Since I finished the website yesterday, I'm now working on getting all of our other online sites to look similar to design of the website. I spent the entire morning meeting with a friend and a music business peer to talk about new opportunities in the area for our music and to help each other with networking and marketing. It is invaluable to have other people in our circle who do what we do and work as hard as we work. That way when we find out about things that will advance our career, we can share them. In turn, some of our music business associates share with us. The whole competition thing is out the door in our minds. Networking is where it's at!
When I got home from our meeting, I started working on the blog. If you are on it, then you can see that the look has changed. Typepad is cool about changing the look of your site without changing around the content of your site. I've been really pleased at the way Typepad has performed for us the past 2 years, and I plan to renew our service with them again this year.
On a sidenote, the weather in Charlotte, NC was absolutely perfect today; the Carolina blue sky, the crispness of the air with the low humidity, and the sun shining on our faces. It was so great to be able to have that meeting outside today. Fall is my favorite time of the year. It's definitely what my definition of heaven is.
We've been meaning to build a website for a while now, but John has been too busy with school to even think about it. It's kind of ironic that he is going to school for web design and graphic design, but can't build our website. So, I (Cate) took it upon myself - Oh god! Ok, Ok, it looks fine; I'm just being dramatic.
I have taken some html and web classes as well, but a designer, I am not. However, many of the artist web hosting sites (I used Bandzoogle) have pretty good templates. Until John graduates, we're going to be using the website I put together. With the easy to use template along with a little hand coding of html, I'm pretty proud of what I accomplished. Please give it a look and sign our guestbook (I'm such a songwriter with the rhyming - LOL!).
Oh yeah; many of you have asked how to help us financially with the promotion of our upcoming CD. On the website, there is a "Support" button that leads to a message from us and the ability to donate. Anything you can do helps to keep us making the music.
Thanks in advance for visiting our site and for the support we feel everyday from music lovers around the country. You inspire us!
Last Saturday we had an amazing time recording 5 songs at FOX Charlotte Studios. Everyone on staff was really cool. When we got there, we got a tour of the news room, as well as one of the studios where they record segments of the news. After our tour, they took us up to the control room to watch the band before us finish up their set of songs. Hearing the Director, Rick, frantically call out production commands made us more nervous than the actual taping did. We have a whole new respect for "live editing" a show. He did an amazing job, as well as the camera operators, the audio engineer and production assistants. A friend of ours is also a friend of the producer. The producer invited our friend to come to the studio to watch us record our songs. He used his Droid to give a little behind the scenes of what it was like to be inside the control room while we were in the studio recording. Thank you to Bruce, Rick, and FOX Charlotte for allowing us to share this footage. The first video is one of the songs that we did that day, The Wanderlust. The rest of the videos are the behind the scenes and are around 30 seconds each.
For anyone wanting to run their work by Rick, he has very reasonable critique rates, and is open to helping writers in any way that he can. He teaches songwriting for Belmont University in Nashville, The Kerrville Folk Festival, and for the Nashville Songwriters Association International. Whenever we make it back to Nashville, we are definitely going to pay him a visit.
We spent Friday and Saturday in our home away from home, Raleigh-Durham. We had some business to do for the NC Songwriters Co-op and we were going to a Creative Capital Workshop sponsored by the Durham Arts Council, so we decided to make a weekend of it.
On Friday, we met up with the house manager of the PSI Theater at the Durham Arts Council and took a tour. We would like to start doing some of our Co-op showcases in Durham, and this space definitely fit the bill. We will be considering it for next year's contest or some of our member showcase events. The sound was great and the dressing rooms were terrific. Plus, the dramatic staircase entrance would be a great place for a meet and greet reception.
Also, we attended the Creative Capital Workshop Question and Answer forum at the DAC. The Creative Capital organization is one of the few entities that award significant support to individual artists. Creative Capital is based on the venture capital model and provides funding, counsel and career development services. Artists who work with CC are supported on a long term basis. Not every artist will fit what CC is looking for, but it's definitely worth a shot. They tend to choose edgy projects which challenge the art world. We have tried to find out information about this grant many times, but weren't quite clear on the funding process and what type of work they tend to choose. This was our opportunity to ask questions, so we certainly weren't going to miss it. We learned a lot about what CC wants from their artists and plan to submit to them as a long term career goal.
Recent Comments