jimether:

Re-Tumbl this image for a chance to win one full color Red Pines 2012 yearbook! This offer ends Tuesday, July 26th at 2 a.m. Eastern time. I’ll pick 2 winners from the list. This image will disappear shortly thereafter. Thank you.

kickstarter:

Cartoonist Jim Ether is making a comic yearbook featuring you, his lovely backers. His fictitious school is named “Red Pines High ” and there are 45 available “slots” in the student body which can be pledged for. Once each slot is filled, Jim will create a totally unique world out of characters based on his backers. We love seeing creators get playful with their communities — and this project is absolutely tops!

Having a HUGE beach ball blown out out of my hands and out to sea. I was just four and very, very unhappy.

A Spring of Teal.

Blimey, from a simple band video this is turning into a video maker’s version of walking around the world backwards whilst blindfolded. It had better eend up being a magnum opus or else! ;)

First we had the ‘studio shoot’. Three cameras and a live performance. We cut it, and sweet it was, except none of us like what we look like. So we don thinking caps again.

A while later Mick and I set off for an amazing location and re-shoot the beginning of the song. A couple of days later we shoot the rest … and it is good. I cut it and it is good, but it looks like a solo effort. There are friendly rumblings. Meh, do I care.

So the day before yesterday we all trundle down to the beach. It’s an amazing location - film companies use it frequently, and though the weather was stellar the bit of beach and groyne we used were tripperless (that’s no people, not no people tripping, btw).

We decided to use a locked off camera and swop positions on three wooden posts. And the result - provided the sync is good - looks great.

Hopefully that’ll be that. A day of snippety-snip and we’ll have our first video up on www.youtube.com/kamakuramusic.

Yup, I know I’ve said it before … but sooner or later, eh?!

The first part of the competition is over and we were placed 27th out of 68. So a big thanks to those who downloaded the track and left comments. Yes indeed. A wittier set of comments I’ve yet to peruse. ;)

What happens now is that the judges go away and judge. Obviously, logic dictates that they’ll just cut away bands 11 to 50, rub their hands with glee at a job well done, and go out to dinner. Whilst as band 28, we’re hoping that the music might have a rather larger part to play.

Then, the ten finalists all have to produce a video for their track, and those videos are then voted upon.

Wish us luck! It’s not over until it’s over!

Yo! Calling all of you who like what we do. We’ve entered a competition to play at the Reeperbahn festival in Hamburg, Germany, in September.

As I write we’re in 29th position, which is oh-so not at all safe!

So, it would be totally awesome if you’d rush along HERE and download the track … and if you also leave a comment it’d be wicked!

Of course this is only the first round. Then we have to make a video … which is very much in-hand and umm, under control. ;)

Peace out.

The Simple Shoes® Road to Reeperbahn contest gives one talented band a slot to play at the Reeperbahn Festival and €3600 EUR to get there! This contest is open to bands from the UK, Germany and the Netherlands and sponsored by Simple Shoes®, your stereotypical, anti-stereotypical sustainable sneaker company.

Throughout the month of June, bands will be featured on this website, where you can discover and download cool, new music. The 50 bands with the most downloads will move on to be reviewed by a panel of judges from Simple Shoes and the Reeperbahn Festival.

The ten resulting finalists will get Simple shoes and a top secret mission to create a video for fans to vote on, beginning in early August. The band whose video receives the most votes will play at Reeperbahn®, a 3-day music festival on the Hamburger Reeperbahn, featuring over 170 live shows on more than 25 stages in front of 20,000 festival goers and €3600 EUR to get there. This year’s festival takes place September 23-25, 2010.

All bands who submit will get a coupon for 30% off any purchase at Simple’s European e-commerce websites.

Pretty nifty, huh? So, what are you waiting for – go download the tracks of your favorite artists!

Having shot and rough cut a video for Spring of Teal we decided to scap it and start again. So, today saw us a few miles outside Rye in Sussex. We were filming next to a bunch of HUGE windturbines and VAST fields of wheat. The weather was peachy, we were undisturbed and Mick became very very arty. As soon as it’s finished the video will be up on www.youtube.com/kamakuramusic

A logo I like rather a lot. Not that I’m OTT about it. I just think it’s sunny. It does beg the question what sort of logo suits us best … and why haven’t we thought of it or created it before now?! Hmm. Your guess is as worthy as mine.

Releasing an album is not as easy as it sounds, especially if you want it to be chart eligible. There is so much information available, both free and to be paid for, it is hard to know where to begin.

The first thing I discovered was that if you’re in the U.K. and you write your own material you should be a member of the PPL. Every track on a released CD should have a unique ISRC number which is provided by PPL. What it means is that every time that track is played it is not only chart eligible, but you get royalties too. Then there are the PRS, the MCPS and the the MU to be explored.

Album artwork is another expense - unless you can do it yourself. Luckily, we did. Scribus is a really good cross platform open source DTP package that allows you to deliver print ready PDFs. For graphics I used Gimp which it almost as good as the renowned Photoshop except it only works in RGB … remember that for print you need to have graphics saved in CMYK and not RGB. For conversion I found a PC programme called Free Image Editor which is just what it says, tiny at 1.5mb, and converts RGB to CMYK and vice-versa. It’s excellent!

So you have an album…. Then what?

Bob Baker is one person I’ve discovered who has a plethora of ideas, books and courses, to help the aspiring musician. And until you can dust the framed platinum disc on the wall you’re still aspiring, no matter how good you think you are. The bottom line is that you can’t market yourself without knowledge, and good apropos knowledge is worth having.

I bought a copy of the Guerrilla Music Marketing Handbook that I carry everywhere I go (I only wish I’d bought the real bound book rather than the PDF download, still that’s life). If you need hints tips and tricks as to how to go about marketing yourself then this is the guide to have. And it’s cheap, too!

I also ordered the ‘The Unsigned Guide’. It’s being printed and delivered in late April, but if you pay for it now you get a years access to the website - which has all the data from the book - free delivery, and ten GBP off the price.

That’s where we are now. The CDs will be arriving shortly (from Cyclone Music) and the official release is the 26th March. Between then and now there is a shed-load of work to do. Sending out CDs to radio stations, journalists, etc - along with a press pack. Creating a video to put on YouTube.com (here is one I made earlier!).

So much to do and only 24 hours in a day!

We’re in the middle of building a new web site, so rather than having a blank ‘coming soon’ thing we’ve put up a nifty holding page. A sort of mini-site, if you will. You can buy a pre-release copy of the CD there too! And for only 7GBP for 12 tracks (including postage) you can’t really go wrong.

www.kamakura.co.uk

We got the CD proofs back from the printers today. They came as PDFs which didn’t make a lot of sense as I’d sent them the artwork as PDFs in the first place. Oh well. So, fingers crossed, soon there will be albums … or CDs, or whatever the new hifalutin word for them is.

I can’t wait, which is actually a pointless statement as I’m going to have to. Duh.

And then there’s everything else: PPL membership forms to fill in. PRS song declarations, getting gigs and engendering radio and press interest. And the biggie - a video!

We had our first rehearsal for months, yesterday, and it went really well. I guess that it’ll take us two weeks solid effort to get gig fit- though we’re allowing a month. Then there’s the album. We still have to get the artwork finished and the replication booked in. It’s taking an age and I’m not entirely sure why. I’m staring at the master as I write, and it’s taunting me.

We’re also re-designing the website. People have been saying it’s naff, and indeed it probably is. Keeping interest in a website is like trying to catch butterflies in your boxers, But what to do? A major flash site might be good, but frankly the loading times are still slow - unless you live in Shanghai. A fresh, but intermediate, site seems the logical way to go.

Then there is merchandise to be designed!

All in all we should be gigging and selling the CD by the beginning of April.

what we really need is a booking agent.