Who Do You Think You Are?

As you can see from my previous blogs, I have attended a few workshops lately with the Recording Academy. One of the most important things to consider when starting a band, a management company, or even having a show is what is your brand. Everything you sell has to provide some sort of insight to who you are and the image your fans will achieve if they buy into your products.

For me, my personal brand is NerdyRockChick. Most of my social media contacts are listed under the persona with the exception of LinkedIn for professional purposes. I based the name on a questionnaire that told me to describe myself in three words.  I love sci-fi, punk rock and I am a girl.  NerdyRockChick.

Once you figure all of that out and you establish your brand, you now have to protect it with everything you have. No matter how small your operation might be, there are can always be a negative side to your image.

One of the blogs I follow is Internet Paraganar. There are quite a few topics covered on the website but their internet/computer blogs have many useful blogs on marketing. A blog that recently caught my eye covers protecting your brand name and reputation online. There are many people who can attack your brand. “People who want to destroy your reputation could be your business competitors, former employees ore even customers dissatisfied with your service delivery or your product”.

Translation for artists, anyone who has a similar style, former band mates, and fans that stood out in the rain for two hours while you were a no show.  So what can you do to diminish the damage? Social media is by far the best bridge to use to reach out to those who have nothing good to say. A tactic seen by bands on twitter such as @bfsrocks (Bowling for Soup) is reaching out and sending a personal mention or a general tweet toward fans apologizing for errors in information.  

I'm In The Band

I recently went to a Rock Band Network workshop in Austin that was put together by Pyramind and sponsored by T-mobile. As a gamer, it was a really neat experience to meet some of the creative talent that has put together one of my favorite video games. As a musician, it was really cool to find another socially interactive product for content and connecting to fans through a popular medium. What really appealed to me was going through motions to actually set up a song through the process and learning about the Rock Band Network. 


It can take a whole company to take a song and develop it for game play. You have to start with the music and record the stems, which are separate audio tracks. Then you have to translate the stems into measures and beats and then to notes corresponding to the controller. A really cool feature I did not know about was you could set instances in the track to follow the digital character so the animation that goes on while you are playing look authentic. It’s designed to be so authentic you can tell if a bassist is playing slap or pick style and what words the vocalist is in the animation is singing.

This is a long and tedious project that can take several days to work through and often there are companies that divide the work.

Once everything is complete, the song then goes to the Rock Band Network, which is a community of artists, programmers, and gamers that give feedback and can affect whether or not a song is allowed to be on Rock Band. The community watches for authenticity, profanity, and quality work. It is essential that if you are going to publish your work on the network that you get a sense of common mistakes so that you can publish as quickly as possible.

The best part of the whole night was getting to play Rock Band with executive producer Jeff Marshall and Gregory J Morgan of Pyramind.