Ochre

No doubt you’re all recovering from your festive excesses, possibly even suffering from some post-holiday blues. Well, some good news—Lemodie CDs will soon be back on the shelf.

At long last, after being out of print for over two years, I’ve finally managed to scrape together enough cash to organise a re-press of my 2006 sophomore album. It’s being manufactured as I type by DMS, and shouldn’t be longer than two or three weeks away, fingers crossed.

In preparation of its arrival, I’m taking pre-orders via Bandcamp here, which also covers an instant download in a variety of formats (I’ve also thrown in the CD hidden track as a bonus).

Now, I’m under no illusions as to how the market has changed in the past three/four years, and so have set the price at £6 plus P&P, which seems to me like the sweet-spot for CDs sans middleman.

If you’ve been following Bandcamp’s Twitter/blog updates you’ll have probably noticed a rather major update: the ability to sell physical products alongside your downloads. Needless to say, I sorted out a bundle for my remaining Midsummer Nice Dream vinyl, pairing up the double vinyl and an instant download for the current sale price of £5. I’ll keep it at that price until next week, so if you were thinking about either purchasing it on FLAC or picking up the vinyl, now’s the time to act. Consequently, I’ll probably retire the Ochre shop in its current state, and divert traffic to Bandcamp for sales.

I’ve also sent some vinyl to CD Baby, enabling stateside fans to get a better deal on shipping than ordering from me, although at the current sale price it’s probably still cheaper to buy direct.

Here’s a quick review of 5 online services and tools I’ve made use of and felt most helpful to me as an independent online musician, during the past year or so:

1. WordPress

As if you hadn’t already noticed, my site’s based on the excellent open source blog/CMS platform, WordPress, which continues to impress me with every update. It runs on PHP with a MySQL database, which allows me, as a non-programmer, to get a fairly complex site up and running without having to know much about the actual programming-side of things. Yet, it’s flexible enough that if you want to change the look of your site, you can do so without much more than a rudimentary knowledge of CSS—simply tweak your theme however you see fit, blissfully ignorant of the more complex inner workings going on behind the curtain. Even if you can’t be fussed editing your own theme, there are plenty of ready-made themes available to download and activate, from within the WP admin area itself.

Another great aspect to WordPress is its extensibility—there exists a veritable plethora of handy plugins written by charitable geeks, provided for free, affording your site some very handy bolt-on features. As with the themes, you can browse and install plugins from within the admin area—no tedious download/install needed.
(more…)

I’ve decided to take advantage of one of Bandcamp’s latest feature additions, and have generated a few download codes for A Midsummer Nice Dream.

Anyone who buys a copy of the album on vinyl will receive a download code along with the album, so they may download a high-quality digital version of the release for their iPod, car, PC etc., at no extra cost. The codes are, as far as I can tell, good for one single download only, so choose your format wisely! mp3, flac, aac and ogg are all present and accounted for.

I haven’t yet decided how to present the codes — I could use stickers on the shrink-wrap, but risk buyers throwing this away with the packaging, or I could put paper slips in with the vinyl, and risk them being ignored at the bottom of the envelope. Could email them, but that’s more work for me and could still be ignored. Hmm. Any preferences?

If you haven’t seen/heard my remix of Jay Bharadia, you can listen to/download it from SoundCloud, as well as the other remixes from Lone, Airliner ’67 and Implosion Quintet.

I’m actually on SoundCloud, and although currently mainly using it as a means of receiving mastering files, I’ll be uploading demos and sketches now and then, so if you’d like to ‘follow’ me to be notified of track uploads, please visit my page. SoundCloud is a very nifty service, totally optimised for listening and commenting to music—you can comment on particular sections of tracks using the natty timeline while listening. As far as I know there are also the obligatory widgets for posting/sharing tunes too.

The server can occasionally strain under the weight of users, as it’s getting rather popular, but it seems pretty responsive these days, ironing out its initial teething problems.

Meanwhile, back at Ochre HQ, the new album is back from mastering, coutesy of panicStudios. Sounding warm and punchy after being fed through some ridiculously expensive analogue gear, waiting patiently for a release schedule to slot into. I’ll be able to spill some more beans once I’ve got a definite plan to unveil.

Midsummer Nice Dream CDs and vinyl continue to shift nicely, but there are still a few copies left if you fancy one. If you’d rather have a download version, it’s slowly making its way through the usual download stores like iTunes and Napster etc. At the moment it’s currently selling for a ridiculously cheap $1.69 at Amie Street (for 320kbps mp3, no less), though given the dynamic pricing used there it’ll probably creep up slowly as people grab it. Also on Bandcamp for a flat $6, in just about every digital format available ever.

I think that’s the current news round-up sorted.

I’ve been uploading much of my music to Bandcamp, to see how well it works, as it offers a few very handy features for precisely zero money (for the time being anyway).

Firstly, the lossless uploads are automatically converted to a veritable plethora of download formats, such as three grades of mp3 (including two VBR), two grades of AAC, Ogg, FLAC and Apple Lossless.

Secondly, it gives me some useful stats as to what’s been listened to, what’s been skipped, and where people have come from to listen. There’s also plenty of widget-sharing options, as expected on today’s internets, enabling you to plaster my tunes all over the superhighweb.

Looks like you can also sell downloads there as well, offering either fixed price or donation options for the tracks, but I’ve yet to explore this option. Might give this a go once I get some more releases up there.