As you know, all of my albums come out first on Bandcamp

I may or may not put this on iTunes/Amazon/eMusic etc. I haven’t decided yet. I’d MUCH rather you got it from Bandcamp, for all our sakes. Here’s why:

• You get to choose your file type. With Bandcamp I can release 24bit audiophile FLAC versions and the highest possible quality MP3 versions (we well as AAC/ALAC and OGG) all in the same place. No faffing about for you searching out the best format, just choose the one you want.
• Sleevenotes, artwork, extras. I can add PDFs of sleevenotes, photos, lyrics, individual art for each track. and I can change it. As often as I want. Freedom
• The ‘Pay What You Want’ thing. It just makes sense – not only does it let you put in the price that represents both what you can afford, and what you think it’s worth, but it means that people who are in parts of the world where they otherwise can’t get ‘legal’ digital music can download it without paying, and if you ever lose your copy in a harddrive crash, you can just come and download it again for free. Or if you decide you want to give FLAC a go and see what all the hi-res fuss is about – again, you can replace it for free.
• Payment is easy. OK, so not quite as easy as buying on iTunes if you’ve got an iTunes account, but its’ way more friendly. If you’ve got a PayPal account, it’s 3 clicks and a password confirmation. If you haven’t, you can pay with a credit/debit card.
• Full previews. Let’s be honest, in the grand scheme of things HARDLY ANYONE HAS HEARD OF ME. Even fewer have heard my music. Hiding it away behind 30 second previews on iTunes/Amazon is utterly insane. As would be hosting it all on a listening service that’s separate from the buying/download bit. It’s utterly vital for indie musicians to remember, you don’t get an audience by selling music, you have the chance to sell music ONCE YOU HAVE AN AUDIENCE. The unlimited listening makes people hearing what I do as easy as possible. You can listen on the site, on Facebook, other people can blog it. It’s just great! A lot of the people who may hear my stuff are likely to need quite a while to decide they want it enough to buy it. It may take years. I don’t want to stop them listening in those intervening years. I’m in this for the long game, not some get rich quick plan. You can listen on the site as much as you want. That’s great. …it’s also worth noting that the pages will also play on an iPhone/iPad, thanks to them being HTML5, not Flash-driven – you can’t download from Bandcamp to either of those, but that’s because Apple are idiots, nothing Bandcamp can do about that.
• Sharing via social media. Bandcamp is SO friendly. the URL turns into an embedded player on Facebook, anyone can blog it and have it playable to their friends, every page (album or track) has facebook and twitter share buttons, when you’ve bought it and it’s downloading, there are sharing buttons there too. It’s made for sharing.
• Sharing the love via Creative Commons. iTunes and Amazon don’t give me the option to change the license terms on my music. It’s All Rights Reserved or nothing. But I don’t want to make it illegal for you to share the music with your friends. I don’t want to make it illegal for you to add the music to your videos, to remix it, to sample it… If you’re not making money from it, you can do what you want with it. If you want to make money off it, we negotiate the terms as normal. That’s friendly, right?

Convinced? Here you go:

If we’re friends on Facebook or Twitter, you may already know that I have a new album coming out next week.

It was recorded live in Minneapolis, after a fortuitous sequence of events (outlined in the sleeve notes) lead us to play in an art exhibition by a fabulous artist called Geoff Bush.

The music was all improvised in response to Geoff’s beautiful art. His theme for his work is ‘Believe In Peace’ – which is also the title of the album, and his work is based on the I Ching from which the four track titles come.

So we have four tracks, all played on my fretless 6 string bass (I only take one bass with me on tour in the US), and there’s some clever weirdness going on from my Kaoss Pad.

Here’s the opening track from it. Like all my recent stuff, it’s mixed and mastered for good speakers/headphones, so if you’re listening to this on a laptop, you’re going to miss a lot…

Enjoy, please tell your friends, and look out for the finished thing on the 1st or 2nd of January!

Firstly, here’s a rough mix of one of the pieces from my improv gig with Corey Mwamba last week in Derby. Corey’s a remarkable musician, and we had a wonderful gig. The whole show should be up on Bandcamp at some point (projects are backing up and I need to start releasing some of them!)

This is the 2nd thing we played on the night – I missed all but the last 15 seconds of the first thing with the recording. Corey starts out on recorder, then switches to vibes. His restraint through the first half is a great lesson in the parameters of improv. Too often, improvisors play all over everything, particularly melody players, rather than ‘arranging on the fly’ and creating space, colour and texture. Throughout the gig, Corey’s choice of when to play and when not to, as well as what to play when he did, was brilliant. A truly remarkable musician.

Please check out the other gigs Corey’s putting on at Deda in Derby. It’s a lovely place to play, and he’s doing good things there. Here’s the tune:

Also recently added to Soundcloud, this is a thing I was playing around with a couple of weeks ago, that I LOVE the feel of. Sadly, I don’t have the recording of how I came up with it, just these two loops that were there at the end. It’s going to be really tough to match the gentle flow of this, and it may be that I end up leaving this as is for the next record. we’ll see…

Please feel free to share both of those with your friends, to click the ‘like’ button, tweet the link to it… all that kind of help sharing the recordings around is SO important to us as musicians who can’t afford promo budgets and magazine adverts to let people know what we’re up to!

Creative Commons licensing is a way of putting a legal framework around allowing people the share/remix/reuse your work for non-profit/non-commercial purposes while maintaining your right to license for-profit usage as you always have done. So if you want to give a copy of one of my albums you downloaded to a friend, it’s perfectly legal to do so. Ditto if you do a slideshow of your favourite pictures for friends and family and use my music as the soundtrack. If you want to make a documentary for school, or even for film festivals that you’re not getting paid for, that’s also legal, so long as the work remains unchanged (I might shift this at some point, still working up to it ) and I’m credited as the author/performer.

If you are making a TV Show, Film, Commercial, Corporate video, then we need to sort out proper licensing terms, in which you pay me an agreed fee for a license to use the music for that purpose.

The reason for this is simple - I want people to share my music with their friends. The internet is an awesome sharing platform. It’s a great environment in which to discover new music, and I want to make it as easy as possible for people to discover my music. I also try as hard as I can to make it easier to get directly from me than it is to get from anywhere else.

The vast majority of the sharing of my music happens by people forwarding links to the places on MY site where you can download it. Why? Because it’s easier! How does it benefit me? Well, people are then in my space (not MySpace, no-one should ever be there ) – they’re on my site, with all that that entails:

• links to my other things,
• an opportunity to hear my other music,
• read my blog,
• and of course to pay what they think the music is worth…

Pricing doesn’t get in the way of discovery, it just allows people to be a part of the ongoing economics of making the music happen.

I don’t want to force people to break the law just to share my music with their friends. I don’t want to drive people away from my site looking for a free source of my music – I’d rather they got it from me, and came back, so that if and when their emerging sense of the value in what I do gets to the point where they put a cash value on it, they’re getting it in the place where they can express that and pay for it in the simplest way. They are also doing it in a place where they can thank me, and send the links to their friends simply.

Sharing is good.
I want my music shared.
I want people to find it.
And, through it, to find me.

I want to connect with them, and to build ongoing relationships between my musical journey and the lives of people who choose it as their soundtrack.

Creative Commons licensing allows me to do that without disprespecting the law, or handing my creative work to others to exploit for their financial gain. It’s the best of every world, for me.

-o0o-

Footnote: You may have seen (especially if you’re an american songwriter) the ‘attack’ on Creative Commons written by ASCAP – it was, frankly, insane, and there have been a couple of marvellous responses. This one on the CC site, and this one from Larry Lessig. Bottom line – use CC licenses if they work for you, or don’t if they don’t. They ARE a Copyright license. You are in control of how your work is used, and if you want people to share it, this is a great way to make that possible.

…and here’s a great CC-licensed album, from Ben Walker:

Here it is:

It also has a beautifully shot and edited video to accompany it, so I guess that makes it our first single!

Here’s the video:

Steve Lawson & Lobelia “Happy” from Brian Wilson on Vimeo.

Right, as this is our single, does that mean it’ll be on iTunes as well? Nope – why bother when Bandcamp is better quality, more portable, and allows us to make it so that you can still get it even if you’ve got no cash OR so you can pay more than the arbitrary £0.79 if you listen to it and think it’s worth a lot more than that (it is ). it means you can download the album, or listen to it all online first and get the bits you want.

Are we going to release a physical version of it? The single?? Nope. What a waste of CDs that would be. But we are thinking of doing a limited edition CD release of the live album… watch this space…

For now, please share this around, we’re rather proud of it, and are VERY grateful to our friend Brian Wilson (not the Beach Boy, before the comments thread goes nuts) for filming and editing it together. It was a four camera shoot, I think – 2 or possibly 3 of which were Canon 5D Mk IIs…

If any radio people want a CD quality copy to play, you can either download the .FLAC file, convert it and burn it to CD (it’ll be perfect quality, we promise), or you can message me and I’ll send you a .aif of it that you can just burn to CD and play. But it’s 9 minutes long, so I’m guessing daytime Radio 1 is out of the question

If you think back to the US tour that Lobelia and I did in Dec/January, you’ll remember that as well as gigs, we also did some masterclasses, teaching and consulting as we went round.

It was a whole lot of fun, and a great way to share some of what we’ve learned about social media for musicians and new ways of exploring artist-to-audience communication, without restricting it to people who were rich enough to hire us for a one-on-one session for a day. Here’s what we did:

• In Milwaukee I had a great session at the home of the incomparable Tracy Apps with a fascinating group of local musicians and artists talking about looping technology, and the implications of the kind of real time spontaneous music and art creation that it affords. Followed by this house concert.
• In Nashville, before a house concert we shared with the wonderful Angela Doll Carlson, we talked about managing a music ‘career’ online, about promotion, connecting with audiences – all the stuff that I write about on here – to a room full of musicians, writers, poets, thinkers.
• In Philadelphia, we did a looping masterclass in a university, via a contact we made on twitter with @natesologuitar.
• In Orange County we had a get together in a pub to talk about the future of artist-to-fan social media communication, organised by the very lovely Geoff Hickman.
• And in San Jose, I did my usual one day bass masterclass, at Looperlative Bob’s Looperlative House, before our house concert.

Well, now that Beyond Bass Camp is in place, the bass masterclass has migrated to the UK, but the rest of it can as well.

Andrew Dubber recently started doing a similar thing, and called it – ingeniously – unconsultancy – like an unconference, but with a consulting edge.

I like nothing more than sitting down with a group of musicians – or indeed creatives from other worlds be they painters, writers, film-makers etc. – and talking about things that help us get our art out there, help us make it, make sense of it, and make the world a richer place because it exists.

I’m happy to come and do this, either on my own or with Lobelia (or, indeed, with Andrew Dubber, if you want to book us both – we do work very well together ) – with or without a house concert to follow (it’s a great way to make house concerts more viable – have a day’s house consulting before hand, let people buy into one or the other or both.)

So, over to you – if you’re in the UK and you want me to come and do a house consultancy, or us to come and do a gig, you can email me, or skype me – I’m therealslimstevie on skype. Hit me up with a text message on there first, and then if I’m available, we can chat about it!

[I have a lot of very bright, creative, wonderful friends, doing fascinating things with music and social media and news and all kinds of other areas of human life that make the world a better place. One such friend is Jemimah Knight, a hugely talented journo - and bassist - who authored this lovely essay as a guest post. Thanks J!]

“Hi, I read Steve’s blog and listen to Lobelia‘s beautiful voice when I can. It’s a privilege I take for granted really, but maybe we do so when we know good people who can make music.

I grew up with a musical family around me, my father is like some musical polymath – he can play most things – although the violin is a bit tiny for him maybe. My mother has a beautiful voice, she sang a lot more when I was small and she was professional. My brother, plays bass, I play bass badly and my dad – as mentioned, annoyingly also plays bass well.

So, I’m the black sheep of the family with my regular job for a big company when those around me taught me well the value of beautiful sound and the ability to create it. I love to sing harmonies – but that’s often along to the radio.

In reading Steve’s blog here, I am reminded that learning an instrument is something really very important, it’s like speaking a different language physically, translating sound into time and emotion in ways that writing and speech cannot. Sadly my strengths lie in the latter categories and I imagine some would question even that.

I still have an ear for bass tones and my mild synaesthesia draws me to it over and over from viola, through cello, to bass. Yeah – I was orchestrally trained so much less rock and roll than Steve.

Anyway, my point is that learning about music, to make music and what it means to hold that particular skill, is irreplaceable. Even in comparison with music appreciation, everyone loves a great song or a brilliant band, but nothing compares to creating sound and colour for every mood. The first ever book I learned from as a whippersnapper was called “Bass is Best” – and I still believe it.

Without the bass section, who cushions your rhythm to swing your hips? Who soars from the deepest reaches of your heart way up into the human vocal range of joy? Who’s there to add that richness to any song, any piece or even alone?

If I could advise people who want to learn, I’d say Bass of course. It might seem lonely without a band to begin with, but there’s always the radio and look here at Mr SolobassSteve himself, you don’t need the whole get up to get down. Also, if there is a sound you can make a mistake with, a bass guitar or better a double bass is forgiving. She will allow you to be incorrect and not berate you with the squawk of a woodwind or brass instrument or harder still the shrill exclamation of a violin!

I still have a bass in my home in London. My double bass lives with my parents – good job my dad can play it well and my mum can sing along. But the electric bass even with no amplifier is company to me from time to time when I get a moment and some space to think another way.”

It’s a series of monthly masterclasses, inspired by the ones I give in California every January – for the last 4 or 5 years, I’ve been doing a day long seminar there, for up to about 25 bassists. Some years I’ve done two – a more general bass class, and then a solo bass focussed class on the Sunday.

But I’ve never done anything like it in London – the only masterclasses I’ve done here have been in colleges, univerities and a clinic at the Bass Centre (with Michael Manring – it was the last clinic they held in the Wapping Store before it moved).

So clearly it was time to make it available. But in order to make it the best possible learning experience for those coming along, I’m limiting the class size to 5 poeple at a time.

Anyway, I’ve posted all the details over in a blog post and an FAQ/info page. Please head over there to read about it.

The blog over on the site is going to be my education/music culture-focussed blog from now on, which is nice, cos I’ll be able to write more, and with a little more focus.

And of course, B*B*C has a Twitter account – @beyondbasscamp – and a Facebook ‘Fan’ Page. Feel free to add/friend/follow or share either.

If you’ve got any questions, please do post them over on the BeyondBassCamp Blog.

We met through Tuttle, and have been talking for a while about recording together, and today it finally happened, though not without an hour or so of technical faffing thanks to some problematic gear…

Anyway, we still managed to record an epic 45 minute long improv, which is embedded below. It starts pretty atonal, and goes through some very strange and often beautiful places. It definitely rewards listening on good headphones or decent speakers as opposed to laptop speakers, and is a long way from the chords ‘n’ tunes approach of most of my solo stuff.

Give it a listen, if beautiful strangeness be your thing, and have a read of David’s blog post about it.

For the technically minded, I was playing bass through my Lexicon and the Looperlative. David was playing flugelhorn and a strip of bowed metal through his laptop setup running MAX/MSP for processing/looping. It’s often tricky to work out who’s making what noises in this…

CDBaby is one of indie music online’s big success stories – it started out as just a CD shop, but has become a site for hosting band websites and most successfully for distributing digital music to the big online stores like iTunes and Amazon for you.

Anyway, our album is now on there, so use the widget below to head there and get it, if you’re of the CDBaby-shopping persuasion. You can, of course still get it from this site – CD or Download.