How To Sell Your Own Mp3 On Your Own Website
Many singers, musicians and rappers are selling their mp3 via iTunes and other mp3 websites. But their comes a time where you might want to sell your own music and make all the profit yourself, bypassing the middleman. It’s pretty easy to do. The easiest way to go about this is to log into your paypal account and create a paypal buy it now button for the song or album. Then, under delivery set up a seperate page on your website that the customer will be directed to once they have made payment. On that page, you’ll have the songs where they can download. This is the easiest way to do it.
Other Services you might consider with more options
Soundclick.com You can set up a free account and you can get your own music player that you can embed on your blog or website.
MyFlashStore.net You can sign up for one of their monthly packages. They have great tools that you can use to sell your music. You can have your own storefront widget complete with payment processing and downloads so you don’t have to worry about creating any paypal buttons at all, everything is done for you. You also have the option of having your songs being downloaded as an mp3 or higher quality .wav file which is a bonus.
E-Junkie.com For only 5 dollars per month, you can have a really easy to use mp3 selling and delivery system. You can’t go wrong at that price.
Sell mp3′s on your wordpress site. If you have a wordpress based website, here’s a great tutorial on how you can setup a fully functioning mp3 storefront to sell your music.
Tips For Getting A Warm Sound When Recording And Mixing Digitally
Recording and mixing with tape and on an analog console usually results in a lush, warm sound. Digital recordings typically sound harsher, and colder. So how do you improve your digital recording? Here are a few tips:
Record At 24 bits, 44.1 bits minimum
Please, don’t record at 16 bit, 44.1 for your project. Record in 24 bits and then bounce/mix to 16 bit and you’re good to go.
Check Your Converters
If you are using a really cheap soundcard to record your audio signal, this can be a big problem resulting in cold, harsh tones. Try to upgrade your soundcard if you can (anything nowadays over 300 should give you decent results)
Go Analog Before Digital
Try to use an outboard microphone preamp or even run your audio signal through an analog compressor slightly before it goes into your soundcard. This can help smooth out the hard edges and give you a warmer sound.
Use Tape Saturation Plugins
Try to use tape saturation/emulation plugins on many tracks in your daw. Use it on vocals, guitars, bass, drums and loops in various amounts and you may notice the harsh, digital edge start to come down into a smoother, more analog sound.
EQ
Certain sounds like a clean type of guitar may naturally sound harsher in the digital world, so try to smooth out extreme harsh mids through corrective eq (filter out the offending frequency, try a desser, or boost a lower frequency to try to smooth out the sound).
Use An Analog Compressor On Your Stereo Bus
Try to bounce your mix through an ananlog compressor and back into your daw. It might sound better (if you have a cheap soundcard, this could sound worse, so experiment with what you have)
Use An Analog Summing Box
Many people swear by using analog summing boxes. You can basically stem your mix (to 8, 16, or 24 channels, what ever your summing box is set up for) and then back into your daw. Summing boxes are known to smooth out your sound and make your mixes sound clearer, more defined and more pro (if you know how to mix, if not it’s not going to help you much)
Be Realistic About Your Music Career
It’s ok to dream and there are exceptions to every rule. You might have heard the saying, just do what you love and you will become successful at it. I would say this is pretty terrible advice. I’ve seen many extremely talented and mediocre bands, musicians, rappers, singers and instrumentalists that have not made any real money doing what they love. Before you know it, you could be beating a dead horse and soon enough, you’ll be hitting age 50 with no musical success.
Let’s be realistic. If you fall into this category, you might have a good shot at quick success in the music business
*you are between the ages of 15-18
*you are a talented singer
*you are extremely handsome or beautiful, or have a really unique and marketable look
If you have all the above characterestics, you have a really good chance at the big time if you hustle non stop, doing shows, spamming music executives with your youtube video links, etc.
If you don’t fall into that category, don’t get discouraged. You can still focus on your music, but do it in an organized way. Don’t quit your day job and go full time into and industry that will likely make you broke. Play the odds in your favor. I would suggest you get into a business that can make you serious money. Once you have money at your disposal and now longer have to work full time to earn an income, then you can really be creative and focus on your music. Having money will unleash your creativity and not hinder what you are trying to accomplish. If one of your songs makes it big, then great. If not, no big deal since you have money.
Making Serious Money
I went from musician to producer to finally internet marketer. What I’ve learned in over 20 years in various businesses is that you have to satisfy a need to make big money. Are people willing to pay for an mp3 song of another local, mediocre rapper from Compton? Probably not. Do people want to buy the latest iPhone 5 at a discount price? You bet they do. Look for a market and satifsy that need whether it’s for iPods, tv’s, clothes, homes, computers, etc. I accidentally got into internet marketing and never looked back. Like any other business, income can fluctuate. On my best months, I was earning 20,000 per month, doing hardly any work. It was great. I no longer had to deal with offbeat rappers, mediocre rock bands, or wannabe singers. I built websites that would earn me money through various affiliate programs while I slept. I get paid and I have all day to spend with my family and experiment with my own music. That’s a great place to be for any singer/songwriter/musician.
How To Professionally Mix Vocals In A Mix
Mixing vocals is probably one of the harder tasts for any engineer ou there. It’s the focal point of a song, and it should sit nicely in the mix, if not, it will sound amateurish. So how do you get that professional vocal sound that you hear on your favorite songs on the radio? Here’s a few tips to help you out.
Start with the source
Recording a better vocal will give you less headaches to deal with in a mix. As a general rule, record your vocal flat, with no eq or compression (because if you are not happy with the sound later, you can’t undo this. Choose the best mic for your voice that you have and the best mic preamp (if you have one). Record it at a good level without distortion.
Compression
I’m not a fan of too much compression. Use compression so that it fits with what you are trying to achieve. Experiment with a few compression plugins (set a medium attack and release, and start with a ratio of about 4:1). Try to tame the vocal a few db’s and go from there. If it suits the song, try a more aggressive setting. You can even try putting a multiband compressor/limiter.
EQ
It’s usually a good idea to roll off the low end at about 100 hz (this will help the vocal cut through and usually minimize pops and sounds). Every song is different, see how the vocal is sitting in regards to the instruments around it. You can start by boosting the highs slightly and then work on the midrange (depending on the singer, you might want to tame honky sounding mids or boost the midrange for singers that don’t cut through. You’ll have to make the decision on your own mix.
Tape Saturation Plugin
I like to use a bit of tape saturation plugin on the lead vocals. Just a hint can go along way in creating subtle harmonics with a touch of natural sounding distortion
Ride The Vocal
Go through each part of the song and automate volume changes. Are you hearing all the words? Is a certain syllable getting lost. First try to bring it out through drawing in volume changes in your DAW. Other times, you might have to eq a word or syllable differently so that it stands out in a certain part (sometimes it can be due to the word said, the way the singer sang it, or other instruments interfering with that particular vocal. If it’s just one part, you can automate an eq change. If it’s many parts, you might consider carving out more space for the vocal by mixing other instruments differently in the mix.
Effects
For the past 5 years, less has been more in the lead vocal department. Generally, people will use autotune to fix any pitch problems. Then you can experiment with various effects. You can generally start with a slight delay and reverb set as an auxillary effect on your daw mixer. See how the vocal sits with low amounts and increase it from there until it starts to blend nicely in the track.
Background Vocals and Chorus Vocals
Every song is different so you can experiment with what you want to do. Here’s a few things that usually work well for background vocals and chorus vocals. For chorus vocals, you can double or tripple the vocals and add a couple of harmonies. Take all those tracks and duplicate them in your daw. Pan one set hard right and the other set hard left. Then take one set and either offset them maybe 35 miliseconds. This will give you a nice wide effect for the background vocals. You can alsy choose to eq the vocals differently if an lead vocal is over top. Usually it might be a good idea to make background vocals more “airy” sounding, carving out the mids and boosting the high’s even more
De-Ess Vocals
Depending on the singer, some people might not need any de-essing, while others need a lot more. Make that call using your own judgement. Listen for any harsh “s” sounds or explosive “p’s. Just put a de-esser plugin, fiddle with the setting and you are good to go.
Working For Trevor Horn On A Song For Seal
A few years back when I had a commercial studio in Los Angeles, I was at West La music in Santa Monica, looking at gear as I often do. I was chatting with one of the managers in teh pro audio section, discussing various microphone preamps they were selling. He then casually asks me, “Do you know anyone who is a quality beat producer?” I told him, of course, I’ve been producing beats and music since I was 10 years old. He then went on to fill me in on the details. He told me Trevor Horn needed beat production done on an upcoming song for Seals latest album (this was a few years ago). He gave me the info, made a few phone calls and I was off to Trevor Horns private Beverly Hills home (with a custom studio). Within 1 hour I met with him and his 3 engineers. He gave me the acapella and told me to come back tomorrow with what ever I came up with. I said, “no problem, I’ll be here at 1:00 tomorrow afternoon.” I rushed back to my studio, picking up a few coke bottles and Doritos for the long night ahead. The song was called “If You Go Away” which was a remake of an old French song. It had a slow feel with an awkward basesline. Nonetheless, I stayed up all night and came up with 11 full blown variations of beats for the track. I must say I was pretty satisfied. The next day, with no sleep I went to meet with Trevor. He seemd pretty impressed, listening to all 11 variations and picking up and playing his bass along with each rhythm as the engineers loaded each version into Pro Tools (he had a beautiful studio centered around 2 Sony DMX-R100 mixers, an HD3 system and a stack of outboard pres, eq’s and compressors). He told me that he would be working on the song for the next few days and would let me know if they used any of my compositions. He then went to another room to have lunch and I began chatting with his engineers. They are all really nice British guys and they clued me in to what was going on. It seems Trevor is so much of a perfectionist that the record label is constantly on his back to finish the album, but he won’t oblige until he’s happy (which is almost never). They also told me that for this song, he hired a 50 piece orchestra and tracked them in a top LA studio for a short part of the song. He then trashed that recording.
I wasn’t called, so I assumed he never used any of my productions. Nonetheless, it was a great experience which I would do all over again if I got the chance. Just being in a 20 million dollar mansion in the heart of Beverly Hills is motivation to show me what is possible with talent and dedication.
How To Film A High Quality Music Video Yourself
As a music artist, there is absolutely no excuse today not to have a decent music video (at least something watchable to upload to youtube). Inexpensive technology for filming and editing is very, very cheap compared to just 5 years ago.
Equipment, This Is What You Need
Don’t use an ancient camcorder to record your video. Filming with an old camera isn’t going to get you anywhere. What you need if you want to achieve a fantastic film look is a DSLR photo camera that shoots video in 24p. Let me explain. New dslr photo cameras have the ability to shoot video as well as photos. You benefit because such cameras have a very large light sensor which results in a really high quality image/video. Also, you can use traditional 35mm lenses. Variations in depth of field (you know when you see a professional movie and a character is in the forefront and the background is blurry? That is depth of field. You can’t get that effect from old, consumer camcorders. But a DSLR camera will achive this will ease.
Make sure your DSLR camera can shoot in 24 frames. 24 frames per second is the traditional speed of film, so this is what we’ve been accustomed to seeing in movie theaters for 100 years. It’s a great look. If your camcorder has different frame rate settings, make sure you choose 24p for a more filmic look. What cameras should I look into. I highly recommend either of these cameras, the cannon T2i, T3i, Nikon D90 or the cheapest of the bunch, the Pentax KX (the only drawback to this camera is that it shoots in 720p vs full 1080p, but that is more than adequate for filming a music video. It does shoot in 24 frames and you can use very inexpensive and old Pentax lenses as you wish. If you want to see the quality of this camera, check out this video completely filmed using the Pentax KX.
Filming Your Video
You are on a budget, so usually less is more. Be creative, come up with a theme for your video and make sure you can pull off what you are trying to achieve. Try to tell a story. Film a scene from a few angles, a wide shot, medium and closeup so you have more to work with in editing. If you have access to a film dolly, use it. You’ll get super nice shots by using one. If you don’t have one, don’t sweat it. Just try to use a video tripod with a fluid head. This will give you smooth movement. Remember, less is more.
Lighting Your Video
I usually get away with using 1 light (not even a video light, but a regular 500 watt camera light that you can buy, with the stand for usually 50 bucks. If you are on a tighter budget, get a $10 work light from home depot and you’ll be fine (make sure it’s 500 watts). What ever you do, check your video through the camera. It’s best to underlight slightly than over light a scene (if it’s too bright, you won’t be able to fix it too much in post)
Editing Your Video
Let me say this loud and clear. Practically ANY video editing software should be good enough for your project. Don’t buy into the hype that you need to buy Final Cut Pro. As long as you can perform basic cuts, you can achieve a very good result. If you can perform a bit of color correction (i personally like to use Sony Vegas), then great. Providing you filmed your material with the right amount of lighting, you can simply bring out the saturation and maybe contrast ratio and your video will come alive.
Now got out and make your video. Since you don’t have the budget for a million dollar, special effects video, be as creative as you can with your shots. Put your camera on a skateboard and push it slowly as if it were a dolly for a few shots. Or try to film your subjects using creative angles, not what you normally see all the time.
How To Get Your Music Mix Loud In The Mixing Process
Many up and coming producers are on a tight budget. So usually, a tight budget means that they are mixing their own songs, and attempting to master their songs so that they try to get their mixes to sound as loud as commercially produced hits they hear on popular radio. You really shouldn’t go this route, but you aren’t going to listen to me anyway since you are stubborn and are on a tight buget. If you do have the budget, a good mastering engineer can many times work wonders (just so you know).
So how do you get a loud, punchy, radio sounding mix when you are mixing in your favorite daw? There are many factors that contribute to this. Here are a few things to consider:
1. Watch your bass
Bass eats up a lot of the audio spectrum. If your kicks are too boomy, your bassline is too thick, synths are bass heavy, etc, you are not going to get a very loud mix. Use a reference CD and try to see where your bass compares to those mixes.
2. Use Parallel Compression
Parallel compression is basically when you duplicate an audio track, let’s say a kick drum. On one channel, you tweak the low section, and on the other channel, you eq it differently such as bringing up the mids and highs, cutting the bass and compressing it a lot more. When you blend the two signals, you can get a punchier, more in your face type of sound. You can use parralel compression on kicks, snares, bass, synths and even vocals if done correctly. Don’t do it on everything, but on a few tracks it can really help you in getting your mix to come alive, and getting your levels nice and loud.
3. Multiband compression.
On the stereo bus, I like to put a stereo compressor to tame the peaks a few db’s. If your mix is loud and punchy, but still not up to the levels you would expect from a commercial release, you can then add a multi-band compressor to your buss chain of effects. Fiddle with the settings and see how loud you can go without obvious distortion.
4. Tape Saturation
You might find that you can get a louder sounding mix by using an analog console. What you could be hearing is the mild harmonics caused by subtle distortion of an audio signal going through analog circuitry. You can try putting various amounts of your favourite tape saturation plugin on many channels. The subtle distortion across many channels can actually get your mix to sound louder. Try it and you might be amazed at the results.
5. Learn To Mix
Ultimately, the better the mix, the louder your final mix will be. This requires years of experience, learning how to tame the bass frequencies and how to place the instruments and vocals in the proper place in a mix through the use of eq, effects and compression. All these things done well will give you a loud mix. Just a bit of multiband compression and your mix is as good as what’s on the radio. So practice mixing, listen to your mixes on various speakers and compare it to a similar sounding genre of music. If the difference is negligible, then you are getting there.
Mixing Digitally Vs Through Analog Console Or Summing Mixer
If you come from the analog console world of mixing, you probably now that it’s much easier to get a great sounding mix on an analog console vs ITB (inside the box of your daw software). Once you have enough experience mixing digitally, you can still achieve really nice sounding mixes, but experience is a factor and you have to mix a little differently than you normally would on an analog mixer. If you are a producer looking to upgrade your sound, you might be faced with a few key questions which I’ll try my best to answer.
Mixing In Your DAW vs. Through A Cheap Console
So you’re making music in Cubase, Pro Tools, or what ever daw you are using. You might be thinking to yourself, maybe I should dust off that old Mackie or Behringer mixer and send my mix through 16 different channels, through the mixer and back out to my daw. In theory, it might sound like a good idea, but let me tell you why it’s probably not. A cheap analog mixer won’t do too much but degrade your sound (chances are if you are going this route, you probably have a mediocre sound card with not the greatest converters. Your signal is being degraded too much for there to be an improvement in the sound. You’ve recorded your audio signal through your soundcard (going through a low end AD converter, then back out to your console for mixing and back through your sound card). You’re not going to get anywhere with this route. Just stick to recording the best signal you can and mixing in your daw.
Mixing In Your DAW vs. A Better Console Or Summing Mixer
If you go this route, now you have a chance to improve your sound. Let’s say you have a nice analog Toft Audio Mixer, Trident Console or anything that has a nice eq channel. You route your mixes, splitting everything on seperate channels (the more channels you can send, the better. Try separating your kick, snare, bass, lead and backing vocals, guiars, etc). You can use the mixer’s eq and maybe even set up an reverb or effects unit. With a higher quality console, you can really start to see an improvement in your mixes with less tweaking than mixing just inside the box. You might enjoy hearing a wider stereo spectrum, a more defined mix and a punchier sound. If you have a nice analog console, by all means, use it if you don’t have to taken into account recalling the mix or you are working on the clock. A summing mixer may help your sound as well, helping things sit nicer in a mix. But using the analog eq’s on a console might do more to your sound.
Even if you use a higher end analog console, you should take into consideration the quality of your recording interface. The better the sound card, the better your sound. If you can afford high end digital to analog converters, it will be a leap in improvement of your sound as well. But in the end you have to work within your budget. You can either stick with mixing inside your DAW or spending a lot more money and going the analog route (multi channel interface, better analog to digital converters, a higher end analog mixer, etc). It can get pricey, quickly.
A Few Cool Recording/Production Tips You Should Try To Broaden Your Horizon
You might be set in your ways in how you approach recording, producing or mixing music. Many engineers stick with conventional techniques (track your record, mix it with eq/fx, etc). But every once in a while, you should experiment and try new things. Here are a few things you might want to try on your next song:
1. Reamp Your Virtual Synths
Don’t get me wrong, software synthesizers/samplers are great and are the future of music production. But sometimes, a synth might be a little bland your you might be having a tough time having it sit properly within a mix. Why not give your music a bit of dimention, especially if all your sounds are virtual synths. Take a synth, output it to your speaker, and then mic your speaker and record that signal. Or, if you have an outboard preamp or eq, send it there, crank up the gain and record that signal. You will be surprised but you can achieve quite punchy, and lets say more “analog” results that way.
2. Use Different Mics Or Preamps On The Same Singer
Let’s say you have one singer recording all the lead and many backing vocals. For more texture and depth, you might want to record the lead and some backing vocals through your best vocal chain (mic, preamp) and for other backing vocals, try a different mic and or preamp). Sometimes it will be just right, giving your mix more dimention without having to resort to more drastic eq or effects.
3. Go Against Convention
So 99 out of 100 engineers recommend recording a snare by using an Sm 57 on the top, and another Sm 57 at the bottom, then flipping the phase and blending the two for a great snare sound. Many times this will work, but if you have time to experiment, th row conventional rules out the window and try something different. For this snare example, try a large diaphragm condensor mic on the bottom, or top, or both and see what you get. Same thing with singers, amps or other instruments. Try different mics, preamps and settings to record in, you’ll be surprised but many times you’ll come across a certain magic.
4. Dirty Up Your Sounds
Obviously, it depends on the genre of music, but a little lo-fi can go along way. Record a piano riff on an old boombox and sample the sound back (tape hiss included). You might have a $7000 Sony C800 mic you always use, plugged into a vintage Neve preamp. But how about recording a violin sound through a cheap, laptop microphone instead? Or taking a single piano note off a 50 year old Jazz record and spreading it across your keyboard, then layering that sample with a more conventional piano. Experimenting around with sounds in this way will make you a better producer/engineer.
5. Plugins Are There To Mess Around With
Why don’t you spend one day and just see how crazy you can get stacking plugins on sounds and what not. How about putting an exciter effect on the return channel for your vocal reverb? Or what about putting one set of backup vocals through a filtered delay plugin, and then adding a distortion effect on the delay plugin return channel? Plugins are there so that you can easily experiment and manipulate them. If you don’t like the results, undo it and experiment some more.
If you are on time constraints (and money is on the line) then sure, go ahead and trust conventional recording wisdom. But if you have time to spare, you might capture a certain magic that is hard to replicate. Often times, these magic moments will really shine on your record.
SEO Techniques For Music Marketing
If you are a singer, rapper or in a band, chances are that you have a website (nowadays, there really is not excuse not to have one, so get one if you don’t). The big problem you might encounter (as with many website owners), is how to get traffic to your website. What we will focus on here is how to get FREE TRAFFIC. If you have money burning a whole in your pocket, then by all means, go to Google and sign up for their adwords program. You can easily get a ton of visitors, but chances are it will be expensive. Everything online is about conversions. If you are selling an mp3 for 99 cents on your website, and you are spending $100 on advertising per day, how much of that money will result in sales? If you are using Google adwords to drive traffic to your website, you can easily be paying up to $1 per click. I can almost guarantee you that if you spend $100, you will be lucky to even sell one mp3 for 99 cents. So let’s scrap that idea and just leave it for the major labels who have millions of dollars to burn at their disposal.
Here are great, free techniques to drive traffic to your website.
1. Content
The more content you have on your website (posts, music, photos, videos, etc), the more natural, organic traffic you will get from the major search engines, it’s as simple as that. If you have a blog type website, the minute you post something it will soon get indexed by Google and chances are people may find your site by some search they performed.
2. Proper Tags, Titles, Naming Files
Everything you do on your site should be seo friendly. Any title should be highly relevant (your artist name, song title, possibly even kewords such as “Brand new pop/dance single from….). The more descriptive you are, the higher the chances are that you can get additional traffic from people performing long tail keyword searches. Short tail terms can be, “music” or “pop music”. Longtail terms can be “brand new pop single”. These longtail terms are what you have a chance to rank for on Google, and therefore get more traffic to your site. Another thing you should do is to properly name any photos you upload in your file. Don’t name your photos as such “6amg.jpg” Instead, use descriptive terms separated by dashes to make them search engine friendly. A good example would be “your-artist-name-photo-new-album.jpg). When people perform image searches on Google, there are better chances that they will find your website.
3. Build Your Website’s Pagerank
Google uses an algorhythm called Pagerank, or PR to determine the value of your website. A website with a PR or 5 is given more weight than one that is at PR 1. So what does this mean? In layman’s term, here’s what can happen. Let’s say a musician with a PR 5 website write’s a new title that contains these terms “Hot New Rap Music Single” and you have a PR 2 website and you also write a post on your website using the same, exact terms. Chances are, if you later peform a search on Google for that term, the PR5 website may show up on the top 3 positions on the first page. Your website, having a much lower pagerank, might be somewhere on page 5, 6, or 10.
Your goal should be to build the PR of your website. The higher PR you have, the more traffic you will get (more importantly, free, nonpaid traffic). Here are some tips that will help you build your website’s pagerank.
* build links from forums. You can sign up at a few music forums, and put your website link in the signature. Try to contribute to the forum at least a few times per week and you will get links to your website.
* blog commenting. Find a few relevant blogs and go ahead and comment on them if you can (leaving a link to your website). If you are a rock musician, then it’s best to comment on rock music blogs (try to keep everything pointing to your website relevant).
*link exchange with other musicians. Contact similar style musicians that are independent as well and offer to link exchange with them. It would be beneficial to both.
*article submissions. Write an article (or a few) about the genre of music you are into and then submit it to free article directories such as http://ezine.com or http://isnare.com The article will get indexed and you might enjoy some traffic from the link you can leave in the article which points to your website.
*social networking. Put your link on Facebook, Twitter and if you are on youtube, put your link up as the first text in the description for any video you upload.
*outsource linkbuilding strategies. If you have a little cash to spare, you can outsource your linkbuilding strategies to professionals. Check out Fiverr.com and you would be surprised the many services people offer for only $5. Before you buy any service, make sure you check out their feedback rating to make sure they are providing what they advertise. Sometimes $5 goes a long way and it can save you hours of work.