04-05-09 – I need a house! / Good NEWS, everyone!
Hokay! First week of getting me organised! Well I didn’t do all that badly!
This week, I…
- Saw the pop group “Same Difference” live
- Made a new tutorial for boyinaband
- Did some biab bloggery (not as much as I wanted though ><)
- Chilled with many of my homeslices
- Had an ace YAWA weekend with Kieran and Shortty-E
- Got some good news regarding Kieran! 
- Replied to 20 messages and 51 blog comments O_O
- Made a life plan.
- Found another suitable lolcat for my blog ^^
What an expression xD
ROCK!!!
Eamon invited me to come to a gig. Which isn’t that unusual, since he attends a lot of gigs. But this one was slightly different, as it took place in the middle of the day in the local shopping center.
Same difference are a pop duet he and I have cruised to many a time in my car – 100% cheesy pop. Fantastic stuff. With such greats as “I need a house”, “We R One” and “Let Me Be the One” from their imaginatively titled album – “Pop”. Genius.
And so it was that us and several hundred chavs with their kids and their kids’ kids were watching the stage as two unnaturally happy looking people sang and danced at us. It was ACE. They did dance moves and hi fived each other (they’re a brother and sister duo that were on the X factor a few years back) and everything.
The best part, however, was when as they left the stage and the security cleared a path through the crowd, I shouted “ROCK!!!” and gave the devil horns to the dude, and he looked around confused, then spotted me and gave the devil horns back with a big grin. Awesome.
How do you annoy Lady Gaga?
Yep, I made the beat for pokerface this week. Part of my life plan involved seeing what blogs got the most attention, and my “Making the beat” blogs were both in the top 20 of all viewed pages on my website (I <3 Google Analytics). So I looked at the top of the charts and picked the highest song with a beat that was worth making (Pokerface was #2 – #1 is Black Eyed Peas – Boom Boom Pow, which is a TUNE, but is a little bit too minimalist to bother making the beat for…)
But yes, I made the beat, and in writing the instructions for the tutorial (I always write out what needs doing so I have a reference while I’m recording the tutorial) I realised one synth took considerably more effort to explain than the others, so I made a new loop with that synth in order to explain how to make it.
Check it out:
So the plan is to either make one more video for another synth effect in there which is a little bit in depth, or to next just move straight onto the pokerface tutorial. BTW – it’s a catchy as hell song with a cool beat, but the lyrics “Mum mum mum mah” just make me think of a retard trying to be on a pop song.
Boyinaband
In other news, I made a few blogs on boyinaband! Yay! It took me a few days to organise my plan, and then a few more days were taken off for hanging out with friends and working on YAWA, but it’s a start to my overall plan to have one blog for every day of this month (I’ll have to backdate a few to accomplish it now – I won’t tell if you don’t!) and see how much my web traffic rises, then I can see whether blogging on boyinaband is a viable method of earning money from the internet for me.
BTW – check out my 5 dubstep artists blog for some cool tracks (numbers 1 and 2 are my faves, shockingly enough, so if you find the other songs a bit dark, skip ahead.)
Homeslice Chillery.
Since the past month has been filled with me trying to focus myself on my uni work, I’d neglected my awesome friends – this week involved much catching up and a lot of studio time with Certain Shortt rappers. Check out Shortty-E’s new song “What’s my name (Shortty-E)” on his myspazz. It breaks new ground in me intentionally making offbeat beats that don’t really work for the lols. With an unnecessarily catch chorus.
YAWAtime.
Just Kieran, me and Shortty E this week, and later on Scratch awoke and joined us. We recorded the rest of the lyrics for the beautiful gabba song I believe I have mentioned before, which is now 90% finished musically. I programmed the live drums (ironic much?) this time since Zak is never around (He’s got his cymbals finally now though) and they sound ace. I did the same thing on our “I’m on a boat” cover if you want an example of how they sound.
We also recorded some guitar for our epic-space-gangstuh anthem “Zero Gravity” which is sounding frickin’ hyewj.
I also replaced the “V festival” banner thing at the top of our myspace (We didn’t get in – shock horror, they chose a bunch of unremarkable indie bands =/) with a new big shiny one for our EP which is coming out on June 5th!
Oh yeah! I got the artwork for the EP through on Friday – looks AWESOME, though it wasn’t actually in an album case so I can’t tell if the tray liner lines up right… and a few parts looked dodgy on the paper compared to the computer screen, so I’ve fixed them and sent off for another sample, asking this time for it to be in an album case. The CD looks ace though – it’s all… Epic. But yeah, Check out the YAWA myspace to see the EP cover I designed!
Best budz 2getha!!!
And the big news… KIERAN IS MOVING IN WITH ME!!! YAY!!! After several weeks of wondering if he should spend the next year doing a course for his primary school teaching thing or spend it on trying to get YAWA massive, he’s decided to shoot for the moon and come live with me to work on YAWA!
So that means it’ll be me, Scratch and Kieran all in one house. PARTAY. Or rather, LAN Partay. lolz.
But yeah, I’m well excited because he’s my favourite member of YAWA that isn’t me. (Heh, I can say that because Zak and Jamie don’t read this Zak smells and Jamie is clearly at least bisexual! lolz x 2)
Anyway, yeah, he said he didn’t know exactly when, but it should be soon. Yay!
*Pwns myspace*
I think this really helped fill up my insomnia time. I started going through my blogs and messages for the last 6 weeks, replying to all of the comments and messages I’d had – by the time I finished, I checked my blog view and saw 51 comments posted that day. from me. And thinking about it, I started on the previous day so it may have been more than that. Plus at least 20 messages. Why don’t I have RSI?
But yeah, I’m sorry it took so long to reply, and I’ll do my best to keep on top of it now!
The Plan.
So yeah! My plan. The first phase of my plan is research – finding if blogging is a sustainable income for me. I tried to contact google analytics but they didn’t reply (my account got suspended years ago for invalid click activity which I’m guessing was caused by certain ex-intera band members who currently have more kids than sense ¬_¬) so I might have to look into other advertising methods. The “project wonderful” Ad that’s on there atm. has earned me a total of $1.69 since I posted it a few months ago. I nearly have enough to buy an apple.
Phase 2 will depend on the outcome of phase 1. If I can guarantee that I can significantly increase my traffic by posting blogs that are relevant and make tutorial videos, then I’ll keep doing that. If my traffic does not at least double by the end of the month then I’ll ease off on the blogging and look into doing some freelance web design or coding flash games. I will also at that point assign time to work on the book I keep putting off.
Hopefully by then, Kieran will have moved in – something Scratch and I started but didn’t stick to was meeting up at 9am each morning to discuss what we’d achieved the previous day, what we were going to do that day and if anything was holding us back from doing what we want to achieve. With Kieran, hopefully we’ll be able to pool our motivation into forcing that to become a habit – then we’ll get so much more done.
I really want to start working to a timetable. As much as I hated school, I always liked the idea of segmenting me focus into time slots. It means that one time slot every morning and another maybe at the weekend can be dedicated to long term focus, then you don’t have to worry about whether you’re spending your time wisely while you’re working on individual projects.
Next Week on Dave’s Blog
Well there’s a gig in Birmingham on the 7th that Zak has recently told us we have to sell a bunch of tickets for without actually giving us any of the tickets or even telling us how much they cost, so a) nice work on the advanced warning and b) GAH. So yeah – next week will entail…
- Playing said Brum gig.
- Getting the revised album artwork then ordering the art.
- Ordering the T-shirts in time for the EP release date
- Blogging every day (and filling up blogs for previous missed days)
- Making the Making the beat video for Pokerface
AND THE BLOGLY QUESTION: A bit of market research – We’ve been wondering about the price for the EP. We’ve been thinking around £6.99-£7.99ish. Do you think that’s a reasonable price for our 6 track EP?