Social - Music - Media - Marketing

yaleootb:

If you’re the business manager or president of an a cappella group, you know that running a successful group is only partly about making great music - it’s also about financing and marketing a small business. This is a series of posts highlighting our favorite music marketing resources.

How to Run a Band

yaleootb:

It’s no exaggeration that YouTube is an important tool for a cappella groups. YouTube channels are a great way for groups to show off their talent to fans and potential clients. Recently, YouTube unveiled a new design that changes how the homepage works. What do these changes mean for your…

Saturday, September 17 is Software Freedom Day. To that end, a few announcements about this weekend’s hackathon and WordCamp Portland.

3.3 Hackathon

WordPress 3.3 is about to hit feature…

This coming weekend, two WordCamps will be going on simultaneously — yep, it’s WordCamp season again! This weekend will be the first of many this autumn with multiple WordCamps. Tomorrow (not…

This has been an exciting year for WordPress. We’ve grown to power 14.7% of the top million websites in the world, up from 8.5%, and the latest data show 22 out of every 100 new active domains in…

The annual WordPress conference, WordCamp San Francisco, starts in fewer than 8 hours. The sold out event — three full days of programming for bloggers, developers, theme designers, and…

Helping to facilitate this townhall meetings all day today. If you live in the Chicago area, you should definitely participate. http://www.facebook.com/rialtosquaretheatre

rialtosquare:

Join the Rialto Square Theatre on our Facebook page to help us create a cultural agenda for a better Joliet.

acageeks:

Jonathon Minkoff posed this question on his A Cappella 101 blog the other day and started some great discussions on the CASA/CAL FB groups as well as getting some great responses from my-acafication and picturesandpor. As for me, I take a “big tent” approach - if the original source of the sounds are voices of human beings, then I count it as a cappella.

When I was still in college, I definitively was in the “if you can’t do it live, then it’s cheating” camp, primarily due to the fact that I was very accustomed to being required to work without sound equipment. Then I graduated and started to move away from that philosophy as I started listening to more professional a cappella and became used to that aesthetic. I think the big turning point for me was seeing Sonos in concert last year and realizing that they actually can do it live and it was an amazing sight to behold. It had literally never occurred to me that you could hook a microphone up to a guitar pedal, and like my-acafication mentioned in his post, I certainly consider a guitar hooked into an effects board a guitar, so why wouldn’t I consider a voice doing the same thing a voice?

For me, though, this debate boils down to my own personal musical philosophy. I am not a formally trained musician; my background in music is completely comprised of: a) what I could teach myself on the Yamaha keyboard I have at home, b) 15 years of school choir, c) 5 years formal voice lessons in high school (going on ten years ago now). I am not an expert in technique when it comes to singing and vocal music, and I feel like the major argument against using technology (and I’m speaking to things specifically like pitch correction or harmonizers) in a cappella is that it is allowing those of us who have not devoted ourselves to learning technique to have an “out,” so to speak. In other words, that people like me can sound as good as those who have devoted their lives to sounding that good without assistance and, to add insult to injury, the audience can’t tell the difference between us.

Which I get. Honestly, I do. But realistically, if you’re not trained in technique, you can’t hear it. You know something is “good” or “not good”. Being able to discern what specifically is good vs. not good is something that only comes with training. And technique, while very, very useful is not why I got into music in the first place. I sing because it moves me at a very visceral level. Technique is something that gives you a vocabulary to work with; a set of tools in your toolbox and it teaches you the rules so you can figure out when to break them. But it can’t be the be-all-end-all of your abilities as a musician, and whatever technology can do to help me as an artist I will gladly embrace any day of the week.