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Rhythm Creation contains articles, tutorials and more to help with all aspects of music production. From getting started with a sounds and right through to mastering and promoting your music.

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A Tip For Musicians Sending Tracks To Online Radio Stations

Thu 3 January 2008
11:26am
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I learnt something new today and thought I would share it with you. The other week I sent a few tracks off to

TSM Radio, a radio station which is devoted to playing unsigned and independant artists. I was rather happy to see that they added 2 of my tracks to their playlist. (Thanks TSM Radio).

I went to listen to TSM and heard my track played, in the track I panned a sound going left to right and back again in the mix. Online broadcasts need to be compressed down into smaller bitrates and one way they might compress down your tracks is to make them mono. TSM Radio does this on their 32kbps stream and what this meant was that when the panned sound was suppose to have been panned on one side the sound played and when it was suppose to be panned on the other you couldn’t hear it. Now I wasn’t that upset as it actually ended up sounding quite good because the sound wasn’t an important part of the track and it kept coming in and out. Had it been a more important part such as any vocals for example I would have been a little annoyed, not with TSM Radio but with myself for not realising that may happen.

So my tip is that if you are sending tracks off to any on-line radio stations or podcasts that may broadcast streams in mono it may be worth sending a mix than contains no fancy panning effects. It will stop any disappointment if you can’t hear certain instruments or your mix gets ruined.

TSM Radio.

Miscellaneous, Promotion,

5 Great Web Sites You Should Be Using To Promote Your Music

Thu 3 January 2008
10:57am
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You’ve made some great sounding tunes, now you want to get some people who aren’t your own family and friends to take a listen and start getting your music out there to be heard (That is why you created it right?). Well you could start off by trying my list below of 5 sites I believe can really help when it comes to promoting your music, getting some listeners quickly and best of all every one of these sites is free to use.

OurStage
OurStage is great site with a great concept which is different to the others in this list. Listeners get to judge you tracks against another track and choose which one they like the most. Listeners then get to see whether other listeners agreed with them or not and these votes determine the charts in the various genre categories. You can go on to win some great prizes if you music is successful. I think this site has got the best ranking system of all the ones on this list because it’s a system where the charts can’t be interfered with too much by the musicians friends with false votes or plays.

Visit OurStage

Reverb Nation/Facebook
Facebook has joined up with Reverb Nation and together can help promote your tracks as you can place the Reverb Nation players into your Facebook page. Listeners can comment on your tracks, you can post a blog or use your current blogs feed if you already have one. Reverb Nation also has some great widgets to place on your own sites. I also especially like the fan mailing list tools on offer too and it also makes it easy to find other musicians in your local area who you may not know about.

Visit Reverb Nation

MySpace
Originally just a social networking site, but musicians and bands can have their own page, upload some songs to show off their music, design the layout and look of their page and create a list of friends/fans who enjoy their music. MySpace is an essential promotion tool for bands and musicians even if you already have your own personal web site. Rhythm Creation has a

MySpace profile so if you enjoy the site or need someone to start off your friends list, why not

add us as a friend

Visit MySpace

Soundclick
Upload your tracks and get placed into the Soundclick charts, you can place your uploaded tracks on any other page you own using their widgets as well as sell your music through their pages. There is a very large amount of tracks on here and your music can get hidden away unless you have other pages to promote your music using the widgets. Note: Soundclick does have an optional subscription charge if you want to make use of the extra facilities. A basic account is free.

Visit Soundclick

TheSixtyOne
We recently placed this site in our Hall of Fame because we liked it so much. Listeners can bump up songs they like similar to sites like Digg and the listeners are playing a game themselves to gain points. The great thing about TheSixtyOne is there seems to be a good amount of users who are ready and waiting to discover the newest tracks that have just been uploaded. The other great thing is that if you are selling your music using Amazon MP3, listeners can go and buy your music if they enjoy it as a buy button will automatically appear if you disallow downloads of you tracks. If you haven’t yet got your music on Amazon, go to our

feature about selling your tracks on-line.

Our longer review of TheSixtyOne

Visit TheSixtyOne

Hopefully this little list will give you some good sites to start getting your music out there, there are loads more sites on the net I just wanted to give you these 5 which have been my favourites so far for promoting my own tracks.

Other Sites, Promotion,

Why Do Bands & Musicians Still Want To Get Signed?

Sat 29 December 2007
11:51am
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This is a question I have been asking myself recently, mainly due to me releasing some of my own music independently without a label behind me and also because there seems to still be a high percentage of musicians and bands that still want to be signed even though there are some great facilities in place which effectively make record companies obsolete by providing services to independent musicians.

I constantly see more articles on the internet that deal with getting a record deal rather than trying to go it alone. Articles such as preparing your demo, getting A&R people to notice you are flooding the internet etc. I also see musicians on message boards saying things like “if I ever get signed blah blah blah” and yet they’ve never attempted or even thought about going independent.

What Are The Benefits of Being Signed?
Obviously this answer varies a lot from label to label and depends on the contract that is signed but the main benefits are as follows…

Distribution: Labels will have the ability to mass manufacture CDs and distribute your music in all the big stores.
Promotion: Labels will have employees who are experts at promoting bands, these experts will have numerous contacts which can get you into magazines, web sites and also radio or television broadcasting time amongst other promotion tools.
Financing: Lots of money behind them, they can pay for the manufacturing of CDs and promotion as well as possibly paying you up front.
Tour Booking: They have the contacts and name behind them to get you gigs in the top venues.
Help & Support: They will help you to develop your skills and provide knowledgeable people who can help to record and produce your music.

All sounds rather nice, doesn’t it. I mean who wouldn’t like to have all that done for them by the nice record company who wants to help you with your music. I believe that these points are what that high percentage of musicians who want to get signed see.

Back Down To Earth With A Bump
The reality of it… (Obviously depending on the sort of contract signed, this is a worse case scenario).

Distribution: The label owns your recordings and takes a huge percentage of any profits, oh yes you will see your CD on sale in all the big stores but won’t see many royalties for your work. They will own any new music you write too.

Four CDs - Image from Stock Xchng (www.sxc.hu) User:grz3gorz

Promotion: To promote effectively they may require you to fit in. They could even make you change the style of your music to get you to fit into a genre they want you in and be marketable to a larger proportion of customers. They may require you to do things you wouldn’t normally do, all in the aim of selling more CDs to make the record company more money. They may even require you if you are in a band to drop members who don’t fit into their visions.
Financing: Yes it’s their money therefore they are wanting good returns for their investment. They might pay you upfront but should your band in their eyes fail, you may actually end up owing the recording company money for all the promotion and the thousands of drinks coasters they produced if your music isn’t a hit.
Tour Booking: They may also want a cut of any profits here for getting you the gig and owning the music your playing. More contracts are having this written into them. They may want you to play venues you don’t want to or too often with tours lasting months and playing every night.
Help & Support: Will you get this if it all goes wrong, No. Who will they blame, You. You could end up no longer owning your music or any music you make in the future. You could end up owing the record company money and paying it off yourself. Where’s the help and support now?

As you can see not all is so sweet. Note to everyone thinking of signing on the dotted line: Record companies are mainly interested in you making them money, they are just like any other business and want to see returns for their money.

Record Labels/Companies Are Obsolete
There are loads of products and services available that can help you to achieve becoming an independent musicians or band. There’s one major difference - You are employing them to work for you not the other way round. I don’t want to make out that going independent is the solution to all the problems, I just want to point out that all the jobs a record label does can be achieved yourself and may be a better option for you and your music.

Distribution: You can use companies like TuneCore to distribute your tracks to all the major digital stores such as iTunes and Napster official site, anyone around the world will be able to buy your music in digital format and you’ll receive all the royalties. You can also manufacture CDs yourself and sell them around the world via your own web site or in on-line stores which have facilities in place to sell independent music. You may not be able to get your tracks into the major stores on the high street, but you can certainly distribute them to your local smaller record stores and you can sell CDs after any live performances you do. There are distribution companies which will distribute for you to the larger stores, but many of these stores won’t stock you on if they don’t believe your album will sell, but realistically this method of selling music is starting to slow down as more people are going for MP3 files. The main benefits of independent distribution are that firstly you keep ownership of all your music and secondly you will get to keep all or most of your royalties, distributing your music has never been easier than it is today.
Promotion: This I believe is the hardest part of going independent as you won’t have the necessary contacts or the upfront financing to promote like a record label can. But you do have some very good tools at your disposal. The internet can be a great tool to do things like set up your own site, use social networks like MySpace, get radio play on independent on-line radio stations and in podcasts or get your music reviewed by on-line magazines and music review blogs. The internet is a world wide tool that you can use for promotion and a lot of the time it can be free promotion too. To promote yourself in the real world can be a lot harder, your main way will be through getting gigs at venues.
Financing: This will depend on your or your bands current financial situations and yes you will need some sort of financing to get started. You started music because you enjoyed doing it? So enjoy doing it and put any money earned through any gigs or other income sources from your music back in as investments for the first 6 months or however long it takes until you have earned enough to pay for services yourself. Today it is cheaper than ever to get started as basic home recording equipment is cheaper and a lot of these services available like digital distribution can be extremely cheap. You may not earn much money straight away but at least you won’t owe a record label money.
Tour Booking: Concentrate on building a local fan base up. Once you have done this you can begin to play larger and larger venues as you can guarantee better that you will can fill the venue. You may not be playing at a well known festival straight away but it is possible to build up to that.
Help & Support: The feeling you will get when you achieve things yourself such as seeing your music available in on-line stores will give you a great sense of achievement. If you feel you need the support of say a sound engineer to help you record your music then go and hire one, there are loads out there who may not be famous but certainly know their stuff and are looking for work.

So Why Are Musicians Still Wanting To Get Signed
Even though you can do all these things yourself or hire people to do them for you, why are musicians still chasing that elusive signing deal?

Musicians are good at music and the realisation that they may have to learn to be good good at more than just music such as business skills can be a major psychological barrier.
They lack the knowledge that they can do it themselves due to all of these articles and info dealing with getting signed and not explaining all the alternatives of going independent.
Musicians believe that music listeners don’t want to listen to unsigned bands and that these listeners want to be told by TV and radio what to listen to. The reality is that these listeners just don’t know about your music yet.
The current music industry in place makes it hard for unsigned bands to make it. For example radio stations will only play signed artists.

Hopefully this article has given you a bit of a insight into how it is possible to achieve going it alone and why record labels are starting to become obsolete. In the not so distant future I believe that we will start to see more and more services and promotional tools start to become available to musicians wishing to go the independent route, I think we will start to see bands becoming little businesses in their own right.

Why did you start writing and producing music? because it was fun and exciting? Going independent is fun and exciting too, doing work for a record label is like any other job, your working to line someone else’s pockets who believes you can make money for them. If your music is good enough and you’ve got the determination, why not line your own pockets?

Article written by

Edward Cufaude for Rhythm Creation

Distribution, For Beginners, Miscellaneous, Promotion,

Basic Waveforms - The Sine, Square, Triangle and Sawtooth Waves

Fri 28 December 2007
12:23pm
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Sine, Square, Triangle and Sawtooth are the basic waveforms (a graphical representation of a sound) used in most popular synthesizers. Most oscillators (The part of a synthesizer which generates the basic waveform) can produce all four of these basic waveforms. All are very different sounding and have their own characteristics which can greatly affect the mood of the sound synthesized.

I believe that by learning what each of these basic waveforms sounds and looks like can be a great way for anyone starting out using synthesizers to be able to start learning to hear a synthesized sound and then go on to reproduce that sound on their own.

Below are images of these four basic waveforms as well as audio examples for each.

Sine Wave
The wave that most of use will visually imagine when we hear the word wave. Can be great for producing very low bass sounds that sound smooth.

Sine Waveform

Download a mp3 of this waveform.

Square
As the name suggest the waveform looks square and this creates a unique sound compared to the other four waveforms.

Square Waveform

Download a mp3 of this waveform.

Triangle
A triangle wave is a very basic waveform where the pattern rises and then falls by the same gradient creating a triangle shape.

Triangle Waveform

Download a mp3 of this waveform.

Sawtooth
The dirtiest sounding of the four basic waves, it is named sawtooth because it looks like the teeth of a saw. You can also get a reverse sawtooth waveform where the slow gradient and steep fall are swapped around.

Download a mp3 of this waveform.

Hopefully this article has allowed you to see and hear the basic waveforms so you can begin to identify them when you hear sounds that have been created using these waveforms as a starting point.

All images of the waveforms are made using

Audacity Article written by

Edward Cufaude for Rhythm Creation.

For Beginners, Sound Theory,

13 Ideas To Help You If You Are Suffering From Musicians Block

Wed 26 December 2007
01:52pm
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Musicians block is the musicians equivalent to writers block and most people who regularly produce their own tracks or write their own songs will suffer with musicians block at some point. So if you are sitting in front of your instrument and/or equipment and no ideas are coming through, these tips and ideas may help to entice out a piece of music instead of forcing out a piece of music.

These ideas include techniques to help you look at your music and the creative process in a different way to what you would normally. Sometimes though the best thing to do is to actually come away and do something which will help to get those musical ideas flowing. This list contains ideas from both of these two different methods of stimulating your creativity…

Change the outcome of the end result that you are trying to achieve in the track or song you are writing. Most likely you are trying to write “the best song” you can. Change this to write the happiest or saddest song you can. Lower your standards and try to write a bad tune, it may just work for you.
Play around with your instrument and record yourself at the same time. When you have some spare time go back and listen to yourself playing. You never know you might just hear a musical phrase that you played by accident, but at the time you were playing you may not have even thought about using that phrase. On listening back when you are in a different mood, you will listen to it differently compared to when you actually played it. You can then take that phrase you found and work on it further.

Welcome - Image from Stock Xchng (www.sxc.hu) User:VinnyPrime

Write your music with a purpose in mind. For example think of a scene in a film such as a car chase and write a piece of music that you feel would fit well with that scene, pretend that you were asked to write the soundtrack for it. Writing music for an occasion like a wedding could be another idea or for when someone goes up to receive a medal at the olympics. Visualizing a feeling in this way may be of help to you.
Sometimes the block can be mentally as you may not be challenging yourself enough with your music. You must have been a beginner to writing music at some point, when it was a new experience it must have been challenging because you were doing new things. So maybe you can come overcome musicians block by challenging yourself again. Set yourself new tasks or challenges, for example writing music in a completely different genre to what you are used to could be the challenge to kick start those ideas. If you write lyrics, try using a dictionary and a thesaurus to learn some words you have never heard of before. Find for example 5 words and challenge yourself to write a track incorporating those words into the lyrics.
Limit the equipment you use to produce your tracks, I did this recently by limiting myself to creating a track using a specified list of equipment and effects and also using recorded samples from my voice only (I usually use a lot of synths). Some of the sounds and ideas wouldn’t have come about had I not limited myself. I wrote a post about this called Do Musicians Use Too Much Equipment. You may just find that you have too many options available to you with the equipment you use and so limiting yourself can let you concentrate on the actual music more. I also found doing this quite fun too and I will be doing it again.
You often hear motivational experts talking about taking lots of small steps instead of large ones to achieve an ultimate goal. Refocusing your outcomes by concentrating on the percussion or the bassline only may be a way you may find will work for you.
Remove distractions from your working area. If the distractions are too easy to turn to then your not going to put your full concentration into your music. Remove Playstations and TVs from the room you work in. If you working on a computer uninstall any games that are all too easy to click on or stop your email software from automatically notifying you everytime a email comes in.
Change the enviroment you work in, move into the attic or the garden shed if you think it could help or make your current enviroment more relaxing. Maybe a better chair is what your looking for. Change your enviroment too by going for a walk, I find some of my better ideas come about whilst I am walking.
If you use a synthesizer or soft synth, why not sit there messing around with it creating sounds and saving the settings for use later on. Some of your best sounds will come out of your synthesizer when you are messing around with it rather than looking to create a specific sound. Not only will you start creating a big bank of your own sounds, but when it comes to creating your tracks you will find that you have already created the perfect sound your looking for.
Set up a microphone and record samples for use later on. This works like the synth idea above as you will start creating a big sample collection of your own to call on at a later date. Go round your house finding objects which make sounds that could possibly be used later on. Doing this will allow you to find samples which others won’t have, these sounds could be used in your drum tracks for example or layered with other sounds to make new sounds.
Listen to new music that you wouldn’t normally listen to. Listen to the structure and the way that musical phrases are strung together. Listen to the production and try to place yourself in the mind of the composer and learn as much as you can from the techniques you can hear. Find music from different countries around the world and borrow ideas that you can incorporate into your own style.
Remix a track instead of writing your own. You will find that all the ideas of the track are already there, all you have to do is bring your own style to the track. If you can’t find a good track to remix try visiting Remix Comps, a web site that we run which contains current remix competitions from around the world. You never know you might win one.
Go back and redo or remix a track that you have created yourself. You may find that one of the tracks you created a long time ago has some great ideas in there, but you now know how to do things better and so can do a better job. Change a track into a different mood or genre. Do a new mix down for a track as you will have a different set of listening ears compared to when you first mixed it down and improve it.

Hopefully some of these ideas can help you if you are unfortunate enough to be going through a musicians block. You may find some of these ideas are just not for you, everyone is different but you can try them. Its got to be better than sitting around staring into space because no ideas are coming out.

If you have any ideas or techniques you use to stimulate musical creativity tell us in the comments of this post. You may just help out a fellow musicians.

Article written by

Edward Cufaude for Rhythm Creation.