How to get exposure as an Internet/virtual band? (3): Making a Music Video

Hey there,

It's been a while since the previous two installments of this series. Turns out there were already vast amounts of blogs and websites out there to help you find a way to your (future) fans, so we shied away from just adding more of the same.

However, recently we decided to make a music video for our latest song, uson. If you haven't seen it yet, check it out here:



Wow, how did we do that? Well, that was also the question we had up front. Of course, one first needs to have a storyline, then work this into a more detailed script. However, how to turn this mental script into a real video?

One basically needs two things to bring a video script to life: footage and a video editing tool. Let's start with the latter. There are a whole bunch of tools, ranging from free to commercial software, for example:

• avidemux (free)
• iMovie (included with most Macs)
• Final Cut Pro (free trial)
• Adobe Premiere Elements

Here's a more complete list. Things you should look out for especially:

• support for most of the common video formats and codecs
• synchronization of the video with the beat of the music (beat markers)
• flexible cut-and-pasting
• text overlays
• special effects

We picked iMovie '09, since that came bundled on our laptop. However, its autosave feature was cumbersome, beat markers of clips easily got screwed up when moving earlier clips, and the handling of text overlays was a bit limited. Anyway, it did the job, but we recommend to try before you buy.

OK, now what about footage? Ideally, we would all hire Quentin Tarantino and January Jones, let them do what they do best, then take the footage and run with it (before they charge us). Of course, this is impossible (they have a busy schedule), so over to plan B: shoot the footage yourself!

Nowadays, cameras are not that expensive anymore, and even with smartphone or tablet cameras, one can shoot nice pictures (the blurriness could even be a feature of the movie!). So, invite some friends, dig up your parent's old clothes and have fun! Of course, you might need to go on location or rent props like vans or helicopters, and create special effects like meteor showers or volcano eruptions. If you're desperately in need of such scenes, you might want to skip to plan C: license or use royalty-free footage!

Just as for stock photos, there are plenty of sites with royalty-free video footage:

• http://www.stockfootageforfree.com/ (free)
• http://movietools.info/ (free)
• http://www.revostock.com/
• http://www.istockphoto.com/video

Video is typically categorized according to the content of the scene, e.g., "people" or "large houses". For a given video, one will typically find different formats and resolutions. Free sites usually have less choice (both content-wise and format-wise), which is why a versatile video editor with plenty of effects comes in handy ;-)

Our uson video is made completely from free footage. We basically used two time-lapse videos for the verses (one of an indoor mall, one of a busy shopping street), two videos of cozy homes to represent the warmth that is missing nowadays, a video of a Las Vegas hotel with fountains (showing decadence and richness), a panning video of billboarded street, another time-lapse video of moving clouds (announcing trouble) and of course an explosive firework video.

Finding the right footage to fit with your mental script takes some time and creativity. Once you have the footage, it's time to mix your clips together into a fluent video. This requires quite some improvisation and experimentation. Here are the steps we took to make the uson video (in reality you'll find yourself iterating a lot between the steps):

1. Mapping the Beat

The white lines with the dots represent the beat markers in iMovie '09. The red line is the play marker, the yellow line the start of the current clip.

Using your video editor of choice, play back your song and insert beat markers at the major events of the song, i.e., the moments at which you will likely want to switch footage, apply effects or want to synchronize in general with the video. These events typically map directly to the beat of the song, hence the name "beat marker".

The iMovie '09 screenshot above shows the beat markers for uson. Note that the markers do not 100% align with the waveform due to our imperfect timing and personal feeling. Also, some bars of the song have every first beat mapped out, while others have not (since intermediate events in those parts are not of interest to us). Spend quite some time on the beat markers, since they will form the skeleton of your music video.

2. Arranging the Major Video Clips

Three different clips: (1) the Las Vegas hotel, (2) a cozy scene and (3) the billboarded street. Note that we cut only a small part of street video and pasted it a couple of times. The 1st, 3rd, 5th and 7th copy are normal, the 2nd, 4th, 6th and 8th are reversed, and the remaining ones are similar, yet will have an effect applied to them (see below).

Using the beat markers as anchors, drag the major video clips to their right position to get a rough outline of the video. Check if colors and tempo match the video. If certain events in the video do not match the tempo of the music, you might speed up the video or split it up and align each part with the right beat.

Once you get a good outline of the major flow, you might notice that some videos are boring or are too long. Hence, it's time to start cutting and pasting clips, possibly with the aim of manipulating individual clips with effects or filters.

In the screenshot above, we see a lot of cut-and-pasting in the 3rd part (billboarded street). iMovie '09 is not the greatest when it comes down to exactly timing where to cut a clip, so we recommend a video editor with more precise control.

3. Adding Special Effects

Here we are auditioning different effects on the video clip on the right. iMovie '09 has a basic selection of traditional effects.

How do you make a music video interesting apart from the music, script and footage? Yes, special effects! Every modern video editor has its fair share of effects that are straightforward to apply. So, just experiment with them. However, use effects sparingly and wisely. Overdoing it will hurt the video, eliminating the wow-effect.

For uson, we opted for only 3 effects:

• We reverse a number of clips to keep things interesting.
• The "Negative" effect was used for indicating something is wrong with today's wealthy lifestyle (Las Vegas hotel and billboarded street).
• The "Aged Film" effect was used for scenes representing the past (cozy scenes) and threatening things (clouds). Note that the Las Vegas hotel switches to "Aged Film" at the end to show that 100 years down the road people will consider today's messed up world as the good old times (i.e., history repeats itself).

4. Adding Text Overlays

Adding a lower third to the Las Vegas hotel.

Sometimes you feel that the footage does not express a certain sentiment, or you want to verbally support the music. That's what text overlays are for, i.e., a piece of text that appears and disappears, sometimes accompanied by some effect. Overlays are also used to show your band's name and song name at the beginning and end of the video (important!).

The screenshot shows us adding what is called a "lower third" to the video. This is the classic position at the bottom of the screen used for example for subtitles. One can pick the color and font of the text, and some editors (not iMovie '09) allow you to position the text more accurately. Be careful with the fonts, not all of them will be rendered sharply at low resolutions. Double-check this in the next step.

5. Exporting the Video and Proof-Watching

Exporting to a YouTube-friendly movie format at a sufficiently high resolution.

Video editors typically have a small preview window to monitor your work. This hides a lot of issues, such as small timing problems, visual artifacts and blurriness. Hence, from time to time it's necessary to export the video to the actual format you'll be using to publish the video.

Be sure to pick a resolution that is sufficiently high to avoid noise and blurry fonts, but watch the file size, especially if the site you want to upload to has stringent space requirements. Many tools have explicit integration for e.g., YouTube, making sure that the video fits or at least a warning is given about issues.

If your video has some issues, repeat the steps above, maybe adjusting the beat markers a bit to fix timing problems, playing with some effects to break predictability, or adding other footage altogether. You'll notice that the whole process can be fun at times, while frustrating at others. Remember to save often and to take a break regularly. It's unbelievable how tired one gets when focusing so hard on a song or video ;-)


Right, this concludes our lengthy blog article on music videos. We hope you guys enjoyed it and that it was informative. Send us your feedback, both about the blog, uson as well as your music video experiences. We'd like to learn from you!

Rock on,

Bad

What Songs have the most Memorable Outro?

[Update: We now embedded the links in this blog post, since Twitter searches on hash tags have only a short memory :-(]

Hey,

A couple of months ago, we started a Twitter thread on songs with memorable outros. An outro can make a mediocre song good, or a good one outstanding. If you don't know what we are talking about, check out "Free Bird" by Lynyrd Skynyrd:



If this sounds like more (and you have to admit, it does!), then check out the following songs ordered according to personal taste:

10. "The Invisible Man" by Queen

9. "Revelation (Mother Earth)" by Ozzy Osbourne/RR

8. "Little Arithmetics" by dEUS

7. "Heather Angel" by Sonic Youth

6. "Who's the King" by Dog Eat Dog

5. "Ripcord" by Radiohead

4. "A Song for the Dead" by Queens of the Stone Age/Dave Grohl

3. "Undone - The Sweater Song" by Weezer

2. "Paranoid Android" by Radiohead

1. "Instant Street" by dEUS

Of course, our choice is subjective and as music lovers we want to know what other songs out there have a legendary outro. So, feel free to submit your own inside the comments to this post, or to provide your take on the posted songs.

Rock on,

Bad

Hire our 2 vocalists, for free (on a Mac)

Hey,

If you haven't checked out our brand new song uson (chances are high, since it's only been up for 15 minutes :-)), quickly click on the player below to get up to speed:



Yes, we finally have a vocalist, 2 even, and they're really versatile! Heck, if you would like to lend them for a song, go ahead, it's actually easy, if you're on a Mac at least. That's right, our vocalists are computer-generated using the OSX text-to-speech functionality. This is much easier to do than you might think, just follow along this mini-tutorial.

Open a text editor and create a file called "say.sh" in a folder called "lyrics" inside your home folder (you can actually put it anywhere, but I'll stick with this folder here). Now paste the following into this file:


  #!/bin/bash


  if [ "$#" -lt "1" ] ; then
    echo "Usage: $0 sentence [voice]"
    exit
  fi


  SENTENCE=$1
  FILE=`echo $SENTENCE | perl -pe "s/\s+/_/g"`
  VOICE=Agnes


  if [ "${2}" != "" ];
  then
      VOICE=$2
  fi


  say -v $VOICE -o ${FILE}${VOICE}.aiff $SENTENCE


Navigate in the Finder to Applications => Utilities and open Terminal.app. Navigate to the "lyrics" folder using:

  cd ~/lyrics

One more step is needed before you can generate the vocals:

  chmod 755 say.sh

There, that's it. Now you can let Agnes, Alex and their friends sing in your band. How do you do this? Suppose you want Agnes to sing "You son have a problem" (where did we hear that before ;-)), then type in the following:

  ./say.sh "You son have a problem"

Once the command finishes, you will find a file called "you_son_have_a_problem_Agnes.aiff" in the "lyrics" folder (type "open -R ." in Terminal.app to open this folder in Finder). You can now drag-and-drop the .aiff file in any audio editor. If you want a different file format, just replace "aiff" by the extension of your choice in "say.sh", and run the command again. Check the supported file formats here:

  man say

What if you don't like Agnes? Well, just look up the name of one of the other voices supported by the OSX text-to-speech via Applications => Utilities => VoiceOver Utility => Speech. Here's a screenshot of the supported voices on OSX 10.6.8:

Suppose you want to get Alex in your band, just use:

  ./say.sh "You son have a problem" Alex

Now you will find "you_son_have_a_problem_Alex.aiff" in your folder. Simple, right? Depending on the audio editor you're using, you can further process the vocal samples by changing the tempo, adding effects or creating harmonies (check out the first measure of the chorus in uson for an example). Although the voices are quite realistic, they sometimes sound a bit robot-like, so take care to "humanize" them in your song.

Bottom line: if you can't find a real vocalist, use the OSX text-to-speech voices, they're amazing!

Rock on,

Bad Maxton

PS: If you have any idea how the style of music of uson is called, please send us a note. We'd like to know as well ;-)

Voluntear, the Story behind the Song

Hey,

It's been more than half a year since our last blog post. In the meantime, we lost ourselves in a sea of information on how to make it as a band (failing to apply the advice into practice, though), so we decided to no longer continue that thread of blog posts. Instead, let's focus on the music for a change ;-)



Check out our song Voluntear, which is a socially oriented song about volunteers. These are ordinary people like you and me who sacrifice their time for ill or elder people to try offering some relief. However, constantly being surrounded by pain and suffering takes its toll, and requires understanding and loving family and friends in order to keep up the spirit and simply survive.

Now, notice the break in the middle of the song. From the beginning, we wanted Voluntear to have 3 parts:

1. a "normal" part with some light despair, representing daily life and activities;
2. a heavy, unsettling part culminating into a dramatic guitar solo, representing a crisis (things going really bad);
3. reprise of the first part, indicating that daily life will return eventually, but possibly with more crises to come.

The easiest part of the song were parts 1 and 3, since the whole idea about the song started with the following chord progression:

Voluntear -- First Draft of Verse/Chorus by Bad Maxton

The verse has come quite a way since then, getting a marching band's drum below it and a dreamy/weary echo in the chorus parts. Funny enough, all of this happened step-by-step as small increments to the song that seemed to fit the general theme.

The longer we were working on the verse/chorus part, the more our anxiety grew for the break, since it had to be radically different from the verse/chorus and even sound quite heavy. Basically, the break would make or break the whole song (no pun intended :-)). So, we started improvising, and quickly came up with this pitch shifter-driven bass loop:

Voluntear -- Original Bass Loop (break) by Bad Maxton

We loved it on the spot, hearing echos from the bass loop in The Breeders' "When I was a Painter" (with the icy Josephine Wiggs and dancing Tanya Donelly at the end):



So, we started improvising on top of this bass loop, quickly resulting into the solo that made it to the final version of Voluntear. However, while the solo perfectly conveyed the idea behind the song, the bass loop was too funky and (dare we say it?) addictive. For a long time, we remained in a state of denial, but eventually even our most funky band member had to admit that the loop was too funky for the song, and had to go. This was a tough call to make :-(

After some synth tweaking, we eventually found the current bass synth (hint: play the song in your car with the bass turned up to the max for maximum carnage ;-)), and we cut up the drums to make the break's rhythm less straightforward and more dynamic. Only thing missing was how to get from the break's bass synth to the solo guitar, we needed some tension there. Enter the siren.

The siren is the sound that is leading into the guitar solo and can be heard during the solo panned hard to the left. It basically is the following simple riff:

Voluntear -- Siren Sound without Effects by Bad Maxton

However, what makes it so special is the bit crusher effect on top of it, wringing the straight guitar sound. A subtle detail here are the two different feedback rates (quick and slow) during the first and second part of the siren.

With these parts finally into place, we added some echos, as well as the guitar slide leading us back to the verse reprise at the end. Mixing the song proved to be hell, because of all the different parts with their subtle dynamics. The final version is not perfect, but it's still loyal to our original idea about the song.

So, our lessons out of this:

1. pick an idea for your song and stay true to it;
2. leave everything else open, ready to catch the inspiration of the moment;
3. but, throw away things if they don't fit, however cool they may sound (publish them on your blog instead ;-)).

Hope you enjoyed this blog post. If you do, tell us which Bad Maxton song's story you'd like to hear, and we might do a post about it. Of course, any feedback is welcome.

Rock on,

Bad

PS: If you like our music, please vote for us on Roadrunner Record's Sign Me To. Or leave a message on our website.

The Hot Toddies

Hi,

Quick shout-out to a fabulous band we just discovered. Ladies and gentlemen, The Hot Toddies! The most apt description we can think of is a cross-over between The Beach Girls and The Breeders 2.0. Check out their catchy, tongue-in-cheek song "HTML" below, and make sure to visit their site for more.

Beware, their songs will haunt you for the rest of the week ;-)

Bad Maxton

How to get exposure as an Internet/virtual band? (2)

[This is part 2 in a series of blog posts. Part 1 can be found here.]

2. Free Internet Radio

The clever interface of thesixtyone, featuring one of our songs (apparently, we're pretty unique ;-)).

There you are, having just uploaded your masterpieces to your 10 social network sites and spammed hundreds of fans with blatant self-publicity. While frantically refreshing the song play and fan visit stats across your sites, you can't help but wonder why your stats remain near zero. This must be a bug, right? Or, err, is no one taking the effort to listen to your songs, or even visit your site?

Well, considering that there are millions of bands and artists out there, each having, say, on average five songs, nobody's really waiting for you. Traditionally, bands would go out and play concerts to make a name (a process that might take ages), but, remember, we're talking here about Internet bands in particular, who don't necessarily have that opportunity. So, what to do?

Think about it for a minute, how do people usually learn about new songs? Right, they turn on the radio! You could try sending a demo to your local or national radio station, hoping to be discovered and being hailed as the new Lady Gaga. There's an easier way, though, called "Internet radio". Basically, artists upload their music. The Internet radio then streams your songs to its listeners, in a channel specific to your style of music, or maybe even randomly. Granted, Internet radio is still not as main-stream as traditional radio, but you'll get at least a couple of dozen song plays, or, who knows, even more.

There are hundreds (thousands?) of Internet radios, in all sizes, shapes and prices. We selected some of the better-known, free stations:

• www.last.fm
• soundcloud.com
• alonetone.com
• www.thesixtyone.com
• www.bandsoup.com
• www.betarecords.com
• www.purevolume.com

Some radios have really nifty interfaces, such as alonetone, thesixtyone and bandsoup. The latter, for example, centers around a bowl of (yes) soup. New songs start off in the centre of the bowl, before gradually straddling off to the border of the bowl, and disappearing. At random moments in time, your song can be beamed back to the centre of the soup, briefly returning you in the spotlights.

From our experience, Internet radio stations are an ideal way to get your songs heard, yet they are not magic. Similar to the social networking sites, your music gets duplicated across multiple places. Also, while people listen to your songs and might even add them to their favourites, they typically won't comment on your songs, still leaving you without feedback. Time for even heavier weapons (stay tuned ;-)).

How to get exposure as an Internet/virtual band? (1)

Well, good question ;-) If we'd known the answer, we probably wouldn't be writing this blog post :-) That said, we thought it might be interesting to explain how we've tried to get some exposure as a band, hoping to get some input from fellow artists, so here goes ...

First off, what are "Internet/virtual bands"? According to wikipedia:

An Internet band (also sometimes called a virtual band) is a musical group whose members collaborate online through broadband by utilizing a content management system and local digital audio workstations.

So, Internet bands are a relatively recent breed of artists who never (or rarely) meet each other in real-life, for different reasons. Maybe nobody in their area likes their music or wants to collaborate, or maybe a band member moves abroad to study or work. Since playing concerts is less trivial, and the band not really has a home base, it becomes challenging to be heard as a band, and hence to get feedback or start up new collaborations.

This series of blog posts considers concrete ideas that bands, and in particular Internet bands, could follow to get exposure and realize their musical dreams. Since our band's promotion strategies are very much work-in-progress, your input is highly welcome!


1. Social Networking Sites

reverbnation site of one of our favourite bands ;-)

The first thing any band should do, is to get a spot on one or a combination of social networking sites geared towards artists. There are gazillions of such sites. Some of the best-known are:

• www.myspace.com
• www.facebook.com
• www.reverbnation.com
• www.ilike.com
• www.unsigned.com
• uplaya.com
• www.hypedsound.com

Which one to pick? Frankly, we tried all of the above. Since each site has a different audience, putting your music in multiple places helps to spread your music to different groups of people. The downside of such a practice is that you need to upload your songs and photos time and time again, making synchronization of your content tedious. Fortunately, sites like reverbnation help you consolidate your content in one place by automatically forwarding messages to twitter, facebook and myspace, or by providing clever music player widgets that you can post on different sites, for example myspace.

Another risk is that social networking sites only work if you're behaving, err, social. So, the more visibility you desire, the more social interaction is required on each site. Otherwise, people won't notice you, which brings us to the point of our next blog post.

Website moved to reverbnation!

Hi,

After ample consideration and experiments, we decided to move our main site and blog from myspace to the excellent reverbnation and blogger respectively. We hope you will enjoy this move.

Rock on!