syd.

on key commands in itunes and ratings

I like to rate songs, but iTunes doesn’t have any built in key-commands to make rating a song a simple flick of the wrist.

I used to use Synergy to control itunes playback and allow me to have system-wide ratings key commands for a while, but it sucks up system resources, and paying for software just to have system-wide ratings key commands? Seems a little excessive.

So, with many thanks to @forrestgrant, I ran this command in the terminal and now I just have to tab over to iTunes and press cmd-1 for 1 star, cmd-2 for 2 stars, etc. The extra step of tabbing over to iTunes doesn’t bug me. Just copy and paste this exact command into the terminal (restart iTunes for it to go into effect):

defaults write com.apple.iTunes NSUserKeyEquivalents ‘{“★”=”@1”;”★★”=”@2”;”★★★”=”@3”;”★★★★”=”@4”;”★★★★★”=”@5”;}’

if you want the key strokes to be different, here are the unix equivalents of the keys on the macintosh keyboard:

@ Command (Apple) CMD

~ Option OPT

$ Shift SHIFT

^ Control CTRL

why I use tunecore

I was just about flooding my friend Christopher Dallman’s twitter stream in response to the very simple question “do you use tunecore for digital distribution as well?”

I had earlier recommended he check out their short run CD program. It doesn’t yield the most spectacular looking product, but they’re fine, and I’d much rather go small batches at a time these days then sit on an inventory of 1000 for a couple of years. That’s a blog post for another time, but my “more selective” touring coupled with college students and music fans in general being less likely to buy product AND my belief that free is a good tool to get people to come to shows has left me selling less CDs. I’m pretty sure if I could afford to, I’d press deluxe vinyl, cheapo CDs (maybe with handmade cases) and then give it away for free online. Anyway…I digress.

My answer to Chris’ question is yes, I use tunecore for digital distribution and that’s partially because I think they have an elegant, easy to use solution, partly because I think CD Baby lost the plot (maybe they’re getting it back, but I don’t want to be a guinea pig thankyouverymuch), but MAINLY because when I first moved to New York in 2007 I was looking for a job and interviewed at Tunecore with Jeff Price (and then over the phone with the rest of the team) and was therefore pitched on the product and company philosophy in a unique way that left me, for lack of a better phrase, willing to put my chips in their….chip…thing. *

Mainly, Jeff was making the (at the time) radical observation that companies like The Orchard and CD Baby were charging *per transaction* as if they had to do any actual leg-work to get a *digital* file from point A to point B. Think about that. Even though they deliver a set of files once to iTunes, emusic, etc, they’re charging you per transaction as if they are delivering it every time. Huh?

His plan was to charge yearly storage on tunecore’s servers so that you always knew your music was safe and ready to redeliver at a higher bitrate (which happened to me) or ready to meet the Next Big Thing whatever that may be.

Anyway,  Jeff was also very charismatic, excited and, as a founder of a great indie label, clearly understood what the marketplace could bear and needed.

I’ve been very happy with tunecore for the most part. They’re clearly answering to investors and I think have maybe raised their prices a bit in the last year or two to meet the demands of their growing business. The price hikes seem in line with what I can only assume has been pretty meteoric growth since Jeff and I first talked. And they’ve added great new services (video, liner notes, more) in keeping with their very artist-friendly company philosophy.

So there it is, Chris. Not exactly 140 characters.

(also, here’s an outdated chart from moses avalon with dig distro comparisons)

*btw, I didn’t get the job. I think it had to do with the fact that I was about to go on tour for 3 months. Turns out, even a rock n roll company isn’t super stoked to hear that. Noted. ;-)

We had some great entries for the Syd Remix Contest over at Remix Comps.

The winner is: Giulio Maddolini: listen

The runners up are:

Lerry Müeller: listen
SatisfiedScientist: listen

The winner will be a part of the Syd Upswing Remix EP, to be released digitally.
We’ve decided to give the runners up a prize as well. They will have the opportunity to remix the other songs from the Upswing EP.

You can hear the original Upswing EP here.

touring in "this economy"

This is not a story about how much it sucks to tour. This is a story about what I’m going to do about it.

So, first it was gas prices, and that was the story, and that sucked, because we’d go out and be on the road for a couple of months and our gas bills were doubled and when your margins are so narrow, that extra expense really hurt. But at that time (let’s say 3 years ago) at least people were still coming to shows. Especially in cities. What did they care that gas prices were high? They took the train. And they still had their jobs.

Now, in the wake of the downturn, sure, touring is a little more scary—-fans are jobless and not as flush with discretionary income to spend on things like merch. We used to sell to like 15-20% of the room at least. That’s what we could count on. Now, we’re lucky for 5%. There’s another hit to your bottom line, along with the gas prices staying high.

Ok, so what do you *do*? Well, you recognize the problems and confront them. I’m choosing to tour in a smaller van this fall because I want to save with gas. We decided to give away an EP’s worth of songs to help build our mailing list so that we have larger group to draw from to get them out to shows. We’re trying to keep ticket prices down. And I’m doing shows solo where it makes sense to save as well. Getting scrappy and felxible and hunkering down, that’s what it’s about.

But mostly, I’m trying to have more FUN. Which I know sounds counter to what I’m saying, but really, all this shit is so obnoxious, cutting costs, eating frugally, trying to spend less on gas, and I know the average Joe and Jane are feeling the same way, so my gal is to let our hair down a little more even at our shows—-just let loose. And encourage everyone else to let loose. The job market sucks, taking the train instead of driving sucks, budgeting everything sucks, so come hear some good music that we think doesn’t suck. And if we sing loud enough and dance long enough maybe that will all go away. 

That’s what we’re going to aim for this fall when we go out there.

the facebook debacle.

I just posted this simple tweet earlier today and have been getting a lot of people wondering wtf I’m talking about so here it is:

When I first joined facebook, I just joined using the name everyone knows me by. Syd. It’s what I’ve been called for years. By everyone. My family and friends found me on facebook that way. But then, so did fans. And I thought that was great, because hey it was a hell of a lot easier than myspace. So I started interacting with them and even invited to be my friend on facebook by uploading my mailing list to facebook and inviting them.

Then facebook decided they’d launch pages/ads for bands like me, and I thought hey this is good—-at that time they didn’t have any specific friend lists for privacy so fans would see some personal pictures and stuff and it was getting weird. So I sent an email to facebook asking them if they would convert my profile over to a Page (remember, myspace did this all the time—you could convert one kind of profile to another) and then I could sort through my *actual* friends and pick them off the Page and say *psst, over here, this is really me, that page is for fans*. It would be a perfect seperation, problem solved.

Facebook suspended my account. That was their elegant solution to the problem. 1000+ friends and fans, gone.

I fought back, but got nothing but regurgitated policy from their support team. And so I started fresh. New facebook Profile and a Page. Turned out a Page was so crippled and non-interactive as to be laughable. There were no events that were started by Pages, you couldn’t interact with people as a Page. It’s pretty pathetic. So who could blame my fans when they started finding my new Profile and friending me?

So I turned to iLike and Reverbnation and yadi yada all of those tools meant to help make facebook more useful.

Luckily, now I can keep fans and music biz contacts in a separate friends list so I can at least obscure some details that I would want friends to know but not necessarily fans (cell, details about my family and where I live) and so there’s a weird balance, but it sort of works.

But now, with a fall tour approaching I find myself in the same stupid predicament. My fans are fragmented across all of the various places a band can be on the internet, but they’re also fragmented *within* facebook Pages/Profiles/iLike/Reverbnation.

When I just want to get the word out that I have new music out and that I’m playing a show, I just want to create an event in my Profile, invite my friends and fans (who I can sort by location) and then inetract with them there. Is that too much to ask?

Yes, apparently. Back to work.

The Pattern Remix Contest!

Summer is here and that usually means long, lazy days with nothing exciting to do. Well, we’ve come along and created something that’s bound to keep you busy. For all you out there who have the desire to put a new spin on an existing song, listen up. Have you ever wanted to step behind the mixing board and tweak what you’re hearing? If you have a remixing hat, or are trying on one for the first time, we’ve got something going that we think you’ll be interested in. Do you think you have the chops?

For the ‘Find the New Pattern’ contest, we’re looking for a fresh take on one of the tracks from Syd’s newest EP, “Upswing”. Take ‘The Pattern’ single, find your own way through it, and send it to us. We want to hear what you hear and see what you see in this tune. In the process, the winning remix will be made available for digital download via The Co-Op and Syd. 

To send in your entry you must create/have an existing a Remix Comps account. From there you’ll be able to upload your entry and will be able to see a list of current entries a they are loaded to the site to check on your competition. 

The contest is running now through the end of August and the winners will be announced right before Syd heads out on his Fall Tour. So, get out there and get those remixes working. We can’t wait to hear what you’ve got for us!

The Contest Link - http://www.remixcomps.com/SYD-Find-The-New-Pattern
The Myspace/Website Widget - http://www.remixcomps.com/Syd-Widget

a note to my cunhado re: Siamese Dream by The Smashing Pumpkins after he heard it for the first time and had his mind blown.

Oh shane. You have walked into something and you don’t even know what it is. It’s a room filled with leather and velvet and cool cigarettes that don’t kill you and men wearing rings and not giving a shit what their parents did. Because here’s the thing, Billy Corgan, let’s admit it, now I know, he’s a fucking toolbag. He’s a sanctimonious prick and an egomaniac. But back then. Back then he was something else entirely to me. He was a weird Bowie-like shemale with a voice that parents despised, singing about God-knows-what but my best guess was that those songs were either about fucking or being in love, the two things I wanted to know how to do more than anything. Or maybe just about being older and cooler and prettier. Because let’s face it, as cool and mature as the music may be, it’s also insanely beautiful. The song “Today” is probably my favorite song of that era, and yes, it was the radio single but it embodies everything good about that album.

Or maybe we should just say that Jimmy Chamberlin, the drummer, *he* was the one. He knew. And he was everything good about that album. He had unlocked the secret of music and was letting Billy in. That’s how I sometimes felt. His drumming is magical, and the glue of the whole thing. And worth learning every drum note of — something I did. Alongside Weezer’s blue album, Pearl Jam’s vs (which was just gloriously re-released and remastered so it’s louder and cleaner, something Siamese Dream could use), Nirvana’s Nevermind….I mean, we’re talking about SEMINAL fucking albums here.

I’ve since learned a lot about the making of that record, about how they took weeks to get drum sounds, about how shitty Billy was to his band and how he would often re-record the parts of his other musicians (guitar and bass) without telling them. But one thing he could never do is play the drums like Jimmy Chamberlin.

Thing is, you can still put this record on at home while you’re hanging out or blast it in the car and it still says the same things beautifully and painfully and like nothing I’ve ever heard since.

Because when you walked into this room, filled with leather and velvet and cool cigarettes, some might say you’re too old to remember this room forever, that you’re not young and stupid enough to think it really exists. But it’s worth knowing that to some of us, we expect heaven to look a little bit like this album sounds.