Ambitions for 2010

Blog

Feb 28 2010

I have been shooting around some ideas for the upcoming listen page changes. After the release of Aphotic Transmissions, I will begin work on a set of suites, later in the year, covering a wide variety of game and film music. Personal releases abound as it is, and I have finally decided to sit and do some key generic material. This will of course change the way the listen page looks and is laid out slightly, but it shouldn’t be an issue. The current releases, along with Aphotic Transmissions, will be cut to 25-30 second demos and be less emphasized on the page itself. Pralaya and Walking with Myths will be cut out completely and their tracks will be sent into the Unreleased music player.

I have not given up on Walking with Myths, if anything I have redefined my approach and have decided to combine some of these planned suites and AT onto the track list. WWM will be a three-disc release with around 2 hours or more of music on it. Pralaya, however, will be abandoned … I started with a very firm direction in mind and have strayed from it. I may revisit the project again next year, but I am not going to continue with the current lineup. These track changes will be reflected almost immediately starting in March. The soundreel player will not be used as it was intended in the site’s design thanks to the upcoming suites. There is just too much material to cover, and I am very prolific … which keeps me from jamming a load of totally different generic tracks into one small player. I like to categorize and make things distinct, which leads me to my next topic.

How to use the listen page

Yes, I have been getting a lot of traffic from listeners who say they have a hard time understanding how to get to the music. The site design of the listen page uses collapseable elements that run off of the jquery library. This will not change, but here are a few tips when looking at the listener page:

The new tracks are listed in the upper right-hand corner in order of the date they were published/uploaded to the site.
Clicking on the name of the album will take you to the player it is in.
Each album that is currently available for purchase is ordered by the track number and easily found by looking into the rating drop down menu, which is also ordered by track number.
All albums that are not released, such as the unreleased player with its mammoth track list, are ordered alphabetically by track name.
Hovering over the play button on the album art will un-collapse the player and the rating bar for listeners to select a track and play it. (Firefox displays the animated PNG files of the play button beautifully, however, IE doesn’t display it so well)

I hope that helps a little for those of you who have had issues figuring out how to get to the music. You will have to have the flash plug-in installed in your browser to listen to the music on the listen page.

RSS Feeds on the Links page

I decided to offer popular RSS feed links for some of the major players in the music world. These links will be incorporated early next month. Since a lot of the traffic to the site comes from music forums, I decided to do a little spoon feeding for newbie music producers who like to stay in the know on gear and software.

Electronic emphasis of my business

I will be implementing some new web 2.0 presentations on the services pages. I have been getting phone calls and emails from film producers who don’t quite understand how my team and I work. I use a lot of online tools to accomplish jobs, and this site stays afloat mainly because of this. These online efficiencies have cut down my costs significantly. I charge a lot less than most composers because I have narrowed my clientele to a very specific niche. By that I mean that FTP (which will be made readily available for download on my services page), email, IMs, and an online client area are the primary ways that I work. I am a very busy guy and moving cross-country isn’t feasible for most small to medium sized projects. However, this means very little when you work with me and see how well the process actually goes. You get what you pay for, and with all the electronic modes of communication available, you are right here with me every moment you feel you need to put in some info.

Cutting costs to lower my prices for my customers is what I am all about. I am here to assist you with anything you don’t understand and you shouldn’t be turned off by working with a composer online. I make this very easy – my customers can attest to this! If anything, these electronic business models make my delivery of your work quicker, cheaper, easier, and all the above.