Table of contents for 2006 Celebrations and Reflections

1. Top Ear Training Articles for 2006
2. Top Songwriting Articles for 2006
3. Top Music Theory Articles for 2006
4. Top Music Hacks for 2006
5. Top Peak Performance Articles for 2006
6. Top Music Business Articles of 2006
7. Top Music Technology Articles for 2006
8. The Best of The Graham English Blog 2006

Here’s the final entry to my 2006 Celebrations and Reflections series. According to my stats, these are the top 20 most popular posts of 2006. Have a happy New Year!

• How To Be An Expert
• Your Goals As Waveform
• What is RSS and Why Do I Care?
• The World’s Most Important 6-Sec Drum Loop
• Absolute Pitch Power Blogathon
• Can Hit Songs Really Be Reduced To Science? I Mean, Really?
• An official blogging-songwriter birthday weekend…
• Links for 2006-06-10
• Links for 2006-06-05
• Links for 2006-06-02
• Any Tips On Guitar Tuning, Ear And Pitch Training?
• Hit Songwriting Tips Podcast 08-22-06
• Links for 2006-03-27
• Learn Orchestration Free Online
• Absolute Pitch Ear Training Podcast 12-04-06
• How Do You Develop New And Interesting Chord Changes?
• Links for 2006-04-04
• Weekly Music Business Podcast
• Hit Songwriting Tips Podcast 09-29-06
• Songwriting For Busy People

I don’t plan on writing much new stuff for the rest of the year. But I will be looking back over the year’s material and creating a “best of” series.

I also plan on looking forward and refining the vision for this blog and how it fits into my life. If you have anything you would like me to cover more of, please let me know in the comments.

Some interesting links while I was away:

MySpace to Let Members Sell Music:
A new partnership will allow indie artists and established rockers to sell mp3s of their songs directly to fans on MySpace.

From Crypto to Jazz:
A new jazz album draws on cryptography and number theory for its riffs and rhythms. Listen to saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa’s melodies with audio clips of digits turned into notes. By Alexander Gelfand.

It’s a new era for me. Expect changes.

1. A free link in my musician’s directory
2. A bio or an article about you and your music
3. Or just tell me about yourself in the comments of this post

Contact me with any questions.

In the mean time, I’ll let Grammy award winning songwriter Jesse Harris share his songwriting process with you from the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus.

Jesse Harris Songwriting Tips Interview

Bottom line: The more you know about music, the more choices you have. Check out my Elite Musicianship Training.

You are currently ranked 1st of 1 Bloggogglers that are listed in Music Teacher.

Ok, so I’m ranked number 1 out of 1. Think you can do better?

BTW, you can instantly subscribe to my blog with your favorite feed reader by clicking one of the “chicklets” along the right side of my blog. Or you can subscribe by email on either the left or right sidbar.

Click here ==> The Graham English Blog

If you’ve subscribed already, this step isn’t necessary–you’ll still receive my blog posts–but it would give me accurate readership stats which helps me give you the information you want.

If you still don’t use a feed reader, you can subscribe by email using the form on the lower right side of this page.

If you want to know more about RSS and Feed Readers, visit this post:

What is RSS and Why Do I Care?

Thanks for your time.

Heidi Klum’s Search for Top Models: When Super Skinny Is “Too Fat” – International – SPIEGEL ONLINE – News

Seth Godin and Robert Scoble hipped me to this. If I link to this page in one of the most popular newspapers in Europe, I’ll get a link on this page: “Blogs discussing this story”

It won’t do me much good in terms of generating targeted traffic. I’m just illustrating a point–That the blogosphere is designed to create connections. And nobody knows this better than word of mouth evangelists, Seth and Scoble.

What Can I Do With Feeds?

So, once you’ve found one or more RSS feeds you want to subscribe to so you can keep up to date with their content, what’s next? What you need is a way of grouping your feeds together and displaying them so you can see them all in one place. There are several ways of doing this, which one you choose really depends on which you find easiest.

Lots of different companies offer separate downloadable programs (often called ‘desktop readers’ or ‘aggregators’) or websites (often called ‘web-based readers’) and even some web browsers and email programs will read and present RSS feeds.

Feed Reading Software

There are many feed reader applications. I have used and recommend the following:
Mac OSX: http://www.ranchero.com/netnewswire/
Windows XP: http://www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon/

Web Based Feed Reading

Bloglines: http://www.bloglines.com/
Newsgator: http://www.newsgator.com/
MyYahoo: http://my.yahoo.com/

Subscribe to a Blog

On the left and right sides of my website you will see a red XML link button. To subscribe to my feed all you do is copy and paste that link into your feed reading software or a web based reader like bloglines. If you already have feed reading software installed, all you need to do is click the button and your software should automatically add my feed to your reader.

All blogs will have a link which you can subscribe to. It might be called Atom, or RSS, or simply Syndicate, but they all do the same thing. The reason there are so many names is because there are different standards to create web syndication services (much like the old BETA vs VHS video format competition). At the moment it appears that RSS is certainly winning the standards war so you will mostly see the orange RSS links everywhere.

Update: You can also subscribe to my blog by email. No applications to install, just my content, delivered daily, in an easy to read email. You’ll see the subscribe form to the left and to the right of this webpage.

Syndication is for More than Just Blogs

Blogs definitely started this syndication craze. It’s still in the ‘early adoption’ phase since not many people know how to use it but most of the big web companies are making subscription feeds available for almost any content and it is definitely here to stay. Chances are if you are reading an article from a big site you can subscribe to a feed that distributes those articles. Just look for that RSS symbol.

Besides article distribution a new technology has launched called Podcasting. A Podcast is simply syndicated audio, usually an mp3 file. Podcasts are downloaded and then you can listen to them on your computer or mp3 player.

RSS for Musicians

1. Get Your Music Heard Through Blogging and Podcasting
Let’s face it, not everybody has the stomach to become the next Creed or Ashley Simpson. Maybe our music will only ever reach a small number of listeners. That’s okay, but with the present-day model of 100,000-sales-or-else we don’t stand a chance – unless we self-publish. Or maybe we are working towards mass appeal but again, artist development doesn’t exist like it used to. So we build our fan base the old fashioned way – 1 listener at a time – through blogging and podcasting.

Example: Within 1 week, my music was published by 3 separate podcasts. See this post.

2. Build Community with Other Musicians and Listeners
Blogging is a Web 2.0 technology. It’s about community and conversations. So you pitch other bands on your blog and in your podcasts and in turn they do the same. It’s a win-win situation.

Not only does it connect musicians with musicians, it connects musicians with their listeners. Blogging allows your listeners to comment and respond to your music. Would you rather listen to a band that ignores you or a band that wants you to co-create the art?

3. Publish News and Tour Dates
So you’ve built a mailing list at your shows and you send them a monthly post card which costs you money. You also email them but with all the spam problems you don’t know how many emails are actually delivered. With RSS, they subscribe to your feed and your news and tour dates are delivered immediately. It’s a much more intimate way of staying in touch with your list.

4. Music Promotion Through Your Listeners
Ask your listeners to post concert posters (PDF or JPEG) of your show dates in their work places. Offer bonus pre-release audio content (podcast) as incentives. You can get really creative here.

5. Monetize Your Blog
Increase your income by selling CDs or audio downloads. You can even sell advertising from other bands or pay-per-click advertising like Google Adsense.

I really could go on and on but I think you get the idea. RSS is indispensable to musicians in the digital age.

The Future

RSS is designed to make your Internet life easier. At the moment it’s worthwhile to become familiar with this technology simply because you are going to be seeing a lot more of it. By keeping up with technology you will have the edge that can make your music an affluent career and not an expensive hobby.

Piano and Synth
Create Digital Music
Matrix Synth