What's Happening: Week of August 27, 2018

First things first: My featured royalty-free stock music item this week is City Shadows. It's a kind of urban feeling track for your version of a contemporary noir video. I hope you'll check it out.

I'm working on a little something different right now. My wife Danita has been having trouble with tinnitus, or ringing in the ears. She was looking at devices that would generate white noise, and asked me about them. I've heard of devices and even phone apps that would generate white noise along with environmental sounds that would relieve tiniitus, help with meditation, and other helpful things. I thought about it, and said to myself, "I can do that!"

So, over the past few days I've been working on a sixty-minute ambient piece with a working title of 'Environs.' Basically what I did to build it was to put down a bed of white noise. Then I sprinkled in sampled environmental sounds: streams, waterfalls, birds and so on. Lastly, I laid down some ambient pads and simple pentatonic melodies. I hope to polish it and upload it to YouTube early next month so Danita can enjoy it. When I do, I'll also make it available in case you would like to check it out too.

In the meantime . . .

There will be no weekly update from me next week. I will be in Utah for several days through Labor Day weekend visiting my son Alex, daughter-in-law Leah and my new granddaughter Ellie. I may post a little on Twitter (hopefully lots of pictures of the little angel), and I'll schedule some tweets to promote my existing portfolios. Look for another post from me around September 10. Until then, take care.

New In The Pipeline - August 22, 2018: Stillness

I have a new stock music item in the pipeline, awaiting curation at AudioJungle. The title of this piece is "Stillness." It runs just under two minutes in length, and is a little different for me because I took a chamber music approach with it. The instrumentation is a harp and string quartet (two violins, viola and cello) playing a quiet to somber background. I could see this working for scenes in your audio or video productions where you want to convey a sort of thoughtful or even dreary sonic atmosphere. Check out the sample below...



As always with AudioJungle, it takes time for them to evaluate submissions, and there's no guarantee they'll accept it. If they don't, I'll be submitting to Pond5 and/or MotionElements, so stay tuned here and on my Twitter feed for updates.

What's Happening: Week of August 20, 2018

First, I want to announce that the prospective podcast I had announced a few weeks back is now on indefinite hold. I'm not holding my breath for it to actually happen at this point. Sometimes things just don't work out, and we move on.

Now for better news.

My featured stock music item this week is Inspiring Podcast Intro (30 Second). It's got a sort of magical feel to it, very light and uplifting. You can also license it in 15 second and six-second bumper versions. I hope you'll check it out.

Finally . . .

I have a new item in the pipeline and there's a story behind this one. A few days back a good friend called and asked if I could put together a game show parody intro with a brief scripted announcer bit up front. I grabbed my item Big Band Swing Intro (Short), channeled my inner Johnny Gilbert, put it all together and sent him two versions about an hour later.

Then I got to thinking. I don't really have anything that would work as a kind of kitschy game show parody. So, inspired by the theme from the long running game show The Price is Right, I put together an intro that might work for podcasters or other media producers looking to take a tongue-in-cheek approach to their material. I purposely used a special VST plugin to try and give the final version a sort of "retro" tape saturated 1960's-70s vibe. I call it "Fun Upbeat Retro Intro." Here's a sample of the thirty-second version.



I also put together a 15-second version, a bumper version, and a loop that doesn't contain the original melody but instead has little accents in the flute and muted trumpet. I'm also experimenting with a new watermark I created that also touts my main website ("thisbrucesmith.com"). If I decide I like it (or I see more traffic at the home page) maybe I'll make the adjustment permanent.

I've got a bunch of stuff currently in the pipeline, so keep tabs here and on my Twitter feed (linked in the top menu) for news of when and if things become available. As always don't be surprised if I get in a mood to write and put out updates or articles in between Sundays. Thanks for reading, and please stop by again soon.

In The Pipeline, August 14, 2018: Two New Items

I'm pleased to announce two new stock music items, one with variations, awaiting approval to go online at Pond5.

The first item is "Lifestyle Podcast Intro 3." This one has three versions: a 30-second full version, a 15-second short version, and a seven-second bumper. Unlike some of the other intros I've described as "lifestyle" intros, this one is very simple and mellow. Check out this preview of the full version.



The other new item is also pretty basic. I call it "Somber Moment." It's a looping underscore featuring strings, piano and marimba for sad, pensive or anxious scenes. Here's a preview of part of the track.



Stay tuned here and to my Twitter feed to be the first to find out when these items go online (or not).

Twenty Years Of The "Cher Effect"

Twenty years ago this summer I was working in my "former life" as an IT contractor. At the site where I was working someone had a radio in the office. Different people had different tastes, and the dial went back and forth between country, rock and pop on a regular basis.

One day, the radio was tuned to the local pop station (which was actually more "adult contemporary") when a dance song came on that I hadn't heard before. The voice sounded really familiar, but it was strange somehow. It didn't sound quite . . . human.

It was Cher, and the song "Believe" marked the first notable use of auto-tune in a hit single. Auto-tune is a digital effect, originally created and released by Antares Audio Technologies in 1997, that automatically corrects the pitch of incoming source material. If you set the effect a certain way, pitches that are very flat or sharp will "snap" to the correct pitch, creating a robotic effect. This was quite striking when applied to Cher's voice, because her singing style has always relied heavily on starting very flat and then sliding up to the correct pitch.

It reminds me of a guy who was getting a similar effect years earlier. Roger Troutman was active in the soul/R&B scene in Dayton when I was growing up. He experimented with an early version of what would become known as a vocoder. The vocoder (or "voice encoder") could modulate a signal, say a synthesizer, to make the sound of words. It was Roger's "thing" and he used it to great effect on what may be his best-known single, with Zapp.

"I Want To Be Your Man" combined the synthesized vocals with human voices to a degree that I still find stunning even today. By 1998 though, with the advent of auto-tune (or the "Cher effect" as it was long known) anyone could sound like a vocoder.

For a while, it seemed, everyone did.

There was a period of several years going into the 2000s where it seemed every new single that came out featured heavy-handed use of auto-tune. I've heard some singers try to imitate the effect in live performance. Auto-tune has become so common in pop music that Progressive Insurance made fun of it in one of their commercials a couple of years ago.

Of course, like many things that are overused, it eventually got old. Auto-tune is now so maligned, producers have dialed back somewhat on its use. They no longer generally go for that "Cher effect" so much. If you listen carefully though, you'll still occasionally hear very subtle pitch shifts in song vocals that tell you auto-tune is still alive and well.

Which, really, is sad. After all, "to err is human." To err with deep feeling can be divine.

What's Happening: Week of August 13, 2018

First, the usual stuff...

My featured stock music item this week is Positive Perspective. It's another one of those simple, pleasant background tracks for presentations, explainer videos and the like.

The podcasting project I was talking about over the last couple of weeks is temporarily stalled. I hope we can get it off the ground and start production this week. (Fingers crossed.)

I think I may have mentioned at some point in the past an idea to take some of the stuff I never released and put it out someplace under the banner of "Lost Decades." I've been going through some of the stuff I had from the 2000s and punched them up a little bit. So I plan this week into getting ASCAP clearance to exempt Bandcamp from publishing royalties so I can put them out there. Assuming all goes well. I also envision doing the same for stuff from this decade and the 1980s. I'll give further updates as I go.

I also intend to work on some new podcast intros, this time in the "lifestyle" or society/culture category, and maybe some other things as well.

Now I want to give a quick mention to the new video I uploaded to YouTube for my recent stock music item Realize The Dream. If you haven't seen it, please check out this blog post. It features a looped animation of my logo spinning on a 3D globe. I like it, but it was quite a hassle to put together. Let me explain...

I saw a bit of information about Microsoft Paint 3D having a new feature. It now allows you to save your projects as simple animations. Sounded great! So I spent some time figuring out how to create one. First, I was able to import a copy of my logo and make it a sticker. That was actually pretty easy.

Where it got tricky was getting the animation right. First I had to fix it so the canvas would not appear in the animation. Making the canvas transparent was not enough; I had to hide the thing entirely. I would have thought making the canvas transparent would have done the job, but no. Not very intuitive.Then there was a lot of playing to get the globe centered correctly. How did I know it wasn't centered? My logo wobbled! After some work, I got that resolved.

Saving it turned out to be a hassle too. The first time I tried to save it to MP4, Paint 3D crashed! I restarted Paint 3D and was able to save it successfully. However, it changed the dimensions of the video to something different than the original dimensions of the canvas (why? beats me!) so that when I tried to import it into Mixcraft 8 Pro to to add the music and text, it was very slow. When I tried to drag it across the timeline to loop it, Mixcraft crashed.

After having that happen a few times (Grrrr....), I remembered that I have some video software that I rarely use. I imported the MP4 file into that and exported it back out to Windows Media (WMV) with 1280-by-720 resolution. I was then able to import that into Mixcraft and it worked like a champ. I hope Microsoft will continue working on the animation to improve, because I do think the results were pretty neat in the end. It beats just looking at a static logo for three minutes.

And that's all I have for now. I hope you have a terrific week, and thank you for stopping by.

Realize The Dream: Royalty-free Stock Music

Here's the video for my new stock music item "Realize The Dream." I plan to go into detail later about how I came up with the animation, so please stay tuned. In the meantime, enjoy.

If you like it, it's available to license now at MotionElements.

Rejection And, Maybe, Redemption

I woke this morning to an email from Envato informing me that my recent submission, 'Realize The Dream', was hard rejected. This means that I can't make changes and resubmit it for reconsideration. Sometimes, they'll do a "soft" rejection, where they'll tell you there's a specific problem that you can fix and then resubmit. Once, I got a response saying they liked what I'd done but thought it should be louder. I pumped up the volume, resubmitted the item, and it was quickly accepted. Occasionally, the rejections will include some reason that it doesn't work for them.

Mostly, though, you get a form response:

"This item does not meet the general commercial quality standard required to be accepted on AudioJungle."

Maybe there's something they don't like in the mix, or they think they've already got too much of "that", or something or some other unfathomable issue.

There was a time when I would get very upset about rejections. I tend to emotionally invest myself
in my work, and that may not be the best thing to do. When it's rejected, my first reaction is to take it personally. The same thing can happen if something is accepted but doesn't sell.

Recently, though, I've started to take a different approach. I started going back to items that were rejected by AudioJungle and asking "what can I do to improve them, and maybe submit them elsewhere?" There have been a couple of occasions where I've made some relatively small changes in an item that was rejected, upload it to Pond5 or MotionElements, and it ends up doing pretty well (or at least selling a license or two).

So I went back and made a few tweaks to the mix.

First, there's a synth mallet part, a key element of the track. I was a little concerned even before I submitted the track for consideration that it might be to dated or otherwise out of place. After the rejection, I decided to replace it with a more bell-type tone and set it back a little in the mix. I also wrote a new line for it that I thought would clash a little less rhythmically with the strings.

Second, I reduced the volume on the electric guitars overall, and then pushed the volume of one syncopated line near the end. I also increased the high end in that section.

I made a couple of other small changes, backing off the bass a little and rerecording a bit nearer the end to give it a little more interest leading into the climax. I also punched the strings up a little in spots. Finally, I decided that the tempo at 120 bpm (beats per minute) was maybe a little too frenetic for this track. So I slowed it down by about 5 bpm. I think that gives it a little more 'oomph', especially at the end.

Here are a couple of excerpts to give you a sense of the "before and after." First, a little of the track I submitted to AudioJungle.



Now, roughly the same segment of the track after I tweaked it.



I know the tweaks I described may sound like a lot, but once I had a good sense of what I wanted to do, it didn't take very long at all. "Realize The Dream" is already live at MotionElements; you can check out the complete track here. I plan to submit it to Pond5 later today.

And that is how I try to take lemons and make lemonade. Sometimes, one person's trash can become another's treasure. I hope that will be the case with this track. I still get upset at rejection, but now it stings a lot less.

Changing My Social Media Strategy

Starting today, I've made some changes in my social media strategy.

Effective immediately, I've deleted my Buffer account. I'd started out on the free Buffer plan and found the interface useful. I liked the idea of having a queue where I could arrange my scheduled posts in a certain order at consistent times. So I took the next step and went to their Pro plan.

The Pro plan offered a couple of things that looked attractive. First, the ability to schedule up to 100 posts a day rather than 10 (although I never intended to do more than 20). Second, the analytics. I liked the idea of being able to see, without having to log on to Twitter, what impacts my tweets were having. After a while, I also discovered the content buffer, which offered something similar to what I've been getting from Feedly. (I'm still using their entry-level offering, and will probably continue to do so.) Although there were occasional failures to post, on the whole I thought that Buffer was much more reliable than Hootsuite.

So why did I leave? The short answer is that at the moment I have more time than money. One thing that's hurt all of these services with respect to Twitter is that Twitter now does not allow multiple posts. Looking at my Twitter followers through Followerwonk has revealed that the plurality of my followers are located on the east and west coasts of the U. S. A lot of them are on at the noon hour Eastern Time and at the noon hour Pacific Time.

One of the things scheduling used to allow was to post duplicate tweets at different times of the day. so I would get impressions from West Coast followers who might not otherwise see tweets the East Coast folks would see (unless they hunted for it). Under Twitter's new rules that's now impossible without changing the tweet so it isn't identical. (Of course, that defeats the time-saving purpose of being able to click a repost button that schedules the same tweet for a later time.)

The other problem was a flaw in the analytics. I would post an article, then look back at it and find it had received 30-40 clicks. Stunned, I would find my Twitter analytics and find that it had been clicked once, or not at all. It finally dawned on me that it was aggregating clicks based on the shortened URL across all users' tweets, not just mine. If I wanted to see the reactions my own tweets of the article generated, I ended up having to go back to Twitter anyway. That's something that Buffer may be able to easily fix, and some point they may do so. In the end, I felt that I was spending as much time on the "automated" process than just scheduling tweets in TweetDeck. And Twitter makes up the vast majority of my social media effort.

Don't misunderstand. I like Buffer. I like the interface. It just didn't work out for me. It could be that those who have more money and less time would find their team management and sharing capabilities very valuable (I am literally a one-man band, so I did not try out those capabilities myself.) I suspect the folks at Buffer will continue to improve their offerings, and I wish them well.

So, for me it's back to TweetDeck and live posting on Google Plus, at least for now.

What's Happening: Week of August 6, 2018

To be honest, it looks like a pretty boring week coming up music-wise.

As I write this, I have nothing in the pipeline since I submitted the track "Realize The Dream" to AudioJungle earlier in the week.  Based on their tracking of average curation times I'd say I have 8-9 days left until they accept or reject it. (More on that here.) I have some ideas rolling around in my head, but nothing concrete for now.

I've mentioned the podcast project I'm working on with a close friend. That is stalled for the moment, but I hope we can move ahead on it next week.

My featured stock music item this week is Corporate Podcast Intro 8 (30 Second). This is another bright, upbeat opener for business positive podcasts, presentations and other media. It's also available in 15 second and bumper/stinger versions (no loop on this one, sorry). If this sounds like what you need for your program, I hope you'll check it out.

Meanwhile, I think I'd like to post more frequently here. I'm not sure how long I can keep it up, but there are topics related to what I do (like promotion and so on, plus updates on projects) that may interest you. One thing I plan to address this week is changing my social media strategy (again). Until next time, be well and take care.

In The Pipeline, August 2, 2018: Realize The Dream

I've got a new stock music item in the pipeline. I submitted this one to AudioJungle. It's been almost a year since I uploaded anything for consideration there, and I think both the content and sound quality are good enough to fly there.

The item is a motivational track called "Realize The Dream." In most respects, it's pretty standard as corporate/motivational music goes. However, I've been listening to so much stuff that using the same IV-V-vi-I chord progressions with variations that I'm sick of it. So I decided to spice it up by adding the VII into the mix. Also, I just took advantage of an IK Multimedia deal to get the CE version of Miroslav Philharmonik 2 for less than $40 (US) -- less than $30 after I applied available credits -- and really wanted to use the new string samples on this track. As you can hear from the preview below, they are much more lively and realistic than the ones in the original Miroslav or Sample Tank 3, especially the ensemble staccato strings that I used heavily on the track. Here's that 30-second preview from the 2:48 full track.



The package also includes a couple of loops for background bed use. As I mentioned, I submitted this one to AudioJungle, where the average wait time for approval or rejection is 14 days. In about two weeks I should know whether it's gong there, or if I'll submit it to Pond5 and/or MotionElements.