It’s been a while since I posted a blog entry here. One of the reasons is I’ve actually been working. I’ve been working both on getting the new Logic Users Group platform up and running, and finally on more Ember After songs.  Towards that end, I finally took possession of a fantastic new guitar, which I detail here in the geartalk blog.   I also have just ordered a Dave Smith Instrumens Mopho, a fantastic analog monosynth based off the Prophet 08, but with some special editions just perfect for grinding mean industrial music: sub-oscillators, feedback, audio input.  Tasty treats, all!

Dave Smith Instruments Mopho

But all this has got me thinking about this whole Interweb, and how much time can be spent communicating on it.  Ember After has a web page, a Myspace page, an iLike page, a Facebook page, a Bebo page…I’ve almost lost track.  And of course Ember After is on Twitter.  To keep up to date on all of these would leave no time to be creative!   (Let alone do a full time job, if recording and performing music isn’t paying the bills).

And it’s not just typing to your huge (ha…) fanbase, it’s keeping up with other people—the whole point of this communication is that it’s supposed to be two-way, to bring people together, and not simply be another one-way announcement system.  But it all eats into what limited time there is to write music, which ultimately is the reason that people are following/friending with Ember After to begin with, right?

Somewhere in there is a balance.  More successful acts have discussed hiring a marketing company to take care of the mailing list/updating news/blog aspect of their “music business.”  That can really help free the artist to both communicate and create…if you’re successful enough to afford it, or have a record company willing to pay for it.  As long as the updates and blogs and tweets come from the artist, if they are propogated and managed by hired help shouldn’t mean the communication is less authentic.

But for those of us who don’t have the means or the success yet to hire a team, we’re left trying to figure out how to keep these dozens of sites and networks up to date while at the same time finding the time to make the music that you are communicating about.  And it’s a double edged sword—without communicating, nobody knows that you’ve got the music out, and without the music, there’s nothing to communicate.

For now, I’m shifting the balance towards creating.  I’ll still try and actively post whenever I have a moment, but that’s proving to be not as frequent as I wish.  I hope that makes sense.

Ah, the glorious march of technology. When we filmed the video for “Lost,” the first song we released from the album Grasping At Straws, our director Kenn Michael filmed it in HD. Of course, the main avenues for video promotion open to a band who doesn’t have a major label budget is online, and at the time, YouTube didn’t really allow high res video.

Thankfully, that has changed. So I have dutifully uploaded the high definition version of the Lost video, viewable on the Ember After YouTube channel, or below:

Friday was a new guitar day for me—always a fun day! My current main guitar is a custom guitar by Koll Guitars, and this new guitar is also a custom guitar.

Read all about it over on the Geartalk blog!