Become a "Grammy Member? Yes It Seems Possible!

So, if you have been in the music field, you've heard about the Grammy awards. Grammy is also known as The Recording Academy and also as NARAS or National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.

We've looked into how to gain a membership in this prestigious society, and here seems to be the deal. The details are all spelled out at this URL (http://www.grammy.com/Recording_Academy/Member_Services/FAQs/DigitalOnlineDist.aspx)

But basically if you are on-line distributing your record with a minimum of 12 tracks and have a web site promoting your "product", which of course is the music, and possibly gigs, and it is "on sale" at Amazon, CD Baby, iTunes etc.,

In other words, if you can prove it to them that you are making your "life" through recorded sound, they will very likely to qualify you with a $100/year membership, $180 for two years, and $260 for three years.

Another way to qualify is to have two voting members recommend you in the membership. This is probably a bit hard for most of us to swing, and if you are established enough to know two voting members, then you'd probably would have gotten in already anyhow!

In terms of voting, yes people do vote to pick the Grammy winners, it sounds like most of independent musicians seems to qualify as voting members, but there is some credits you need to earn, and I have not completely figure that out yet. But even if you don't have credits, you can opt for non-voting Associate membership which can be later upgraded to voting once you earn the technical or creative credits. I am not sure how these credits are earned, sound like by the number of tracks you produced?

Logic 8 Tips: How To Stop Memory Eating Daemons (i.e. Entourage Database Daemon)

One of the important things to run the Logic 8 smoothly is to give it an ability to use the CPU and Memory. So I would quit all other applications while I am using Logic 8, remove applications that isn't needed, such as Logitec Harmony Remote programs etc.

If you are using Micrsoft Entourage, you will also notice that it runs "Database Deamon" in the background, and there seems to be no way of keeping it from running even after you exit the Entourage applications. This is a nasty background application for Logic 8 users because it is a Power PC application so it requires memory hogging Rosetta virtual CPU environment, and on top of that, it will access the disk and more than 1 GB of memory!

Fortunately there is a way to stop this after exiting Entourage. Here is how.

• Go to your application folder. You will find the top level of where your Entrougage is located.
• From that finder window, do a search on "Database Utility". In my case it is stored under Microsoft Office 2004 -> Office -> Database Utility
• Click the Database Utility
• Select the Main Identity database if it is not selected. If there are more of them, you will need to repeat the each step.
• Select "Set database preference"
• Press Continue
• Deselect "Perform Database Integrity check in the background" checkbox.
  
• Save

That should prevent the database integrity checking to run after exiting the Enorourage application.

I usually keep the "Activity Monitor" utility always available in my dock, and whenever I see any performance issues, I will take a look at which processes are taking up the most memory or CPU cycles.

Great Logic Pro 8 Tutorial

About a half a year ago, I bought Apple Logic Pro 8 as an upgrade to Logic Express. A brother of my former colleague is a musician in So Cal making sound tracks for movies and such and highly recommended I get Logic. He himself recently converted from PC Pro Tools to Mac and he really liked the fact that it came with so much stuff in the price. I do agree.

But I could not figure this software out so easily. Yeah, it is easy to record a few tracks, but once getting into the art of mixing, automation or even side-chaining effects... This is probably one of the most complex software tools you'd ever use (forget about PageMakers, PhotoShop or even Visual Studios), and you will end up and needing to be using just about every feature available to it to produce good sounding tracks.

I was looking for some nice books about it on a book web site and there was a comment from a user who wrote to check into MacProVideo instead of buying the book. I was a bit skeptical at first but I ended up buying already about half of their Video tutorial. Their sample videos were convincing and the instructor they pick are the people working at the top of the line in the industry.

I happen to think they are really great especially if you don't want to spend time and money learning it the hard way. Just sit and watch one of the videos for half a day and it is a savior in terms of climbing that hard initial learning curve. A normal course at your local art school extension would be $300 or $400 for a week or something, but with just $50, you can get your teacher to "come to your home" as many times as you need (so to speak).

So if don't have time to attend classes like me, do check out some of the courses MacProVideo.com

I started out using analog VUs, motorized boards, and patch cables to processor boxes and bouncing back and forth on 8 tracks with the studio time ticking by the minute. I could not have imagined that a I can carry a fully automated 64-track mixing studio and do a complete mix while traveling from SFO to NYC. It has definitely produced a lot of good mixes by a lot more people.

Chord Resources

So how do you play C7+9+5 if you see that in the chart? Even though I can figure out how to play most of these chords from the theory, it is often just convenient if a software (or a web site) tells you what to do, especially if I ran into F#+9+5 (somehow I really dislike the key of F#. I'd rather play in Gb!). There are many sites that show chord voicing with some nice little Javascript. The A Passion for Jazz site is a good example of it and just really convenient. I am logging it here so that I can remember to refer to it whenever you and I need it.