You may have noticed the new video shorts on the landing page and your musician dashboard explaining how to hold various studio events on merge.fm. We made these to help show you as simply as possible how to use the versioning platform to quickly and easily set these up. But don’t let this limit you to these specific events. The platform is designed to allow you to use your creativity to make any interactive experience or event you can dream up for your fans. If you have an idea for an event that needs an extra feature or two in order to launch, just let us know and we’ll help you make it happen: support@merge.fm
We also recently launched a comment notification feature. For example if you want to notify or reply to someone with the username honkytonk, just include @honkytonk in your comment and an email will automatically be sent to that user letting them know you mentioned them.
We also built email notifications for new song versions and a variety of smaller updates throughout the app to improve the user experience. More on the way as usual!
Blind Melon bassist Brad Smith is putting up some great content for his solo project Abandon Jalopy. A big thanks to Brad for his feedback and to his fans for putting up some awesome remixes! Check them out here.
Just launched the fan contributions & remix feature! Now after you buy access to a song, you can add your own ideas. Then just click Contribute to upload and post your new version to let the band and the rest of the fans see what you’ve done. Enjoy!
After I was in a band for bit and started playing out, it didn’t take long to realize that some shows went much better or worse than others. In my first band, we found out quickly that there were lots of reasons why a particular show might not go so well. Sometimes we weren’t playing tight, sometimes we weren’t singing on key because we couldn’t hear ourselves too well, maybe we picked the wrong songs to play, and the list went on…way on. The good part was that we had a lot of control over most of these things. So the story went on and we fixed a lot of the initial things most bands of first-timers go through. We started making a little money and the first thing we did was throw it back into getting better gear. As the lead guitar player, I obviously first bought a ridiculously massive amp, then more effects pedals, another guitar, and finally a wireless guitar system. When asked why, at the time I might have told you “because I want to have freedom on stage” or “I have big feet and I get tangled in my guitar cable.” Then you’d call BS and think that I just wanted to be like my stadium rocking idols on our 15 foot wide stage at the bar.
At some point along the way, one thing that started getting to us was the abundance of not-so-talented live sound guys at the venues. Who knows what the actual split was, but it seemed like about half the guys found some way to blow it. One thing’s for sure: with a bad mix, it’s unlikely that it’s going to be a killer show. Before the show, if the guy said he was a kick-ass drummer, you could almost guarantee that the drums would be thumpin’ and the rest of the instruments would sound annoyingly weak. But other times it would just be too loud overall or the vocals wouldn’t be loud enough etc etc. So you might think that this would be an easy problem to solve because all we should have to do is go tell the sound guy to fix the mix. But at most venues the way it usually went was we arrived and set up our gear on stage, the sound guy set up all the mics, then he told us to play one at a time for the sound check, and then we’d start the show. Then one of three things usually happened: 1) we played the show completely oblivious and assumed we sounded awesome, 2) if the show was video recorded, we’d check it out afterward and get mad at the sound guy because we couldn’t hear the guitar solo or whatever, or 3) someone in the audience told us during the show that the bass was too loud or the vocals were too quiet, and we had no idea whether or not to trust them.
Now here’s the part where you can stop thinking that I was a tool with a fancy wireless guitar on a tiny stage. I realized after a few months…err right away that wireless let me finally go out in the audience and listen for myself how the mix was. Early in the show while everything was still ramping up, I would sneak out into the middle of the audience while playing some easy part of a song, listen for a bit, and then go way in the back to the sound guy and make him fix any big issues. Suddenly the problem was solved and just like that, our sets hit a ton more consistently.
Worth the few hundred dollars to go wireless and risk looking like a wanna-be stadium rocker? Darn right.
Adam
co-founder of merge.fm
A large round of design and user interface improvements was just launched…better dashboards, sign in + sign up pages, and landing page to name a few.
More to come!
It’s been a while since the last post about recording, so here’s a quick story on an experience I had with mic placement. (You can stop reading now if for you: audio recording < rebecca black live…and yes that is a less than sign which should break some universal rule in this case).
So I had this $100 no-name acoustic guitar that actually sounded all right with a good set of strings on it. But every time I went to record something with it, it sounded like garbage. You read about how this mic and that mic are good for recording acoustic guitars and here’s where you should place them, then you should do this, blah blah blah. But no matter what I did, I couldn’t get the darn thing to sound nearly as good as how it sounded to me when I just sat there and played it. Then, like most ideas I get, I was doing something else and it just randomly popped into my head to try moving the mic around a lot more than you’re supposed to and see if it sounds better. So this time I had someone else play it and then I put on some ear-cup headphones with the microphone signal coming in live. Then I moved the mic near the ground, up high, way far back, under the chair, then finally next to the guy’s ear pointing down at the guitar and POW! Magic sounding all of a sudden! But when I sat back and thought for a sec, it made perfect sense because when I took off the headphones and just listened from different places, it never sounded as good as when I was the one playing it. So for whatever reason, that guitar’s sweet spot was above it right at your head (a clever trick to make me buy a cheap guitar that I thought sounded good).
Once the idea sank in that many instruments, amps, and even voices tend to have a sweet spot where they sound that much better than anywhere else, suddenly all my recordings got that much better…even with cheap recording gear. It’s actually pretty amazing the difference it can make.
—Adam Steele
Just a quick update…
We launched a feature today to let artists track their sales. Musicians: just sign in and go to your artist page to see your sales next to each song.
You also might notice that we tweaked a few other things around the site.
Enjoy!
We’re still at it and we’ve made some improvements to merge.fm based on all the feedback from artists. Here’s some of what’s new lately.
Download
We received a lot of requests from both artists and fans to add downloadable music content. So we built a feature for artists to add a mixdown mp3 that fans can download if they buy access to the song. Artists can just go to the Edit Song Properties tab to upload/change/remove it at any time.
Design Updates
In our rush to get everything launched and in your hands as soon as possible over the last few months, we haven’t spent all that much time on design. But we finally caved and gave the main page a facelift, added search, added social buttons, and tweaked a few other things site wide. If you notice anything that doesn’t do it for you, let us know and we’ll fix it up.
New feature just launched: artists can now set their own price for each of their songs. Thanks for the suggestion Isaac!
More improvements on the way!
