Well, our concert tour has come to an end. Will blog about the amazingness of the whole thing soon, but first, here’s a lil video that Geoff Hickman took at the inauguration party/house concert we had down in Newport Beach, with the lovely and amazing Kerry Getz, which also featured Jason Feddy, Matthew Von Doran, Seth Horan, Ed Sheets and a whole load of hugely talented Hawaiians:
Steve and Lobelia Live in Newport Beach, Ca. 01/20/2009 from Geoff Hickman on Vimeo.
NAMM so far has been a whole lot of fun – have met up with loads of great friends, checked out some fab music gear, chatted a lot, drank coffee, playing some music on the looperlative booth (and discovered a couple of amazing new Looperlative features – video coming on those ASAP!)
Of course, I’ve also run into loads of pictures of Geddy Lee looking scarily like me as always (see above), but below is a round up of the rest of my pictures so far from NAMM – bass gear-wise, my favourite things so far have been the Mark Audio powered speakers (not really bass gear, more portable PA equipment – looks PERFECT for what Lobelia and I do!) and the new Ernie Ball bass with the push button pick-up controls… the great sound of it really took me by surprise.
Have met lots of of twitter friends too, which is rather lovely, and not a small number of people whose opening gambit has been ‘dude, I LOVE your blog’ – so this post is for you lot! 🙂
One of the magical things about house concerts is just how quickly they can be put together. Because there’s no ‘press’ involved, no promotional deadlines to hit, emails can be sent out to friends as soon as the gig is decided on, and an audience can be rustled up in about 2-3 weeks.
Which is exactly what happened to us for Philadelphia. Linda Mills sent me a message on Twitter just before Christmas saying ‘what would it take for you to come to Philadelphia?’ – we swapped Tweets, then emails, and it was booked! Because of Philly’s proximity to New York and New Jersey, a lot of the other twitter and social media friends in the area were up for making the trip, some musician friends were emailed, and a plot was hatched.
The date was picked because it was the day before Lo and I were going to be giving a looping masterclass at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh anyway, so we’d be out and about, and needed to have a car rented for that weekend anyway.
And once again, we were in the now-familiar situation of turning online friends into real friends, getting guided tours of cool cities, and introducing another room full of lovely people on to the delights of house concerts. (and posing for bizarre pics with lovely audience members/friends at the end, like the one above)
The gig went so well – the PA was put together from bits borrowed from Lo’s brother and from the drummer from her old band, Kevin Quickle. So the sound was fab. And Linda’s house has a through-lounge, meaning that we could do the fairly common L-shape set up, with a lovely assortment of sofas and chairs and cushions for people to sit on.
As a reference for how well house concerts work, we sold more than one album-per-person at the gig, including Lo’s first foray into selling her entire back catalogue + rarities on a 1gig memory stick. Definitely something we’ll be exploring further in the near future!
Being an audience largely drawn from the world of social media, the amount of fab technology on show was amazing, from great cameras, to Macs streaming the gig live to Ustream, two Nokia N95s taking pics and video, iPhones tweeting and twit-picking… Welcome to the future; blink and we’ll be onto something new.
We now can’t WAIT for the 3 more house concerts we’ve got in Northern California on the 22nd,23rd and 24th January – it’s going to be a LOT of fun. 🙂
..But before that, it’s NAMM, which starts tomorrow. Except for the ‘social media for musicians‘ session that I’m doing tonight. If that counts as NAMM for me, we start in about 2 hours!
…Oh, and one more thing – if you want the definitive explanation on how looping works, just watch the video below, from the Philly show:
One of the highlights of my year was the great weekend I got to spend in Helsinki as part of the Nokia Open Lab 08. It was a weekend in which social media practitioners – most with an emphasis on mobile usage – brought together for a series of discussions, workshops and presentations on the future of mobile social media, with a focus on Nokia’s hardware, obviously.
I met some amazing people there, many of whom have become really good friends over the ensuing months (particularly Phil Campbell and Ilicco Elia).
When I got back, I wrote a series of blog posts, encapsulating a lot of the things that the weekend covered, and my thoughts on them. Looking back on them now, I’m really grateful for the brain-food I got over the weekend.
Here they are:
There were a couple of other big writing things I got up to online (as well as my column in Bass Guitar Magazine, which ended this year after a couple of years…) – I was invited to write for a blog on a government website called Creative Choices which aside from being an appallingly badly designed site (front and back end), was a great project to be a part of given that I had the remit to write about the creative life, and got paid for it! Here’s a link to all my posts there.
The other site I’ve been writing for is an ongoing project, writing for MusicThinkTank.com – as you’ll see if you look at the list of my co-authors over there, I’m in insanely good company writing for them, sharing the web space with some of the best thinkers I’ve ever come across.
I’ve posted a couple of articles to MTT in the last few weeks – this one I posted today:
And this one was in December:
The rest of my writing there can be found here.
It was an amazing year for me, geek-wise. Will come back to that in more detail soon!
Finally, the details have been nailed down, and thanks to the wikkid organisational skillz of the wonderful Geoff Hickman, I’ll be doing a ‘future of social media for music makers’ masterclass in Santa Ana, the night before NAMM starts.
Date: Jan 14th
Time: 7.30pm
Venue: The Olde Ship, Santa Ana (map)
Cost: $15.00
Description:
“Making your way in the world today takes everything you’ve got… no, wait, that’s the Cheers theme-tune… anyway, it’s true that the times they have a-changed for anyone trying to make it in the music world – record labels are resorting to increasingly desperate measures to make money and artists are getting squeezed. The smart money is definitely on handling your own career, out there on the world wide interwebs. But how? There are million services promising audience reach, targeted email addresses, high profile this and big bucks that… most of which are glorified spam email campaigns. So what can we do? How can we, in the words of Rage Against The Machine, ‘Take the Power Back‘?
“Enter Steve Lawson, a solo bassist and ambient/electronic music pioneer from the UK.
“Steve’s managed to keep his career buoyant for the last decade, all via online interaction direct with his audience. He was exploring social media tools before the term ‘social media’ existed, and was using the web to connect with fans and fellow artists back in the heady days of Web 1.0.
“These days he splits his time between playing his beguiling cinematic music – at venues ranging from house concerts to the Royal Albert Hall – and teaching other musicians how to form genuine connections with their audience, to understand the new attention economy of the internet, and make the most of the opportunities that are out there. It’s not easy, it’s not a get rich quick scheme, and it probably won’t result in you making a million. But if that’s what you’re looking for, buy a lottery ticket. The music world has never been a good place to get rich. This is a chance to discuss, to ask questions and to come up with workable strategies for finding the people who want your music to soundtrack their lives. Sounds great, huh?”
There you go. Please do forward this page to any friends of yours who are going to NAMM, and may benefit from a lil’ StevieStyle social media make-over.
And if you’re at NAMM, please do drop by and say hi. Lobelia and I will be at the Looperlative, Modulus and Accugroove booths as well as around and about. And we’ll be tweeting, streaming some video, and generally having a lark!
So the Atheist Bus Campaign are delighted that they’ve raised £135K to put up adverts around the place telling people not to worry cos there probably isn’t a God.
So, let’s get this straight – their logic is that putting God-bothering ads on buses is a stupid idea. So in response they… put up anti-God-bothering ads on buses. Genius! An eye for an eye. An ad for an ad. Maybe we can just start having whole conversations via 15 word slogans on the sides of buses. it’s a pretty nuanced way to talk about things.
Oh no, my mistake, it’s a fucking stupid way to discuss anything. Regardless of my own beliefs/faith/whatever, I’ve always been baffled by posters stating ‘facts’ about God, or with bible verses on them. It always smacked of some kind of talismanic evangelical witch-craft; ‘if we use bits of the Bible, it has special powers and people will be saved‘… Surely actually talking about this stuff is more useful. As some fab Welshmen once said, ‘this is my truth, tell me yours‘.
But, to counter it with equally bogus ‘there probably isn’t a God..’ banners helps no one. It does as much for discussion of the merits of faith and atheism as the original posters do. Precious little.
The picture at the top is my contribution to the debate. Happy new year, whatever your faith-persuasion. 🙂
Tonight’s our last night in Nashville, the town that both Lobelia and I think is the US city we’d be most happy to live in were we to move here… It’s so full of amazing people, and has an incredibly vibrant and exciting arts world. Ironically perhaps, it exists a long way outside of the music scene that makes Nashville famous, but throughout the city there are people producing amazing and vibrant art, music, and writing.
Last night’s house concert was at a beautiful house in the woods out near Franklin. Franklin is kind of CCM-ville, the bit of the Nashville area most heavily populated by the people that comprise the Christian music scene that makes up so much of the music commerce in the city.
But the vibe couldn’t have been further from the hairspray and choreography of a slick pop gig. One of the things I most love about house concerts is that they break the binary nature of the artist/audience relationship. Rather than it being about us communicating AT the audience, with house concerts people get to meet, to hang out, to eat together, swap stories, and the artist is no longer the only relevant factor in people having a good time. The space, the hosts, the food and the sense of coming together for something special all contribute to the overall effect of the event.
So being in such an amazing setting, the home of the very wonderful Angela and David, and having Angela open the show with some really beautiful songs, then getting to eat together, chat, hang out and get to make loads of new friends made for another great experience for us, and for the audience, by all accounts.
Immediately before the show, I gave a workshop/masterclass, advertised as ‘the future of social media for music makers’ but to an audience made up half of musicians and half of wordsmiths – authors, journalists, creative writers. A really wonderful group of creative people to discuss the amazing opportunities presented to us by social media.
Again, the space proved perfect for it, including the million inch HDTV I was using to show some of the sites I was talking about in the presentation.
The reaction was pretty much as it always is – one of relief, that the fear and loathing that has swept through the music and publishing industries is actually caused largely by their short-sightedness in recognising what we can do with social media, how diffuse and varied our ways of connecting with an audience are, and how great it is to not be tied to a record release schedule followed by expensive PR campaign as a way of getting music or books out there.
All in all, an amazing day. More of those please!
More photos:
Lobelia chatting to lovely audience people between the two sets at the house concert:
the very lovely Julie Lee, who came to the masterclass, and then guested on one song on the gig. She’s amazing:
Lobelia and Victor Wooten, swapping looping tips:
Lobelia being filmed for the gig:
It’s been an amazing year for me – a proper round-up of the year will be coming soon. But I thought that first I’d pull together some of the things I’ve blogged about this year. So this is part 1 of a compilation of links to my blog posts for musicians this year –
Back in May/June, I did a series of posts about Social Media for Musicians:
…ah, clearly i didn’t finish that last one… 🙂
Then in July, I did a series on my thoughts on bass teaching, and music teaching in general:
These had some really great comments off the back of them…
And here, in roughly chronological order, are my favourite posts from Jan – August:
There you go, that lot would make a pretty good e-book, if I ever get round to editing out the typos, and shortening some of my more overly-verbose entries 🙂
Next entry will cover Sept – Dec, and then the rest of what’s happened this year! If I don’t get to it til tomorrow, have a great new year, see you in ’09!
If you particularly like any of the posts, please share the links around, either via the ‘share this’ option below, or just by forwarding the URL to people who think might like to read them.
I’ve been getting WAY too many ‘follows’ on Twitter of late from musicians who really don’t get it. So here’s my Top Tips For Musicians On Twitter. You may want to start with my Best Practices In Social Media post, or just jump straight in here.
OK, let’s start by comparing twitter with Myspace, as that’s where most musicians get their start in social media:
Like most musicians, my start on Myspace involved using the search function to find other musicians and ‘fans’ and adding them without any interaction. I accumulated thousands of ‘friends’ in no time, and for about a month was getting hundreds-sometimes-thousands of plays a day. But very little of it turned into any real interaction with them, either at gigs, buying/downloading music or just messages to say ‘hi’.
So I backed off, and stopped actively adding anyone to myspace, and recently deleted 8000 myspace friends in an attempt to make it useful.
So how does that relate to Twitter? Well, Twitter has no media player. It’s just text. It’s also asynchronous. This is crucial to understanding it. So point #1 with Twitter is:
So if you’re tempted to come onto twitter, search for ‘music’ or ‘jazz’ or ‘bass’ or whatever and hope to gain an audience. Think again. It’s not going to work. All that happens is, your timeline becomes unusable. You miss the good things other people are tweeting and you look like a spammer. Because (point #2):
That’s right, it’s not primarily about you. It’s a very difficult interface to game anyway. You can’t turn up, post links to your own page and hope people will find you. Because everyone else is way more interesting than you are. So, tip #1 (as opposed to point #1, that was above) – Tip #1 is:
And it stands to reason that tip #2 is:
No, it’s not, it’s self-obsessed, dull and ultimately does you more harm than good. If you’re trying to get me to listen to you, you were in a better position when I’d never heard of you than when I saw your twitter page with 4 tweets that said ‘hey, check out my myspace‘. Now I just think you’re a tool.
No, if I go to your page, and you’re interacting (twitter interactions happen by way of ‘@’ replies – if you put an @ in front of someone’s username in your ‘tweet’, it shows up in their replies, and for other people, it links to their page. It’s creates a contextual network for what you’re saying, it means people can find out what your tweet was in response to, and more about the person you’re talking to.) then I’m more interested in talking to you, asking you questions, answering your questions and generally getting a conversation going with you. Which is good for you, because if I reply to you, the 900-or-so people that follow me are going to see it, an if they find what I’ve said to you interesting, may click through to you…
So, tip #3 relates to how to get started:
If you’re having normal fun interaction, you look like a human being, not a spam-generating bot, or worse, an up-their-own-arse musical narcissist. Just talk about what you’re up to. What you’re doing is placing your music within the narrative of your life. You’re letting people know what you’re about, so they may then be interested in what kind of music such an interesting person would make. And if you’re a musician, the day-to-day life of practicing, getting gigs, designing flyers, getting paid, making records etc. is fascinating. It really is. So talk about it.
Tip #4 relates to this:
There’s already a link back to your site on your twitter page. And if you’re clever, you can post a nice pretty twitter background (here’s mine) that will give them a little more info. When you are interesting, people will be interested. That’s just how it works. So be interesting.
Tip #5 follows on from this
Like I said at the top, if you get it wrong, it’s worse than not being there. if you look like a spammer, people will not only ignore you, they’ll block you. That’s not good. So If you
people may follow you back.
So, last tip – #6 – for now (I’ll do a part 2 later) is about Conversation:
No-one knows if your music is great. Lots of links to your site won’t make them want to check it out any more than one link. However, lots of conversation makes you more interesting than no conversation.
No-one likes the guy/girl in a bar who talks about themselves all night to the exclusion of all else. Don’t be that guy on Twitter.
For reference, here are some musicians being interesting on twitter:
Lobelia, Jeff Schmidt, Imogen Heap, Warriorgrrl, Botched, Steven Guerrero, Alun Vaughan, Simon Little, Ben Walker, Graham English. They range from the hugely famous (Imogen) to the ‘tweets all the time (Graham and I), to the ‘small but important interactions’ (Botched and Steven G) – there’s a range there. Watch them, see what they do, what makes you want to listen to them, and do that.
Have fun, make friends, and post any questions you may have in the comments below! And if you want to recommend a musical twitterer (that isn’t YOU) then please do that too, but give reasons why…
OK, so it’s christmas day, and I’m blogging, what of it? 🙂 Happy Christmas, y’all. Hope you’re having a fun day. We certainly are here in Ohio.
Anyway, thought I’d do a quick post about my touring looping rig. Here’s the picture:
from the top we have:
Samson S-Mix (mixer)
ART TubeMP Preamp
(next to it is the…)
Lexicon LXP1 reverb.
Looperlative LP1 looper
Lexicon MPX-G2 processor
and on top of the LXP1 we have my Ebow, G7 Capo, Slide, Sennheiser Mic and currently-missing rubbish cell phone (if you see it around, let me know, I can’t find it anywhere). The JBL speakers were provided for the house concert in Milwaukee. We don’t generally travel with speakers in the US, just find people locally to lend us things.
The signal flow is really simple – bass goes into Lexicon MPX-G2, which goes into the S-Mix, and has the ART preamp in the FX loop. Lobelia’s loop mic goes into the LXP1, and that also goes into the S-Mix, which then goes into the Looperlative. The Looperlative then goes out to the desk/PA/Speakers/whatever.
And here’s what’s happening on the floor –
The big pedal, rocked back, is the Visual Volume Pedal.
then an M-Audio expression pedal, which controls the loop volume.
Then a Rolls Midi Wizard that controls the looperlative.
then Another M-Audio expression pedal, for the MPX-G2 (sometimes wah, sometimes volume, sometimes pitch etc.)
then a Roland EV-5, for Loop feedback.
Then a Lexicon footswitch for different stuff on the G2
and finally another EV-5 for track speed on the looperlative.
Meanwhile, Lobelia is using a Roland RC-20 for much of her looping, unless I’m looping her or she’s doing improv stuff through my rig, in which case she just plugs a mic into the volume pedal and uses my bass set-up exactly as-is.
So there you go, a Christmas present in the form of some gear geekness. Post a comment with any specific questions you may have about how it all works 🙂
(the second photo is by the lovely Tracy Apps )
