An Eco-Friendly Soapbox

Recordings

Hey everyone!

Thanks for visiting my blog to read about my latest project! I wanted to explain what it is, and most importantly, why I’m doing it.

Lately (as in, in the last few months), I’ve made a serious effort to ramp up my efforts with my own music (hence the recent spate of gigs). I’m not sure how much that shows, because It’s been hard to be consistent! I’ve enjoyed gigging again, but I’ve found it extremely difficult to stay on top of everything. I moved house in February which took up loads of time, I work as a tutor with Songschool, I have seven piano students, I also try help out several different artists with online stuff (Tiger Cooke, Suzanne Savage), and organisations (Thereisbear, The Kodály Society) with their own promotion in my spare time, as well as gigging once a week (now every two weeks) in Seán Mc D’s in Harold’s Cross. I’m also so broke that if I want to do a gig over the next two months, I can’t because I won’t be able to afford the taxi fare. And that’s not a complaint, that’s how it goes, and it’ll be this way for a long time…if not always. Money is - for most of us - terrifyingly tight at the moment, and that limits what I can do, but I’m trying to figure out a few little ways around it, hence this latest project.

I’m blessed in that at most gigs, someone I don’t know comes up to me and says they’ve really enjoyed what I’ve done. This is good, better than good, this is fantastic. My music reaches people! Yay! But the pragmatic side of me knows that that’s not enough - you also need to do your best to engage between gigs, so that they’ll consider coming to the next one too. So I’m in a place where I feel like even though I’ve a lot of growing to do as a performer, I’ve been able to reach someone with my music live, but don’t have recordings of most of the material I perform to back that up after the event. Grrr. BUT! I do my best not to dwell on problems, I like to try to cut to the solutions as quickly as possible.

So! I’ve been researching over the last few months, calling people, meeting people, applying for funding, discussing with friends, doing up budgets…I think I’ve arrived at a decent estimate of how much this is going to cost (this including paying all the musicians who work on it; this part is extremely important to me). I’ve come to the conclusion that It’s not going to happen within the next four months. This album would include the fairytale songs, a few older songs and a few newer ones. It’s going to take a while more, and it may involve a fundit campaign, where I try and get people to cover some aspect of the costs of the album.  So while I’ll keep working on it, in terms of output, that’s that for a while.

Cue the work I do with Songschool. Lucky, lucky creature that I am, I get to go into primary and secondary schools and help young people write and record songs, podcasts, movies, and much more. My colleagues are musicians, sound engineers, who can handle any musical style thrown at them. It’s really kept my creative side going. It’s also brought me in closer contact with ipads - one evening my boss Peter told me to take one home and try out garageband on the ipad. I definitely didn’t need to be told twice. In a two hours I wrote and recorded an entire song on it. And I was pretty happy with the result. I played it for a few friends who really liked it and it got me thinking: Huh. I might be onto something here. I really should put this up somewhere, or do something with it. Cue Laura Sheeran, who is always recording and creating, but most importantly she’s always sharing her creativity with the people who follow her. Her output over the last year has been crazy - her new album What the World Knows was preceded by a mini-album called Murderous Love (which itself was preceded by another album, the Paperdolls OST ). Not to mention being Glitterface in NanuNanu. Inspiring? Yes. But recently that concept of the minialbum really arrested me. What a great idea! Creativity is funny: in my mind, my album is going to be a culmination of a lot of work from the last six or seven years, but that doesn’t mean I’m not creating now. So inspired by the new technology and other musicians, I’m going to do a mini album of my own on an ipad. 

Simple concept, one that’s already worked for quite a few bands: create and record a few songs on Garageband on an ipad and release them. So that’s what I’m doing. I have five songs written. Some of the vocals will need redoing, and the styles vary wildly - but my taste varies wildly, so that makes sense. I may also include some entirely vocal stuff (I’ve been working on a loop pedal lately, that’s been fun). My plan is to release a new one every week (maybe two weeks), and see what sort of uptake they get. I’m hoping this will be fun for people who’ve been supporting my music, and a really good way for me to gauge if launching a funding campaign will actually work. BI-WINNING.

Okay, so when is this happening?

Well, the songs are mostly finished. I’m expecting to get the first song up NEXT WEEK.

EXCITED?!

I AM. =D

Oh, one more thing.

There may be videos to go along with these songs. This may or may not involve one certain other artist that I used to gig with quite a lot. More on that one later :)

In the meantime, thank you so much for reading this post. I really appreciate your support and your interest in my music. If you feel like you’ve got friends who might like my stuff and you can share my facebook page, my twitter account, or any other place where I exist online, I cannot tell you how helpful that is.

Grá, Grá, Grá!

Emma

Facebook - Twitter - Bandcamp - Soundcloud - Reverbnation - Breaking Tunes - Website

Upcoming stuff!

Here’s a little something I sent out to my mailing list this morning, I thought I’d share it here too! Look at me, doing stuff! So much stuff! Feel free to share!

THIS THURSDAY, April 12th, The Mercantile, Dame Street, Dublin City Centre (Ireland):
Doors 8pm, FREE entry.
Curating “Imagine This”, with music from Tom Cooney, Stu Daly, myself and one extra special guest TBC.

Friday May 4th, Citóg at The Cellar Bar, Eglington Street, Galway City (Ireland):
Doors 9.30pm, FREE entry.
Line up TBC!

Saturday June 30th, <As a member of the Irish Youth Choir>, St. Fin Barre’s Cathedral, Cork (Ireland)
Time TBC
Part of the Cork Midsummer Festival

Sunday July 1st, <As a member of the Irish Youth Choir>, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin (Ireland)
Time TBC

Saturday 11th August, <As a member of the Irish Youth Choir>, St. Canice’s Cathedral, Kilkenny (Ireland)
Time TBC
A concert on the opening weekend of the Kilkenny Arts Festival.

Sunday 12th August, The Sunday Roast at The Mercantile, Dame Street, Dublin (Ireland)
9.30pm, FREE entry
Delighted to be playing at the very popular and delicious Sunday Roast!

I have a gig!

…and I think you should come along.

Venue: Bewley’s Café Theatre, Grafton Street, Dublin

Date: Saturday 30th of July

Doors: 8pm

Price: €6

I play music at the piano, occasionally I get a string sextet together to help me. I’m not sure if I’ll have one this time, but I’ll do my best. Support from the fantastic Stu Daly of Chewing on Tinfoil, and hoping to get one other act confirmed too. Really looking forward to this one, but slightly terrified because I haven’t had a solo slot in ages!

After that, I also have another gig (I know, I’m going mad here, right?!).

Venue: Kevin Barry Room, National Concert Hall

Date: Thursday 11th of August

Price: €10/€8

This features me as a conductor of a newly formed choir, Cogar. We’re a classical choir, but we fully believe in making all music engaging, so even if you’re not generally into the classical thing, I recommend coming along, this programme was put together with you in mind. We’ll be exploring the idea of Heroism, and looking at how it crops up in lots of different ways in different music. This will be a really great show, don’t miss it!

We will be doing a preview of this gig at the Ruby Sessions in Doyle’s on Tuesday, August 9th, fiver in and it’s for charity, so that’ll be fun!

END TRANSMISSION

Where’s yer manners!?

We’re all e-mailing, texting and messaging each other these days.

I was chatting with a friend of mine about text messaging a month or so ago, and we both share a pet peeve: people not texting back. There are a few situations where this particularly annoys me:

1. Casual social text/ invitation to something:

I text someone to say “Hey, I’m heading to the cinema, care to join?” or some such casual enquiry after health, availability for meeting up for tea or some such thing. To me, if you’re the recipient of this text and you can’t (or just aren’t up for it), you SHOULD text back and say you’re not free. I think you should reply within the day out of respect to that person. Of course, if your phone is broken, you’re without credit, out of battery, out of the country, very busy in work, that’s cool, but I’d be inclined to let the person know that I was busy, wasn’t free, etc. as soon as I had means to reply.

2. Text conversations.

I’ve quickly become allergic to these, because what inevitably happens is one party will just stop texting back mid conversation, and to me that’s extremely rude. To me, it’s the same as being in a conversation with someone standing right in front of you, and while you’re in the middle of a sentence they turn their back on you and walk away because yeah, they found something better to do. I’d much rather a text saying “it’s been nice texting, but I’ve got to go, talk to you soon!”…does that really take a lot of effort? I think if you’re not going to do the courtesy of informing the person you’re texting that you’re no longer available to chat (and that’s understandable, because text conversations unfold over a longer period of time), I think you shouldn’t start them. And if the other party wants to, I think you should tell them straight up that you’re busy and you’ll talk to them soon. Again, obviously stuff happens and if something kicks off in work let’s say, you may be so busy you don’t have the time to send such a message to someone you’ve started texting. In my opinion, you send it later that day when you have time. You explain to the other person that you got a bit busy and couldn’t reply - I don’t mean apologise, I just mean informing the person that you weren’t ignoring them.

3. Professional queries.

I don’t do this a lot, but occasionally if I’m setting up a gig I’ll need to get in touch with a few musicians, or some such thing. So I might just text a few people asking them to help me out, especially if I’m in work. I think if you’ve given out a number and you get a text asking you to be involved in some sort of project, you should reply as a matter of priority (I’m talking about a personal number you’ve given to someone and indicated that you can take professional/work/project enquiries on that number). I think it’s unprofessional not to do so. The same goes for e-mail. I think it’s unprofessional not to get back to someone within the space of a week  - especially if you indicate to people that this is the address you are available on for those queries.  And I think that if your reply is later than around…two days or so, you need to acknowledge that you’re getting back to them a bit late. The same thing goes for a project you’re involved in. Unless it’s the case that you’re waiting for an answer from someone else before you can send a reply, if you haven’t replied within two or three days, it just strikes me that you’re not taking it seriously. Now when it comes to the e-mail inbox, my stance on this one is open to change, and it heavily depends on what your line of work is. If you’re a touring musician, like Amanda Palmer, and you get thousands of e-mails every day, maybe 10 that are related to projects you are already involved in that are coming up soon, but you’re, well, touring and performing most of the time, obviously you can’t spend your day replying to e-mails that don’t directly relate to what you’re doing. I’m sure you could be waiting a month or two for a reply from someone as busy as that. But I still think if you’re not the type who can reply to e-mails relatively quickly, you should warn people of this when you give them your e-mail address. That way everything is clear. I sit at a desk for a lot of my working day, so if you e-mail me, you get a reply within a day (unless I’m waiting on information from someone else for you). I rely on people getting back to me quickly to do my job, so yes, I am biased in this respect - I need my answers fast! - but I still think you need to stipulate when you’re giving out  contact information what is best for you - “Don’t call me, I’ll forget what we’ve talked about, e-mail me.” Or “I’m not great with e-mail, it’s better to call”.  If you’re supposed to be contactable on the address or number, you need to reply within a decent time frame and not leave people hanging (unless of course, you’ve indicated that they’ll be waiting for a bit for a reply). 

What I’m getting at, and what my good friend pointed out to me is that we have no established etiquette for texting and e-mailing - but texting in particular. In office environments, as far as I can see, people have directly taken the etiquette of letters and posting letters and translating them to e-mail, but the more casual user has no guidelines whatsoever. My friend told me that if he texts someone with work for them (most of them would be musicians, who may not be able to pick up the phone for a call a lot of the time), and they don’t reply within two days, he doesn’t contact them at anymore - unless of course there’s a good reason why they couldn’t reply. This kind of etiquette is important. It affects you professionally, socially…here’s what I think the general guidelines should be. I’ve added in a few other things that annoy me too, you’ll be delighted to see.

1. Reply, reply, reply.

If you have made your contact information available to someone, you need to reply to communication they have sent you as soon as possible (unless of course you’ve told this person that you don’t really want to speak to them anymore). If you cannot reply within a day, you should let them know you were busy but received their message as a courtesy to them.

2. Don’t converse over text message unless you’re willing to sign off when you can’t continue the conversation.

3. Don’t use text speak in e-mails or public profiles.

In text messages these are bad enough. It used to be that you used text shorts in messages because there was a character limit and you needed to conserve character numbers in order to get your message across. That was understandable. It’s very rarely necessary to do that now. When you send me an e-mail or set up a profile that has no regard for spelling or grammar, you show me that you don’t think the people who are reading your e-mail/ profile are worth using the spell check function for. It’s dangerous. I got a e-mail into my inbox the other day - a web designer looking for work. “Id love 2 design ur website 4 u. check out my samples here. thnx.” DELETE. If you can’t spell, I don’t want you anywhere near my website. I’m not going to have customers visiting a page designed by someone who thinks so little of their employer BEFORE THEY’RE HIRED that they don’t bother to write out full words. If I’m not worth adding a full stop or a comma into the body of your text message, maybe I don’t want you communicating with me at all. We use language to express meaning to each other, and I think when you give the text speak a miss and make sure you’ve got at least your full stops and commas in there, it shows a desire to be clear and to communicate. Text speak and poor grammar (although the latter less so, sorry purists) just tell me that you don’t think other people are worth that effort.

That’s all I’ve got to say for the moment.

Thoughts?