What's Happening: Week of August 28, 2017

The eclipse has come and gone, and my own big event went well too. Now it's time to look ahead, to a long weekend and beyond . . .

Excelsior: Volume One Online

I don't know about you, but I am definitely doing my 'Happy Dance' over the release of Excelsior: Volume One. The release went off without a hitch Thursday, and I've created a page for the EP where you can preview the trailer and download or stream tracks. The only site I don't have a link for yet is Microsoft Groove, but if you have Groove you may be able to search for it from within the app.

You can download from Amazon, iTunes or Google Play and stream right off the page from Apple Music, Spotify, or Tidal. There's a link off my official home page, or you can go to http://bit.ly/xlcrv1. I hope you'll check it out and enjoy!

Stock Music Update: Time to Get Ready for the Holidays

With that out of the way it's time to think about Christmas. Late last week someone licensed one of my royalty-free looped orchestral versions of "Jingle Bells." Guess some folks are getting an early start on promos and other media for the holidays, so I should follow suit. I'll be starting to feature my Christmas collection in my promotions beginning Monday.

I also want to work on some new arrangements of Christmas classics to add to that collection, and hope to have some new material by late this week or early next.

Meanwhile, I'll continue to promote Halloween stock music for at least a couple more weeks, and then more sporadically through mid-October. You can check out the full collection of chilling, spine-tingling tracks here.

If you're a podcaster (or know one), don't forget I have a pretty big collection of intros and loops for all kinds of podcasts, including:

Rock
Pop
Country
Jazz
Metal
Corporate
Light Classical
Baroque
Electronic

There's something for everybody, and I'm not finished creating new ones, so keep an eye on my podcast music collection at Pond5 as the weeks and months progress.

Other Stuff

If you have Spotify, please stop by my artist profile. This week my artist pick is one of my favorite drummers and genre-spanning musician Bill Bruford. If Summer Had It's Ghosts is a unique collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Ralph Towner and bassist Eddie Gomez that celebrates its 20th anniversary this year.

In addition to that, I have a new playlist on the profile. I call it "Excelsior Plus" and it features all of the tracks from the Excelsior series single and EP, plus my single "Dream Catcher" and some feel good instrumentals. Those are from the great Larry Carlton, Bruford (this time with his self-titled group from the late 70s), and Booker T and the MGs. If you want a lift on your commute or lunch break, please check it out.

And with that I am finished for this post. Have a great week and please keep the poor folks on the Texas Gulf Coast in your thoughts as they endure Hurricane Harvey. Take care.

What's Happening: Week of August 21, 2017

It's eclipse week, and release week!

Obviously, everyone is going crazy about the total solar eclipse crossing the U. S. tomorrow. I hope to be out and have a chance to experience it myself. Who knows: I may even live tweet, so keep an eye on my Twitter feed between 2:00 and 3:00 p.m. EDT tomorrow. Maximum coverage where I am will be about 89% around 2:30 p.m.

"Are we not men?"

I'm really excited about the end of the week, too. That's because I'll be uploading my EP Excelsior: Volume One to DistroKid on Thursday in the hope that it'll be OK'd and in at least some online marketplaces by Friday. I've already shared a track on Soundcloud. Here is the "official" EP trailer.

I ran into a snag in the upload process with YouTube. I thought that one of the auto-magically generated thumbnails was clean (no scrolling text), but when I looked at what uploaded to Twitter and Google+ it turned out there was some stray text in it. So, I deleted it, and added my cover art as a custom thumbnail. Then I posted the link to Google+ and it showed up with the correct (clean) thumbnail. But when I posted to Twitter it still had the dirty one! As Dilbert would say, "GAAAAH!!" Hoping to have that straightened out and posted to Twitter shortly.

Meanwhile, I am still in the royalty-free stock music business. My featured track this week is "Smooth Jazz Intro (Full)." This full version is :30 long, and it's also available in a shorter (about :10) and 20-second looped versions. You can preview and license it here.

So, lots going on this week. Please stay tuned and I'll keep you informed on when Excelsior: Volume One will be available to download or stream. In the meantime, don't look too closely at the Sun.

What's Happening, Week of August 14, 2017

Here comes another week. They just keep flying by.

In case you missed it, I have a new release ready to roll out. This one will be a 3-song EP that will be part of what I'm calling the "Excelsior" series. In fact, I'm calling this one Excelsior Volume One. I plan to drop it through DistroKid late the week of the 21st. For more details on the release check out my Excelsior: Volume One release announcement issued last Thursday here on the blog. Also, please check out this sneak peek of the first track of the EP, "Happy Dance," on Soundcloud.

My featured royalty-free stock music track this week is "The View Ahead," a sort of atmospheric track aimed toward corporate and business positive media and presentations. You can sample that from my Twitter profile page.

As for other stock music in my portfolio, I'm continuing to heavily promote my scary Halloween music collection for the next several weeks. As always, I'm promoting my collection of intros and loops for podcasting, You can find links to my current collections from my Pond5 artist page if you're interested in using them for your projects. Sometime in early-to-mid September, I'll start promoting my Christmas music collection that includes both classic and contemporary tracks.

I did some reading over the weekend, and one of the books I looked into was one I'd read about 30 years ago. It's The Inner Game of Music by Barry Green with W. Timothy Gallwey. The book took Gallwey's "Inner Game" concept, that had previously been applied to other areas (most famously tennis) and gave it a musical spin. I didn't appreciate the first time I read it how Gallwey's ideas were on the cutting edge of the positive psychology movement that was just getting started in the 1980s. I might write more about it in a separate post. If I do, expect to see it midweek. If not, at least I mentioned it here.

Thinking about longer-term stuff, I have a tentative schedule in mind for new releases extending out to early 2018. Sometime in late October, I'm planning to release an ambient-New Age instrumental holiday single. It's tentatively titled "Snow Globe" and I'll give more details as we get closer to the release. Ditto for Extasis, which is the tentative title for the ambient-New Age instrumental EP I intend to release in early to mid-November. There are definitely 2 tracks that will make the cut for that release, and I anticipate at this point having one or two more tracks to be determined (for a total of 3-4).

Looking ahead to 2018, I hope to release another "Excelsior" EP (Excelsior: Volume Two) in Jaunary or February, followed by an EP of chillout music in the spring. I classified my Circadia album as both ambient and chillout, and I'm afraid that may have caused some confusion. So going forward, since I don't plan to release albums, I'll split my EPs between "chillout" (which for me means there's more of a beat) and "ambient" (meaning for me: more spacy, less of a beat).

Now you know what I know. Until I change my mind. Have a great week.

Coming Soon, Excelsior: Volume One EP

I have some news that I'm excited to share with you today. Within the few weeks I'll be releasing a new EP under the informal banner of the "Excelsior" series. The three-track EP will be titled Excelsior: Volume One and will stick to the theme I've established for this series of releases. They're all former stock music tracks that I'm re-purposing to allow people to add them to their personal motivational playlists without paying a licensing fee. I've remixed and remastered all three tracks, and in one case even added some material.

The track listing for EV1 is as follows:

Happy Dance

Quiet Confidence

Epic Achievement

"Happy Dance" is pretty much what the title suggests. It's got a fun beat and a nice little arpeggiated synth hook. "Quiet Confidence" is the "slow" track of the three but has an uplifting melody. "Epic Achievement" has a a little faster beat and is a great soundtrack for celebrating your personal triumphs.

I'll be releasing future entries in the "Excelsior" series in this format: probably three or at most four tracks at a time every few months. Of course, I'll let everyone know when the EP is out. I think I want to wait until after the solar eclipse since I expect that to dominate the "non-Trump" news over the next couple weeks. Watch here or on my Twitter feed for more details as I figure them out. In the meantime, please preview and enjoy the track "Happy Dance" from my Soundcloud feed.

What's Happening: Week of August 7, 2017

Just two weeks now until the Great American Eclipse, and I hope you're stoked too. I'm not travelling to see the totality in person, but hope to catch it online (maybe on Slooh). As it is, the eclipse coverage will be just under 90 percent where I'm living, which isn't bad. On to the music.

My featured stock music track this week is "Funky Podcast Intro 2 (Full)." Funky drums. Slap bass. Horns. Organ. Percussion. It's on. Please check it out on my Twitter page or on the website.

I have two new intros available as of late last week, and I plan to feature them on my Twitter Monday in case anyone missed them. One is a 70s disco bit, the other a bright and sunny kid and family friendly intro. Both have longer, shorter, looped and logo/ident versions. Meanwhile, I have yet another corporate intro in the works and hope to have that online sometime this week.

I'm getting ready to release a new motivational single in the "Excelsior" series. Or it may be an EP. The beautiful thing about DistroKid is that I have the flexibility to change my mind right up to the last time I click "Enter." (Or whatever it's labeled; I don't remember right off the top.) I'll have a more general announcement when that happens.

My latest Artist Pick on my Spotify page is Pink Floyd's Ummagumma. Before Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall, this 1969 release finds the band stretching out their psychedelic side with a double album that's half live and half studio. The live half features performances of some of the material that brought Floyd a cult following up to that point. The live version of "Astronomy Domine" particularly rocks much harder than the original studio version. The studio half runs a gamut from the very avant-garde and film music influences in "Sisyphus" to the folky "Grantchester Meadows." There's some seriously experimental-psych vibe on one track that I think has the longest title in modern pop music history: "Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict." (No, I did not make that up.) Listening back now, there are parts that could be remixed as drum and bass! I had a lot of fun listening to Ummagumma back in the day, and hope you will now.

That's it for now. If you haven't already, please keep an eye on my Twitter and Google+ feeds for more info. Have a good week and please check back.