or Twitter when they do that. So it's good to be all of those platforms. So it goes without saying, but Tito, just a guess. One thing that will definitely stop people from playing your music as if you are grouped to them. So being rude include sand, waves or mp3s. And instead of lakes at first because enough a day will crash somebody's inbox. So that's the anti-social not saying thank you. When you've had airplay if you know it. So make polite when someone does something for you to say, thank you, not showing any interest in the person, show IT career, just what they can do for you, not promoting the airplay yourself on your own social media platform is also fairly Roche because after all, you want to return the favor by drawing attached to the show and getting a few of your listeners into the sharp. So these are all things to think about when you're sending tracks to radio presenters.
68. Local and Community Radio: Your first port of call when you're starting to look for appetite is probably going to be local on community radio stations. And they can be very supportive of local artists. They might have you in an interview you let you play live. So great to reach out to presenters there, I'm formed good relationships with that. So doublet dine on really small radio stations, x-naught, realistic to date, you're going to start with, you know, massive national airplay, calm hands, although there's nothing wrong with AMA for that in the long run. So community can mean local community, or it can mean across the world with the advent of the Internet radio station, there's a radio station I really love based and Glasgow called Celtic music radio. They do a lot of roots and Celtic music. But their tagline as serving so register a Glasgow and across the world. And they do have a listenership across the world. The great thing they do, which smaller radio stations are able to do. Cmr have a listenership of about 50000 people, is that they have Facebook pages. And while certain shows are on, people are on chomping on the Facebook page. So there's sort of a community element and you can get quite a lot of feedback on what people thought track with that happening. So really good to be involved in those kinda shows. Celtic music radio also do live showcases and Dublin. And they're building by half songwriters circles. Are there other community stations that do this? And there's more than likely one near you. Be asked professional web contact and local radio stations as you would pay one called tactic national radio stations. After all, they are also getting a lot of people wanting their music played. And it's not just the quality of your music that will get your music play. As discussed in the last video, it's whether or not they feel they want to support you as a person and as a brand.
69. Commercial Radio: Everybody wants to be played on commercial radio. This is actually fairly hard without a record label behind you. If you get a record label behind Jake grit, if not, presenters on commercial radio are really tied to walk to the station waltz on its role store. And they don't have a lot of flexibility. But having said that, it's not impossible to get attract played on commercial Red Air. If you get enough of your fan base to male end and request your track, that should definitely be helpful. Just something to think about. And also, it's not true across the board, but there's certainly a lot of truth and the notion that it's easier to get an upbeat song plate than a slow ballad. Just something to bear in mind.
70. Interviews: So if you score an interview on radio, Hi, do you comport yourself in an interview in order to present your Brahms the best that you can. Well, you want to mostly be yourself, really show your personality off so that people want to support you and they want to support your music. It might be a little nerve wracking before you're used to it the same with TV entropy's. But the more you do, the more you get used to doing with the more relaxed you become. So just consider it as a chat between brands. The nice thing about a radio interviews, people might be listening, but you know, you can't see that they are. So just have some fun in the studio. You want to be sure to stay on message. And we talked in the video by Brown and high, when you're doing interviews, you want to still convey the message of your music. Keep that message out there. And if you've got a new release of your dirt doing a tour, you woke to be sure that you give a call to action, that you ask the listeners to come out and see you or to listen to your music online. Give them a place where they can find. You don't forget to mention your website details. It's quite like greed that the presenter will do that, but it's not a bad idea if you did too.
71. Performing Rights Organisations: If you're going to be getting airplay, It's good idea to sign up with organizations called PROs performing rights organizations. They pay royalties and why they pay royalties mostly to songwriters. But there are also organizations that collect royalties for performers. In the UK where I'm based, the songwriting PRO is called PRS performing rights society. And the organization for collecting your royalties as the singer is called PPM. So you would want to be signed up to both PRFs on PBL if you're a singer songwriter. So each time your song is played, you will get a royalty. If you're played a local radio, it might be about 79 paths through two separate ponds per play on national radio. But PRS have the list of writs on their website. The American PROs are ascap, BMI, and SESAC. And there are PROs and every part of the world, the Norway, Norwegian PRO, which I've done some work with us, Naropa. So I'm going to put a lake with the section about PROs. And it was worth investigating the conditions of signing up to the one in Europe, Gloria PRS costs a 100 poems to join. So if there's going to be a phased join, a PRO, there's no point in doing it until such point as you know that you're going to earn that money back. You not only get money from airplay though, you also get royalties from live performances if you're a songwriter. So it's something that's very much worth doing.
72. Press: Getting press is very important for artists. There's a verse in the Bible that says, LET another MAN praise you, are not your own lips. And that should actually be in the music marketing Bible as well. Because what other people say about J is much more important than what you say about yourself. If you say you saw like Aretha Franklin yourself, just signs but Oregon for somebody else says it. That's quite impressive. So this is the reason we want to get press, and we want to get as much press as possible. So this is my top tips for getting press. Follow blogs, local blogs in your own area and international Abroad. Blogs. Comments where you can if it's a WordPress blog and I'm not actually interact with people, but it will let you know what artists or art they're getting attention on wool is current and what that blog is interested in. Focus on your story. Why should people be interested in you? And the newspaper article I showed at the start of this video, they talked a lot about the fight that I happen to have rheumatoid arthritis. What have you got going on in your life that people will be interested in? What is it that makes people connect to you? And it's not as hard as you think to get national press. And the likes of Guardium music in the UK will accept submissions from unsigned artists. So approaching bloggers and journalists form relationships with people. You'll keep chatting to them. I have bloggers and journalists that have covered my stuff here of my friends on Facebook that I chopped it all the time because they love music. I love music, you know, it got on with them. So that bait, businesslike at the same time, you know, when you send an e-mail sander professional e-mail showing that you know something about the publication, that you know something about the journalist, and that you are a serious professional. You're right there gigging and business-like language. A nice thing to do once you get to know a journalist at Sam, the material before it's released, I have one guy that I sent all my stuff to before it actually goes art because I like to give him that little trait and he's always the first person to review everything. Tell them about your gigging calendar, let them know that you're there on the scene. I mentioned previous press because that makes journalists and bloggers fail. Oh, people are actually interested in this parson. Other publications are interested in this person. So I should jump on that bandwagon.
73. Your Artist Website: Now let's look at something very important, and that is music and websites. Night, some of you might be thinking count, I just have a Facebook page or a Twitter account. But on Facebook or on Twitter, you don't control the experience of the visitor, whereas you do on your own music and website, on your own website allows you to put your music, your images, your calendar dates, everything that people would want to know about you in one place. So I thought the best way to start looking musician websites was to have a liquid. A few famous examples. So here's a screen cap of Miley Cyrus's website. You see that really bright colors, which says something about her as an artist. You'll also notice here that she's only got home events, news, video shop. She's only got five little tabs. We don't want to have too many. You can always use sub menus. Otherwise, you'll just confuse people. But if you want to pause this for a second and look at the browns in here, the pink stars and that kinda thing. And just ask yourself, what kind of messages is this website sending? I-t, What age ranges? Shaming knots. And what gender is she giving out? Where might the people she's aiming at live that kind of thing. So Jennifer nops website, new album, Love comes back, arrived at NIH. And very importantly, a little button where we can buy it. Because sometimes if people have to go off and look for a place to buy it, they'll say to themselves, I will do that later. And then they will, did you want to make things easy for people? And you can see that you can actually play music quite easily. At the bottom of the page, no, I don't snap tracks to autoplay because it's genuinely, really annoying when you log onto a website and it just sort of plays music without your having asked it to you. That does annoy some people. Again, not too many tabs and clear image. Swear she's really at the forefront. So again, if you want to pause this video and think a little bit about the different messages that are coming actually from the homepage of Jennifer nops website. One of my favorite bands, The Divine Comedy. So note the Divine Comedy, the font that's used very elegant and of course they have that very elegant, witty style and were left under no dodge that they at the moment hover released. That's, it's NADH. And again, the button that says purchased so you can buy it as soon as you hit their website. If you're looking for their new album, you don't have to hunt a rye bread. You just google Divine Comedy, gone to the website there it is, on click, forever land. And the art work clearly conveying the kind of message, that kind of side that you expect to go with a Divine Comedy if you haven't heard from them. And it's very sort of sharp, witty lyrics with an almost neoclassical signed. All the social media icons. Very easy to find so that you can follow them online in various places. And then we see the little menu icon at the top left-hand corner. So it's all easy to navigate. It's very clear. Notice the lack of text. There's not a huge amount of text on any of these artists websites when you first hit their website, everything is very clear, easy to navigate, and the messages are mostly coming across via image. So if you're going to start your own website, set up your own website, there are certain things you're going to want to include. But before we move on to that word, just mentioned that host baby here related to CD Baby, offer a service for $20 a month where they have great templates that you can put in your own images, neuro black branding to set up your website or WordPress. For free websites is one of the bigger services on the web. There's also a site called Canva. You can buy images to use in your website, and that means you own the copyright and it's fine to use as images. So what to include in your website? You want to have a simple menu with only a byte four options, so you can use sub menus. So for example, all my website, I have a menu option that says news. And underneath I have press for all my press that site and calendar. And I also have a widget for the calendar elsewhere. So we want to make it simple so people can advocate it easily. You want to have your bio. We'll talk a little bit later about how to construct bio and high not to construct a bio calendar of gigs and interviews or any kind of events you're going to be involved. And if you know your track is being played on a certain radio show, if you're doing a live gig, put all into your calendar because your website should be somewhere that people can go to find out where you're going to be in when it's put some tracks up, but not Who albums, you know, just enough music for people's get a flavor of your music. Youtube videos live are also good and bad it into your website because Record Labels and industry professionals, we want to know what you saw in like live as well as on recordings. News. So having a news page and keeping up dead and yet is a great way to improve your SEO, your search engine optimization, when people are looking for you online and you know, if your news page isn't regularly updated, if it looks, but I did it. People will wonder if you're still in the music business. A sign-up form to your email list, completely essential. And of course, widgets to all your social media and a store. So I love apps when people buy my albums via my website rather than when they buy them on say, Amazon. Because I don't owe anybody any condition, I just make the money. So that's a nice facility to have.
74. Your Artist Bio: Artist bio. Now I have to be honest, over the course of my career when I've done a little bit of work for music blogs and when I've been working in INR, I have rats on truly shocking bios that have more Put me often artist an interested, may add them. So let's have a look at how to write an effective bio. It should be a byte ten lines. People don't want to read a war and peace sized bio. They just want you to hit the high notes and tell them what's different about your, your USP, your unique selling point. It's not supposed to be a work of art. So if you were writing a CV, if you're applying for a job, you wouldn't write it in the form of an epic poem, say, because there are some people that view their bio as a work of art. So that's almost like they're writing an autobiography. But professionals like mate just don't have time to wind through that. I'm not saying it should be bullet-pointed, but it should be to the point. Includes your man achievements. Have you worked with anyone kill? Have you played any major gags? Do you have any special talents such as playing a really obscure instrument? Or can you sing five October? So, you know, tell us the man core of your skills and achievements. Quotes should be by other people, on not by you, even if the quotes so by someone who had been to gag rather than by a really famous music magazine. But I've read things in people's bios such as their music has been compared to the Beatles. Well, who compared their music to the battles? Because if you don't tell me who's sad that it comes across like you said it yourself. And that's quite frankly a little bit of noxious. Give contact details for press and bookings. As ever, if you'd like any feedback or you've got any questions, feel free to post them in the Q&A section or to sent me a PM. And if you'd like me to give you some feedback on your website, I'd be more than happy to do that.
75. Branding: So speaking by branding, this is my logo. As you can see, it's eighth Williams. And I have singer songwriter as opposed to singer-songwriter, because singer-songwriter suggests a certain sound, which isn't really the side that I'm making my sign as much more high-energy, much further than that. So that was my logo on my website. Here I have it as a banner on huge. And I'm going to show you the same branding on SAN Clyde. So it also comes up on my Facebook, on my Twitter, on all my online platforms. And the reason by logo looks the way it does as my name is, Eve has the silver apple tree and the WHO A1 story. I have the leather because it's very earthy. I'm the silver because it's a 30, which I think describes my sign is both heavenly on earth late in my opinion. And that's really what I'm trying to convey with the logo. The photograph is of course also part of the brown dying. I have a Scipio photograph because I'm trying to present an image that is classic, timeless, slightly old school, rather than something that's very, very cutting edge. Now let's talk a little bit about formulating your branding. So the first thing you've got to work out is what is your business mission statement? What are you trying to achieve with your music? Now if I count up to that for you, What kind of message you want to give that something to sit down and think really carefully a bite. My business mission statement is to comfort, inspire, and forum on Connect. And that's across the music that I write and released when I'm co-writing and also the educational aspect of my business. These are the kind of things that I want people to experience when they have contact with my business. So what do you want people to experience from you? We're going to look at the three word exercise again. I know I've really hammered at home, but it is very useful. So let's three words which describe your brand or artists persona. So say you want to work very much at a commercial pop genre. Maybe you would describe yourself as energetic, fresh, and current. Well, that means that there are some things that your music is not going to be. So let's also less three words which defined what you definitely don't want to be seen as. And that might be classic old skill on elegant. And obviously there's nothing wrong with being classic old school and elegant, but it just isn't you. And you want to avoid things in your branding that just aren't. You. Branding includes images. It includes the fonts that you use, which should tie in with the images we looked at the Divine comedies website. You can see the very classic use of faults there. Miley Cyrus, the bright, energetic use of font on image. It also includes the use of language. You'll notice on Jennifer nops website, she had a buy button for her album on, on the Divine Comedy is website. They use the word purchase because that was more in keeping with our very literary branding. How you dress as part of your brown dying and part of the message. Rounding should be consistent across your website, on all your online platforms, on printed materials. When you're live, you should be keeping to the message of your branding and also an interviews. So branding doesn't mean an actual logo, but it is good to have an actual logo. You've seen mine, you've definitely seen my teaching business logo appears at the startup, most of the videos on this course, and also my music logo. And you can't actually have a logo designed very cheaply on Fiverr.com, and that's Fiverr as an FIV, a IRR.com, you might have to pay a little bit extra for certain extra services or for certain kinds of files. But you want to make sure you get a logo that will actually work with Facebook, with YouTube that you can do that, that will banner shape.
76. Do's and Don'ts of Social Media: Something you need to think about before you post anything online is who is your ideal listener? In the business world, there's this concept of the ideal customer avatar. The person who's going to most want to connect with your business. So, HIO, does this person, what gender is this person? Where do they live? What are their interests? Very importantly, what are their needs and their wants? So it's good to take out a piece of paper and jot down all this to get an idea of who you're really targeting. When you're using social media, when you're using any other form of marketing. And everything that you write online, all the pictures and videos that you post should all be targeted to Gan the interest of that person. The do's and don'ts of social media. Okay, let's start off with the things you should have a specified musicians probe separate from private accounts. We all want to keep our business lives on our private lives separate as much as we can. Create content which drives people to the music on. Don't just post tracks every day. So if you have blogs that you've written or had been written about your interviews, pictures, any kind of media. You want to get those out there. Use media because basically large blocks of text are very off-putting. If you go off on a rant on your Facebook and write a couple of a 100 words. You can't expect an awful lot of people to pay attention to it. Reply to comments. People will stop following you, are stopped taking an interest in your work if they feel they've made the effort to contact you or to give you some feedback and you simply haven't responded. Ignore trolls. Know if no one has ever posted anything nasty about your music. That just means you haven't gotten very far yet. Everyone will pick up the AHG detractor here and there. But don't get into runtime arguments with a speed boat because it only upset she at wastes time and it doesn't look particularly professional. So you can join grapes, especially on Facebook. I'm a member of grapes and Northern Ireland's such as Northern Ireland musicians and songwriters. And as discussed earlier, don't just post your tracks and run. You really use that as a networking opportunity. Link to your website and update it, regulate night. You can't control the sort of online atmosphere with Facebook or Twitter, but you can't control your own website. And we'll talk about that a little bit later. So you want to ultimately encouraged people to visit your website where you're sort of guiding the experience that they'll have, have consistent branding across all platforms. And that is important. So you've got a consistent message everywhere you are online. You're signed in. Images should give the same messages. I don't really post high-quality profile pic. So yes, your profile pic should be something that's really representative of your business. It shouldn't be drunken selfie or something very blurry, or something which really no thought has gone into. Now let's look at the don'ts. So don't insult individuals are whole grapes. So you've got your ideal customer avatar and you've got a very specific group that you're targeting. You still don't need to be offensive to other grapes. So we avoided to try and be offensive to people of specific ethnicities, religions, or sexual orientations, that kind of thing. I once was added by someone who worked for a record label to his private Facebook. And on there he had oh, prejudice against a specific religious grape which he decided that Facebook was the place to vent. But ultimately, you know, those of us who are running a business, who are businesspeople don't want our businesses to be associated with any kind of prejudice. I'm not saying you can't have your personal opinions, but just be a bit sensible in the way that you express them and try not to be bigoted. And anyway, don't ignore interactions because fans will be pleased if you thank them for commenting. That I like to think that they've got a beautiful relationship going with you. And interaction creates more interaction. So the more comments that you get, the more people will actually save the post. And after all, music is all about forming relationships. Don't post material too frequently so that people go, Oh my goodness, That's the tenth post from that person today. Or too infrequently survey, forget they ever, like Japan in the first place. Don't people to groups without permission. It's genuinely, really annoying. Don't go into streams of consciousness and start sharing your life at inappropriate detail. I think we all have friends that do that when they're a bit drunk on what we usually do as wrestle their phone away from them, so really don't do it. And the business context of your music Facebook page. Don't post only songs and nothing else whatsoever. People want to connect with a human being and not a marketing machine. Because as I say, it's all about building relationships. Don't post and public what should be emailed. And I told it to put this and the Twitter section that a fade that rates. Please listen to my track over and over again. Just doesn't cast you in the best light. Don't use low quality profile pics. And we've talked about that before.
77. Facebook: So let's look at some of the more popular platforms that you're definitely going to want to get yourself as a writer and artist ICT on. So we'll start with Facebook, because nearly everyone who uses the Internet uses Facebook. So you want to open an artist page and not just use your personal profile for promoting your music. So keep texts short on these images as often as possible. There more, more eye-catching. And when you think about it, when you open up your Facebook app on your phone, you've got a hundreds and hundreds of messages that you can scroll down. What should the ones that really draw your attention? Usually it will be the ones with a strong image. Don't post videos and tracks too often, but do post them. The thing is if you're asking someone to listen to a song, you're asking them for between 34 minutes of their time, but a dozen other people are also asking them for that. So you don't want to overburden people by posting tracks every other day. So maybe sort of once a week would be often enough to post a video or a song colored link. Post regularly, you need to make sure that you're keeping up to date with your Facebook page. Otherwise people will give up on it and stop following it. Use targeted ads. Night face spec allows you to target people based on their geographic location, their age, their interests. So it's a way of targeting the people you actually want to reach. And when you're online, on Facebook or on any other social media platform, you still want to keep this idea of an ICA and ideal customer avatar or the forefront of your mind. So every post that you write, you're trying to engage with that person, that ideal listener. Join grapes because it's a great way to meet other musicians and be in the know about what's going on in your local musical community and the wider music industry. But don't just post your own stuff. And Ron, which is genuinely rate, if you just stick up a track every couple of months into a grape and that's your involvement in the grape. No grades, comments on other people's tracks as well, be a community member. And I realized there is a time commitment than that, but it does pay off. No, I want to look at a really good example of Facebook fanpage. This is go vadose fanpage. You can see they have this grit background artwork that they use across your social media. So scrolling down, we can see that there are videos that they've posted happening well edited, and are of high-quality. Their photos similarly are of high-quality. They ally people to review them. Script to encourage interaction. You can see I've reviewed them there. And here we see them actually interacting with people, thanking people for coming to hear them, making themselves accessible again, well edited photo and you can see they have a lot of comments and likes.
78. YouTube: Youtube Night. Youtube is actually the second biggest search engine online after Google. So at somewhere where people go to find information and it's somewhere where people go to find music quite lot. He probably do yourself. This is where agents, if you're looking for live gigs and fans will come to look for you. They'll expect your music to be on YouTube, but only post high-quality videos. And I'm not saying you have to go out and spend a lot of money on professional video production. But don't post you to really shaky videos taken on a mobile phone on your official YouTube page because that doesn't let grant. You can have a separate playlist for fun recorded videos. So if people have film G on their phone out a gag, you can have a little playlist for that. And if anything, that says that people are paying attention to you. But I wouldn't have that as the man focus of your YouTube channel. Going live on YouTube night. This is a quite recent thing. You can of course go live on Facebook, but going live on YouTube is a good idea because it can help you build your YouTube following and get some more subscribers in. So having a brief look at my YouTube channel, I'm not setting YouTube, Ally. I've just recently come to it. But you can see here I've selected a video to use as a channel video. And I've divided my channel page up into different playlist so people can see official music videos. They can see my music education videos. I've just tried to make it as easy to navigate as it can be. Going to talk a little bit later about thumbnails and that kind of, I've said YouTube to automatically play another video of mine. And the left hand top corner of the screen. Just as a video ads for a viewer. I'm going to let you know how you do this. We are in the Creator Studio. We go into edit the video and we go into endnotes and annotations that may go to add Element. And I'm going to add a video or playlist. And I'm going to select best for viewer. So YouTube will calculate which video the person may be most interested in. And then of course, remember to save the changes. Something vitally important on YouTube is tags. And it's important to tag your videos so that people can find them in searches. Perhaps use artists who signed similar for you to, to you to help describe what the song is, is that a piano ballad? Is it an up-tempo country song? You'll be quite specific. And other great thing to do is to create a tag like I use the tag IV Williams music. You could use your artist's name because YouTube doesn't realize that's not a thing. So there aren't very many videos tagged this and automatically play one of my videos at the end of the video that somebody is watching. So it's a good way of making sure that one of your videos as what comes up next for the viewer, The title you use for your video on the thumbnail are actually really important because the title is going to make it easy or difficult for somebody to find. So you want to use the most important words in the title, first law. You might just want to tie the video the title of a song, but it might be a good and the start, while people are still getting to know you to write something like piano ballad, nobody wins. That's one of my songs. Just get the important words aren't there. And you want to use really eye-catching images. And it's good to use really bright lettering with background and order to get people to actually click on the video. Because YouTube has Bryce features that bring up suggested videos, as well as the search features on it's, it's really ones that are very eye-catching that are most likely to get attention. So here's an example of my thumbnails. I still haven't perfected my thumbnail style yet, but you can see I'm using red lettering and trying to keep a consistent style. Very importantly, remember to add a subscribe button. And YouTube actually gives you an option of adding a little subscribe icon to all of your videos on your channel. So that's a very wise thing to do. And actually ask people to subscribe, ask them to subscribe somewhere in the video itself. And also very importantly in the text and the description of the video night. You want to link in the description of the video back to your artist's website, to your fifth spec, to somewhere where people can buy your music, you know, give people as much information as possible there so that if they're enjoying what they hear, they know where they can find more.
79. Make a Free Music Video: Welcome to this video on high to make a really cool YouTube music video, because lyric videos can be a little dull for the audience. Going to start off with showing you one I made earlier. So you get the idea. It's by finding some really cool footage that goes with the theme of your song, creating a story. I'm putting it all together. So I'm going to show you hi, I did that. I went on to have fantastic site called Pixabay. And on Pixabay you can get both images and video by searching by keyword. So my songs, who needs a night. So I searched for the keyguard horses, and quite a lot of stuff came up. I used this little video in my video, although I muted it, and I made it black and white, so it looked very different from the original. So you can see that says free download on that. Some of the footage on this site you have to pay for, such as this video. It depends whether or not you think that it's worth paying for the film. So it's good to have a story that you're whacking to, but also add your own footage. It's good to have your own face somewhere in the video if you're the artist, just to get it right there. And add up the footage to go with the lyrics here we want it to make sense. That can't be really time-consuming like the little clip I'm about to show you it took up by an R to pull this off. You can also add it, the video dine and have 30-second versions for Instagram, on for Fest spec, where people maybe don't want to invest a whole three or four minutes into watching your video. So have fun with S and I hope it works out well for you. If you found this useful, please do subscribe. I've got lots of videos out there, all music careers and music education, especially on singing and song writing. And I've got quite a few courses up on Udemy and music as well. So you'll find links in the description.
80. Twitter: Okay, so now we're looking at Twitter, obviously also a hugely popular social media platform. So it way of writing a tweet as you use short text. And obviously you can't write too much. And Twitter, then post a link and then post two hashtags. Any more than two hashtags on the tweet will look incredibly cluttered on a little bit unprofessional. So tweets with pictures look better in people's feeds. So I've given you an example here. Basically the image is saying exactly the same thing that they tweet itself does. Bot, the image is more eye-catching. So if you can imagine this in my Twitter page where I've got dozens and dozens of tweets to rate. The bright yellow of this image really stood out to me, which is why I chose it to share with you. And as you can see, it's got 2.5 thousand likes. So, you know, people are paying attention to it. Hashtags can help you reach a much wider audience. So you need to choose them carefully, because as I say, it doesn't look great to post about six of them at once. If you're only going to use two, they have to be the right to choose your time of tweeting carefully as well. Otherwise, your tweets just sink, they get lost. And there's a certain amount of research that says the best time to tweet is around dinner time when people have just finished work. And you can schedule tweets so you can opt for it to be posted at a time of your choosing during the day. Don't post tweets where it would be more appropriate to send an e-mail. I looked at 1 artists Twitter profile and it basically said, Hey mister so and so please pay my Track, hey miss, so and so please play my track about 15 times. And that doesn't look great.
81. Instagram: Instagram, not this is they form social media that I failed does best for my music, but of course everybody's different. Only use high-quality pictures. So anything really blurry, not best image, you sort of falling out of the pub drunk with your minutes. Maybe an Instagram that's there to promote your music isn't the place for those particular photos. So choose a filter which represents your brands and there's something to be sad for consistently using the same filter. The video facility is actually really good. Now you can only really post about a minute of video so you can't fit and then a whole song. But you can't fit in enough of a song to get peoples and trust and you can get some of your live performances like there. And if you use the right hashtags on Instagram, you can get quite a lot of attention that it's not like Twitter where you'd really only want to be using two hashtags. You can use quite a lot of hashtags on Instagram and on get people noticing you and finding you that way. Post plenty of music related pictures. Now that might sound silly if you're running a channel dedicated to promoting your music. But, you know, you might end up posting your cat or a particularly interesting debtor that you had last week on Instagram. Everybody does it. Just make sure there's plenty of music. Almere? No.
82. Spotify1: So the most popular site for browsing music online as Spotify on, you can see here that it suggests play lists to the listener. Here's one of my, the Discover Weekly. And your real goal is to get your tracks into these playlist. For that you need more than 250 followers on Spotify. So once you have a Spotify account, you're going to have to get out there and really promote it. So the Billboard Top 100, if you want to be working in the music industry, very important playlist to follow, as it will tell you a bite, commercial trends at the moment. So we're going to look at it, see what the big tracks are the moment, we'll talk in the next video about how to get your music on Spotify.
83. CDBaby: A really useful service online is CD Baby. And CDBaby can help you get your music onto Spotify, onto Amazon, iTunes days, or they also put your music on YouTube, just basically anywhere where people can reach it, um, where you can be paid for it. You can select an option that says anything that pays, or you can basically put it anywhere online with CD Baby. They also provide a widget for you to have a store on your website or Facebook. And they sell your physical CDs. Plus they'll give you barcodes on ISRC codes for your C days, which are pretty much essential. If you want to sell music and stores.
84. Soundcloud: So this is my sign Clyde profile. And what I really like about Soundcloud is that it has a social media dimension. So you can see here on some of my tracks, there are quite a lot of comments and that's great when you're sending links to people who might be interested in your music. As it shows that people have taken an interest in it, I pay for a Pro version of slides so I can do what's called spotlighting. So I can choose which tracks come up first and my profile, if you don't do that, I will just be whatever track you last uploaded. So it's worth doing that so that you can have a bit more control. You can also see I've got a detailed bio there with plenty of links to places where people can connect, connect with me, and where they can buy my music. So this is the home page of my Spotify. You really want to comment on other people's music and share other people's music, used the social aspect of it because if you support other people's music them, they will support yours. And that's really what sign client is all about.
85. Bandcamp: Another popular service online where you can sell music as Baum camp. And as you can see on the right-hand side here, it's showing you what's popular in certain genres. It suggesting artists. So it's a great place for music fans to find j. So let's go in and search for an artist. Just so as you can see what an artist's profile looks like and what ODP. So archie ortho. So if we click on him, it will bring up all these releases, as you can see here. So you can set your own price on bomb hat for what you want to sell your music for. So let's click on One Wiltshire winter. And you can see that he has that up for 10 hives. Found count will also give you that will store that you can use on your website or on your social media as well.
86. Email Lists: Now let's talk a little about email marketing. So there are some very good reasons to have an email mailing list according to CD Baby, e-mail remains the most effective way of reaching people online. And when you think about it, when you go onto your Facebook account or you're on Twitter, you have post after post after post raid containing videos and articles and tracks. And you're kind of overwhelmed with messages. Whereas if you send an email to someone as just a bit more of a direct personal way of contacting someone. The most popular HTML e-mail service is MailChimp, and that enables you to do some quite cold things. You can send emails that contain tracks and images. You can keep lists. A monitor who's opening your emails and who's clicking on the links they contain. So you can say who is really engaged with your work and there's a whole host of other useful stuff. Importantly, it gives subscribers and unsubscribe option of every e-mail, which keeps you in line with data protection legislation. You can choose music related tablets for CD launches, for tours, and for calendar diets. So, you know, you can pick a template that suits the news that you're sending it via e-mail. You can, of course on should use your own logo, on your own branding. Within MailChimp, emails, you can post sign-up forms on your website and social media are asked fonts to sign up at gags. One thing you must never do though, is add someone to your mailing list who hasn't given you permission. Because that as against data protection legislation, it's nice to offer an incentive such as a free track or an exclusive video to people who sign up to your mailing list. Because your mailing list should be a little bit like your fan club and there should be a reward for being part of it. Try not to a male too frequently. Or people might report you for spam on unsubscribe, but not so infrequently as people forget about your music once a month, that's as good as him. Or when you have really big news that you want to share with people.
87. GDPR: Musician. Mailing lists, like all other business, mailing list, should follow GDPR, general data protection regulations. So that's things like never having anyone to your mailing list who hasn't expressly given permission to be on your mailing list, never sharing anybody's contact details and storing people's contact details safely where they can't be accessed by any third parties and is actually really important to comply with these regulations. So I have attached our resource along with this video, which is they incorporated society of musicians guidelines for musicians on GDPR. And if you're running a mailing list, I highly recommend that you read it.
88. End: Very well done on completing the course. I hope that you've enjoyed it and it's been useful to you. If you have any questions or comments and you'd like any feedback on your voice. Feel free to send me a message with dropout blanks to MP3s. And it would be really, genuinely lovely to hear from you. It would be really kind retail lever VA, if you possibly can. And I hope to see you again on your musical journey.