The Real Blog

The Real Blog is my mini-journal about Unique And Innovative Music. It...

• lets you know whenever any new bands are added to my Music Artist Directory
• keeps you up-to-date with other postings or news about The Real Musician (like Album/Concert/Gear reviews and articles)
• points out some of our super-special past adventures that you might otherwise miss
• lets you know when I send out the The Real Musician e-zine (in case you don't like to give your e-mail address, or if your ISP tends to over-filter causing you to miss an issue).

To subscribe to my Real blog (no e-mail necessary), right-click on the orange RSS button (see left, underneath the NavBar) and then paste the URL into your RSS reader.

Or click on the Google, My Yahoo!, or the My MSN button if you keep a personalized home page there (also left).

If you are not sure what RSS and blogging is all about, click here... What's an RSS Feed?

Once you start, you will be amazed at how RSS brings your world to you.

Would You Like To Be Part Of This Blog?

Become part of the Real Blog! Simply share your musical journey/experience here!

Your story becomes part of this blog (which shows the site's most recent pages) and a permanent part of TheRealMusician.com for others to read!

Steve Reich - Music for 18 Musicians

This thing is so far outside of anybody's envelope, that it's practically impossible to like it first time. If you approach it with a checklist of preconceived

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Some Alternatives To Your Interpretation

I know it's long but please have a read and see what you think; I reckon it could be worth it but I would, wouldn't I? Anyway, have a go: Well, so far

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How To Write Music Suppression Stops Creativity

How To Write Music. One struggle that I have found to become really common when writing in a band, is that when things get bad between the members, the music usually suffers. You can try and keep you

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Born Gold

Born Gold (Previously named "GOBBLE GOBBLE" has one of the most unique live shows you'll ever see. Focusing mainly on the interactive aspect of the show, they definitely thrive in a "small venue" type

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Genghis Tron

Genghis Tron is the perfect combination of Electronic + Metal. Their intense, almost danceable sections (Especially the song "Laser Bitch") combined with a solid foundation of groovy bloody metal cr

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Flying Lotus

Flying Lotus is one of the giants in the electronic scene over the past few years. Although Aphex Twin ruled the 90's (And is still huge today), Flying Lotus seems to have taken the world by storm. H

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Explosions In The Sky

Explosions In The Sky is a band that could put you to sleep. And I mean that in the best of ways. Their calming instrumental tunes are soothing, pleasing, and melodic. There's no intense beats or

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David Crowder Band

David Crowder Band is the pretty much the first Christian Worship band that actually captured my musical attention. My general attitude towards worship music is: "Musically, this sucks". And it gene

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Converge

Converge will rip your gallbladder out of your nipples and then write a poem with your plasma. Don't believe me? Listen to some of the tracks below. Being one of the most hardcore bands I've ever

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Cloudkicker

Cloudkicker is an unsigned one-man band, but you would never know by listening to his albums. Once you get past the first track on his album 'Beacons', it's a non-stop ride of tasteful forward-motion

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Bonobo

BAM! You've just listened to Bonobo's "Black Sands" with the Subwoofer turned way up, and got completely blown away as the Intro song transitions into "Kiara". Oh wait, you didn't? Do it now please.

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Bjork

Björk is one of those long standing musicians that doesn't even really need to promote herself anymore. She's even been parodied on SNL by Wynona Ryder, and you know when you've been parodied by SN

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Atlas Sound

I remember when I first listened to Atlas Sounds' song "The Light That Failed". I felt like natural sounds of reverb and echo were penetrating me from every-what direction. It was a new experience fo

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The Arcade Fire

The Arcade Fire is a fairly "world-renowned" indie band. They've been featured on huge festivals like Coachella, and don't seem to be letting up at all. I first remember seeing the "Power Out" music

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Animals As Leaders

That's the same for their drums on the first album Animals As Leaders Released (Self-Titled). The drums were entirely MIDI based. "But Andrew!" You may ask. "How can they tour if they only have MIDI

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Amon Tobin

Amon Tobin's electronic grooves are easily recognizable within any compilation that he does. Whether it's the aforementioned videogame music, or on the pop-styling's of Mike Patton's "Don't Even Trip"

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Nosaj Thing

I've mainly only listened to Nosaj Thing's album "Drift", but boy has it been a great ride. Although there are no vocals in the tunes, there is just a special quality about him that I can't really de

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James Blake

James Blake is an Experimental Electronic artist from London. He was originally a producer, and a lot of his early EP's consist of only sampled vocals (Never his own voice). In his first full album,

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Animal Collective

Animal Collective is one of those bands that is so unique that you aren't quite sure what type of genre restriction you could put on them. They use a combination of incredibly reverb drenched electro

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MGMT

I don't do drugs, but listening to MGMT (And watching any of their music video's) is a perfectly acceptable (And adequate) supplementary experience. When I first heard of MGMT, I saw a music video of

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Bon Iver

I only just got into Bon Iver's newest album ("Bon Iver"), so I'll only be speaking from my experience with that album. The thing that first stood out to me was the unique approach to the vocals. The

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Outkast

I only started listening to Outkast recently, but I remember when their album "The Love Below" came out when I was a kid. At the time I didn't really appreciate it as much, with their big singles bei

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Jamorama Review

In this Jamorama Review I'm going to take a deep look through the program, pointing out every flaw that I can find about the Jamorama Online Guitar Course. Read now to make sure you make the right cho

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Line 6 DL4

So you've got that new fancy $300+ Line 6 DL4, but you aren't quite sure how to use the looper function on it yet, hmmm? For most people that have never used a looper before, the idea of it ...

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Powered PA Speakers

3 Reasons Why Powered PA Speakers Knock Passive Ones Out Of The Park. Many people argue about whether Powered PA Speakers are better, or whether Passive speakers are the way to go in live music perfo

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Battles July 23 2011

When the band first walks on stage, everyone's first thought is; "Where the heck is John Staniers' comically raised crash cymbal?" In case you've never seen how high that cymbal is normally; here it..

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Facebook Advertising Lower Your CPC

Facebook Advertising is easily becoming the best way for a band to get the word out there for their band. But with the competition rising and rising, the cost per click (CPC) is becoming increasingly

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In Search Of Hipster Women!

No comment needed!

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In Case You Didn't Get My "General Mills" Comment From The Last Post...

In my last post, I made a comment somehow relating "General Mills" with "Post"...well...something like that. If you didn't read it, this will seem somewhat incoherent.

Anyways, hopefully this will clear it all up for you.

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I'm Practicing Word Masturbation!

My biggest inspiration for the following is Allie Brosh. I was recently reading a post about how her How her boyfriend would be a Headless, Dignity-less torso without her.

Without reading her article, or at least part of it, I'm afraid you might not understand the following comment that I made on her blog.

Anyways, I wanted to take a stab at how she is so creative in her writing, and was truly inspired. So I decided to do it (For just a comment!)

As lame as it sounds for me to simply share a comment I left on her blog, just think of it as...a mini article.

This is the type of random humor that just makes me fly off the wall. It's kind of like some sort of...free association thing. Where you just start writing the first related thing that comes into your mind.

Sometimes you just start writing sentences and you have no idea where they are going to end up.

Anyways, here it is!:

"Your creepy cellar is totally straight out of Evil dead!

Also, your amazing writing has inspired me to try some of this "word masturbation" where you just go on amazing tangents of anger and metaphor, similar to if a bear took a ball-peen hammer to merriam-websters' grandchildren and held them hostage until she wrote him a complex novel piece describing all the ways in which he is superior to dolphins.

And it's not that's he's entirely superior to dolphins'. The bear is actually quite self-conscious of himself and just needs a boost in confidence.

In fact, Merriam Webster is a complete moron. Because instead of writing a ridiculous novel in which she needs to somehow spin the word "opprobrious" into a 7-bar stanza haiku praising the bears internal organ superiority, she probably could have just given the bear a hug and told him "Hey you know what? You are a really decent guy, and the way your parents treated you when you were a kid was completely wrong. You are good looking, and your males parts are very large".

I think that would have entirely done the trick. And she could have saved her grandchildren from the Mechanics' "Thors' Hammer".

Unfortunately, she was not that smart at all and the grandchildren suffered a terrible, terrible fate.

In any case, I felt that I wanted to do something similar to this on my own site; but I was too self-conscious to pull off such a task, so I decided to write about it on your amazing comment stream instead.

But now that I've gotten into the groove, I'm going to post this shiz like some general mills cereal.

Thanks for being such a wonderful inspiration with your overtly-honest writing style. It brings me feelings of flying pigs and rainbow-colored lamp!"

What do you think of the writing style? Do you think I should try and incorporate some of that into my future articles?

Give me feedback here!

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BandCamp Gets A New, Simpler Shopping Cart So You Can Sell Your Music Easier Than Ever!

Here's a quick teaser for the post. I'm gonna love this new feature, and I'll bet anyone with a Bandcamp page will love it too!

"It’s true, every Bandcamp-powered site now has a shiny new shopping cart. You can add stuff to it, remove stuff from it, and even umm…check out. And yet we’re sincerely excited about it, and think you should be too. Why? Well that requires a story. It’s kind of long, but as you’ll see, that’s kind of the point."

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Also, The RubberBandits are funny guys!

I definitely found myself laughing out loud at these guys...really interesting sense of humor.

I don't really know what I think of the music, but at the very least they are incredibly funny.

The main premise of this video, is that the band wrote a song about Ice Cube, and they ended up doing a show with him because of it.

Convinced that their songs come true, they decided to write a song about flying to the moon, in an attempt that it might become true.

'nuff said?

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Submit Your Band To Red Bull Records!

I use a service called "Music Xray", which is an online service that helps bands get paired with music industry professionals.

What professionals am I talking about? Well they might be:

• Record labels looking for up and coming artists
• Producers
• Music Critics
• Online Music Radio Show hosts
• And More!

I've been subscribed to their service for over a year now, and after careful screening I've decided that it's a worthy service to be using.

I'm going to be doing a write up on it soon enough, but for now I'll simply be telling you here on my blog.

And for the news! Red Bull records is currently looking for indie artists, and you can submit your band for consideration through Music Xray.

Periodically I'll be posting about opportunities to get your band heard by record labels and such, if I feel the opportunity is neat enough.

In any case, you can submit your band Here or through the link below.

Even if you don't feel that the Red Bull Record Label opportunity fits, I recommend that you sign up for a Music Xray account, and they will mail you new opportunities every week.

In fact, they actually will match your specific songs (Using complex Algorithms...oooo!) to deals that are fitting for your music.

I've found that most opportunities that were matched to me were pretty relevant, so that is a huge bonus.

Anyways, Sign up right away if you don't already have an account!

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Live Music Performances Open Mic Night

Live Music Performances. It can be really tempting to go out to open mic nights for quick and easy gig. Why wouldn't you? Well it might not be quite as sweet of an opportunity as your originally thoug

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How To Write Music Brain Automatic Filter

How To Write Music. When you first start writing music, most things that you write are really not...all that excellent. And it's not because you are a terrible musician or anything, or that you don't

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