It's Monday again, so time to check in with everyone and give some updates about what's been going on for the past week (or two)!
I had some new cue sheets show up this week for some shows I've already been in, Little Couple and The Dr. Oz Show, as well as a new show, Chef Roble and Co. I also had three cue sheets show up for Inside The PGA Tour for some tracks that I did with my "band" Crushing Gray. Never would have imagined we'd get some hard rock placements on a golf show :-)
On the RevAbs front, I finished up Phase 2 last week and I'm now in the home stretch of the program. As of today, I've dropped 55.3 pounds overall and I'm only 14.2 pounds away from hitting my goal with 4 weeks left to get there! Unfortunately, I tweaked my right hamstring muscle during my workout on Saturday so I'm having to rest it for a bit to avoid further injury. Today was the first time I've missed a workout since I began back on April 16th. I'm feeling a bit bummed about it too.
As for what I'm currently working on music wise, I finished up a Promo type cue last night that will be pitched to CBS. Then for this week I'll be working on a cue that I'll be pitching to one of the high end PMA libraries. I'm also going to be spending some time on the administration side of things as well as some networking follow ups.
Until next time...
It's been a fun-filled couple of weeks or so since my last entry, time to get everyone caught up on what's been going on. Before I get into the music updates, I had a chance to go to my 20 year high school reunion at the end of August. I had such a great time getting to see so many old friends, many of which I hadn't seen since graduation day. I ended up getting the award for "Most Changed Male" while I was there. Needless to say, I look a bit different now than I did 20 years ago :-) Hard to believe it's been 20 years! On to the music...
I was sad to see both Proving Ground and Surprise Homecoming come to a close over the last couple of weeks. I ended up having 65 placements in Proving Ground and 9 in Surprise Homecoming. I'm not sure if either will be having a second season but I'm grateful for the opportunities that I got with both shows.
Since my last entry, I've signed three new deals with some music libraries. The first deal came as a result of a TAXI forward. The company signed 5 acoustic guitar tracks in the singer-songwriter style, kind of like Ryan Adams. You can hear them all by clicking this link. I heard from him yesterday and all 5 tracks were sent to MTV for possible use in the Teen Mom series. Not sure if they'll get used or not yet but he told me that if he hears good news, then I'll hear good news, which means you'll hear good news too :-)
The title of this post doesn't mean what you may think it means but if you continue reading all will become clear. But before I do that, here are a couple of updates about some items from my last entry.
First off, the Fantasy Factory episode is now online. You can view it by clicking this link. My cue begins at around the 17:10 mark in the episode.
Second, the "Writer's Detour" that I was suffering from finally went away and I was able to meet my deadlines. Barely, but I met them. And now thanks to the detour, I've got a few new tracks to finish in some new styles for me. And now on to the new updates since my last entry...
It's hard for me to believe that 2010 ended over a month ago! What's the old saying, time flies when you're having fun? Last year was definitely a fun one as I was able to see my dream of having a career in music take several steps forward. I've still got a lot of hard work ahead of me but that light at the end of the tunnel is looking quite a bit brighter now.
The year started off with me participating in a social networking Blog contest sponsored by Ariel Hyatt. It was during the contest that I really began trying to figure out my musical identity. I was torn between trying to be "Big Blue Barry" the artist and "Barry French" the composer. At first I struggled with the decision but eventually decided to go with being the artist. Then near the end of the year, I re-visited my choice and began moving forward as "Big Blue Barry" the composer. Now I'm at total peace with my choice and it feels great.
During the spring I began signing some new deals with music libraries, both for myself and for Crushing Gray, all of which were results of direct forwards from TAXI. I also began getting some new placements outside of the daytime TV medical talk show that I wrote some tracks for the previous year.
Unfortunately, not everything in 2010 was great. In May, Nashville was hit with one of the worst natural disasters it's ever seen, simply known around here as "the flood." We were fortunate in that the only damage we had was with our driveway, but others were not as fortunate. The effects of the flood are still felt throughout the city.
The summer was spent cranking out as many tracks as I could for another daytime TV talk show, this one being focused more on home and lifestyle, produced by the same company that produces several of the largest daytime TV talk shows out there. I ended up signing 50 tracks with them at the end of the project. It was a very tiring project but well worth it in the end as I ended up with around 120 placements on the show during the last three months of the year.
Speaking of the last three months of 2010... I had a chance to take my annual trip up to the Big Blue Madness to see Kentucky start off the 2010-11 season, as well as my trip to the TAXI Road Rally. The week after the Road Rally I found out that I had landed the theme song for a new TV show that was debuting on a brand new network that debuted in 2011. Again, it's one of those deals that I'm not permitted to disclose the name of in public but you can probably guess which network I'm talking about. I'll give a hint about the show, it airs on Monday nights at 10pm, but that's all I can say :-)
Finally, in December I got a chance to become a "Go To Guy" for the library that had gotten me placements on a couple of TLC shows earlier in the year. I've already signed a handful of tracks with them and look forward to writing more.
I believe that covers the highlights of the past year. And from the looks of things so far, 2011 is going to be just as exciting!
Last night I tweeted that I was going to be re-mixing some tracks for my "band" Crushing Gray with the hopes to pitch them to a major music library. I ended up staying up later than I wanted to, which for me means it was pretty late as I'm your stereotypical musician when it comes to being a night owl, but it was necessary.
There was a "soft" deadline of today for this particular opportunity. Though I would have a chance to pitch to them again later in the year, I wasn't going to pass up this chance. So before I went to bed I submitted the tracks. We were told that it may take between 6-8 weeks before we would hear anything, though I suppose that probably is a disclaimer for people that submit after the "soft" deadline. Why would I think that? Because I heard back within a few hours...
I recently signed a deal for a song that I co-wrote with my buddy Joel for our Big Blue Shoes project. It's more of a Pop-Rock/Indie Pop/Rock kind of "band" and a definite departure from my Crushing Gray project and the "typical" Big Blue Barry metal tracks. But I digress... so, the library that is signing the track wants an instrumental version of the track as well as the full version with vocals. No problem. So I thought...
Though it feels like I've been doing this a LOT longer, the truth is, I've only been at this film/TV/production library and songwriting "career" for about two and a half years now. Granted, I've been playing music for a long time, and I did write my first song YEARS ago. It wasn't until January of 2008 that I truly became serious about it.
During these last two and a half years, I've had to learn quite a bit. Some of it was about songwriting. A LOT of it was about song production. I can pick things up pretty quick when it comes to "techie" stuff, but I didn't have the formal background or training that a lot of my peers, colleagues, and competition had. I've pretty much taught myself every step of the way. That's been a very fulfilling process, but I know that I've missed out on some things here and there. Which brings me to the topic of this post... printing FX.
Before I get to the heart of this post, here's a quick update of what's been going on since we last spoke :-)
While I didn't win the grand prize for the blog contest, I DID win one of the 1st place prizes - a free 6 week PR campaign! Look for that to start within the next month or so... I've been finishing up some of the "busy" work for one of my library deals, ie... paperwork and lots of stems and edits for about 25 tracks. This is a new start-up library that began about a year ago. We now have a MAJOR distributor in place and the first group of tracks will begin to hit the streets in about a month. I also signed my first deal for a vocal song with a very selective music library. The song is a co-write with my friend Joel and is going to be on the Crushing Gray album when all is said and done. I'm sure there's more stuff to update you about but it'll have to wait for the next entry.
Earlier this week, I got an e-mail from Ariel Hyatt asking me if I could do a blog entry for her that basically re-capped my experience in her blog contest. She was so inspired by how the first one went that she's going to do another one. She'll be posting my blog summary on her site as a guest blog entry. Below you'll find what I sent to her.
Ariel asked me to provide a summary of my experiences with her first Music Success In Nine Weeks blog challenge. It's hard to believe that it's been three months since the contest ended. Seems like it was just yesterday when I was posting my final entry. But as I look at the calender, I can clearly see that the hands of time have moved well past that point in time.
I remember before I decided to take the challenge, that I was kind of sitting on the fence about it. You see, I'm not a touring artist. Haven't been in a long time. My dreams and goals at this stage are to one day be a full-time composer working with Film and TV. Hence my hesitation about taking the challenge. I wasn't sure how it would apply to me as a "stay-at-home composer." But after some great feedback from some musical colleagues, along with a gentle nudge from Ariel, I decided to take the challenge.
I remember going through the first chapter and just feeling overwhelmed right at the start. Not because of the amount of work, but instead, because of the "type" of work. While my wife is probably more of the "dreamer" type personality, I'm much more of the "nuts and bolts" kind. At my day job, I spend most of my time bringing other people's "dreams" into reality by doing the actual grunt work. So when it was time for me to dream big, I really struggled. And part of the reason for that was because I was trying to walk the line between "Barry French the composer" and "Big Blue Barry the artist." I wasn't sure "who" was taking the challenge. And looking back at the goals that I set for myself, I straddled the line between the two.
As the book progressed, I began to form a clearer picture of who I was as an artist. Developing our perfect pitch definitely helped solidify that "side" of me. As I'm typing this, I have a feeling I should probably read the book again, but this time, do so as "the film/TV composer" 'cause I'm sure my pitch would be different than what it currently is, which is "Imagine a steel cage match between Sevendust and Linkin Park with Joe Satriani as the referee..." in case you were wondering :-)
I remember being excited when I got to chapters 3 and 4. I knew that my web site was in need of some work and this was the perfect "jump start" to help me get it taken care of. I did the re-design myself, and while I'm not a graphic designer, I was very pleased with how things turned out. And in regards to the Web 2.0 sections, I was already doing some of those things and that chapter helped to improve my efficiency. I definitely remember feeling "victorious" at the end of those chapters.
The next couple of chapters, e-mail and mailing lists, were a bit of a challenge for me. And honestly, they still are. While I was in the contest, I definitely made an effort to grow my list, and it worked, as my list doubled in size in just one day. But once the contest ended, so did my attempts at growing my list :-( I do plan on attacking this one again as I did see some monetary results because of it. Simply put, if you follow her advice and stick with it, it works.
The other area that I struggled with, at least initially, was the Continuum program. Of all the chapters that made me wish I was back in one of my old bands, I think this one was it. If it were 10 years ago, I would have had no problem filling up one of the charts she provided in the book. But since I'm not touring and I don't have any merchandise, I wasn't really sure what I could offer. In the end, I wanted to do something that would help my career but at the same time help others and her idea of linking up with a charity really spoke to me. I ended up deciding on donating 30% of my album proceeds for the remainder of the year to 3 different charities (10% each).
It's been great trying to reflect on each of those entries that I did for the contest and remembering all the different things that were going on at the time when I wrote them. The contest was definitely worth doing. I made some new friends through the process as well as got a better definition of who I was and what my long term goals were. I'm also happy to say that one of my goals, to write and sign 50 new library tracks by the end of the year, has ALREADY been met!
So if you're reading this and trying to decide on whether of not this challenge is something worth doing, let me encourage you to give it a shot. There will be areas that you'll find difficult as well as areas that come very natural. But in the end, it will really help you to get a clear definition of who you are as an artist now, where you want to be as an artist, and the tools to help you get there.
Thanks again to Ariel and her crew for allowing me to be a part of the initial challenge. I thoroughly enjoyed it!
- "Big Blue" Barry
Some of you know about my side project with Logan Rayne Pepper that we call Crushing Gray. But I also have another project with my buddy Joel that we call Big Blue Shoes. I'm happy to announce that we just signed our first deal for a Big Blue Shoes song.
The track is called "Our Place" and you can hear it at our ReverbNation profile. The company we signed with is the same one that I signed the 6 exclusive tracks with back in April.
I know this is probably starting to sound like a broken record but once again, this deal is thanks to TAXI. But there's a twist to this story!
I tried to find which listing that I submitted the song to but I couldn't locate it. In addition to the TAXI Submission history page on our account, I also keep very detailed records about every forward and return I get, and yes, I still get returns too.
But the reason I couldn't find the listing was because... I didn't submit it! I've heard Michael mention on more than one occasion that TAXI will often pitch the music from the members without the members ever knowing about it and apparently this is one of those cases!
So once again... THANK YOU TAXI!
I'm extremely excited to announce that Crushing Gray has just signed it's first deal with a music library!
The song is "Not With Me" and it's one that I co-wrote with my best friend Joel Shoemake a couple years ago. We'd had a couple of different vocalists on it but after I started collaborating with Logan Pepper on the other Crushing Gray tracks, Joel and I came up with the idea of having Logan sing on it, which we think was a brilliant idea :-)
The deal is with a high-end music library. Any guesses as to how we got the deal? If you keep up with my site in the slightest then you already know the answer. But if you don't, here it is. TAXI.
Hopefully I'll be able to report back that the song has been placed in a film or a TV show. Until then, you can hear the song here.
It's hard to believe that I'm on my last entry for Ariel Hyatt's Music Success In Nine Weeks Blog Contest. It's been quite an experience to say the least. Some of it has been easy to do, while other times it was definitely a bit challenging. But I guess you could really say that about anything in life.
Hard to believe that it's been almost a month since I wrote the entry for Week 3 in the CyberPR blog contest. Check out my last post to see some of the reasons (*cough* excuses *cough*) why (as well as pictures of our new cats!). One area that I've been struggling with as I've read through this book is in the way that I perceive myself as a musician/artist. Here's what I know: What I know that I AM: a songwriter and a composer for film and tv What I know that I AM NOT: a touring artist My dilemma lies in finding that line between writing music for use in film/tv and writing music for mass (hopefully) public consumption. Because I don't sing, or at least not in a voice that most would find pleasing, though I can do the scary cookie monster growling thing fairly well, I typically write more instrumental tracks. And though most of what I do is guitar driven, I am NOT a "shredder" like some of my favorite guitarists - Satriani, Vai, Petrucci, Gilbert, etc... - who typically write guitar driven instrumental music. I do have some side projects with a couple of co-writers that do sing, Crushing Gray (rock/metal) and Big Blue Shoes (indie/rock/pop), but I still have a desire to "do my own thing." I guess what it REALLY boils down to is a fear of failure. I think every artist deals with that though. In this instance, my fear is about something that I'm planning on launching next month. I know that on my own, there is NO WAY I will be able to achieve the results that I'm hoping to get. But instead of dwelling on that now, let me try to get back on topic for this post. Trust me, there will be plenty of time to talk about "the big project" after I announce it next month. Ok... Chapter 4 - A Musician's Web 2.0 Guide... There was a lot of stuff in this chapter that I was already doing or familiar with. But instead of glossing over it I wanted to put the time in to it as if it was all new to me. The first exercise was to head on over to CommonCraft.com and check out some short videos on different Web 2.0 concepts. Though I was already familiar with the concepts, it was fun to watch the videos. They were short, concise and amusing. Well worth the 15 minutes. Up next was setting up a Google Reader. This one has been one of the best pieces of advice for me personally so far. I had worked with an RSS reader once before a few years ago, not Google's, and just didn't enjoy the experience. But Google got this one right. With the exception of a few social networking/community sites, I've now got the RSS feeds for all of the sites that I visit on a daily/weekly basis set up in my reader. What a great time saver! The next section was blogging and podcasting. One of the things she mentions to do is to sign up for an account with http://www.mybloglog.com. So I signed up for that and you should be able to see their plug-in is now on my blog. This next exercise was to identify 50 blogs that you would like to have your music reviewed on. Remember the indecisiveness and the fear of failure from earlier? I think this exercise helped contribute to it... lol... I had to skip this section for the time being. I do plan to revisit it later, but it will be for when I go back through this book for my "band" projects, Crushing Gray and Big Blue Shoes. Actually... I just had a thought... instead of looking for blogs to review my music on the basis of it as being art, I think instead I will look to have it reviewed more for the basis of it's production quality! Yeah!!! I think that will be more in line with my "goals" at the moment. Then I'll start expanding the list to include reviews on the quality of the art. Whew... I'm glad that thought popped into my head. I actually feel a sense of relief, as funny as that may sound. The next step was to join the Podsafe Music Network. I was glad that the book had the web site URL listed near the back of the book, but it would have been handy had it been included in this specific section as well. I didn't realize it was in the back of the book at first and I ended up going to google to find it. I created an account there and will begin the process of adding my music there over the next week. The next section was on Twitter, which I've already been using for a while. I've got things synced up now so that when I upload a new track to my ReverbNation profile, it updates Twitter which in turn updates my Facebook profile. Thanks to an article by Robert Holland from http://www.facebook.com/SocialSEO - I was able to get my Twitter feed to update my Facebook Fan page as well. Unfortunately, the specific method he was advocating, using Yahoo! Pipes, no longer works due to a change in policy by the Third Party developers. I'm still able to do it, but it's not as "neat" or "clean" as Robert's first plan was but it still does the job. Finally, the next step was to get set up on Flickr. I wasn't sure if I was going to follow through with this step or not as I was beginning to get concerned that I was starting to spread myself too thin. But I figured I'd go ahead and do it anyway. I created my account and uploaded a couple of live shots of me from a show I played a couple of years ago, a picture of me with the legendary Bill Gaither, and a picture of each of our cats, both past and present. That's all for this week's chapter. Now that I think I'm out of my funk and moving forward again, I plan on getting caught up this weekend and knocking out Chapter 5 as well as trying to do a better job of organizing my time for blogging, facebook, etc... so that I don't start to get the feeling of being overwhelmed with all the "non-musical" music stuff that I'm trying to keep up with. Until next time...
It's been quite a while since I posted so I figured I should probably at least put out a quick update on what's been going on. The last several months have been filled with lots of music, work and excitement to say the least.
For starters, I've been going through some changes with the day job which initially I thought would free up some more time for music but it actually had the opposite effect for awhile. Now, I think things are about to settle down there again, so that's good.
One of the more exciting things that happened during the last couple of months was actually getting to hear some of my music on TV for the first time! I had been accepted into a new music library as a composer and a few weeks later was presented an opportunity to write some tracks for a new daytime talk show.
It was very much a whirlwind experience to say the least. In the end, I signed four new tracks for the show. During the first two weeks of the show, I heard one of my cues get used three different times. It was quite a feeling to say the least!
This past week I've been finishing up the mixes for the new Crushing Gray album. We were hoping to have the full album done in time for the TAXI Road Rally later this week but it just didn't work out. BUT... we will have 6 songs finished. We're still working out the details in regards to distribution, etc... but the wait is almost over!
And speaking of the Road Rally... I'm actually going to be a panelist during a session on Saturday morning. I'm humbled and honored to be chosen and a bit nervous as well :-) The panel is on writing songs and composing instrumentals for Film & TV. We're supposed to choose two tracks that we'll play for the audience. Before playing the tracks, we're supposed to discuss what made/makes it a good track for Film/TV. I know one of the two tracks I'm going to use but I'm still undecided on the second one. Gotta choose quick!
Well, I still have some prep work for the Rally to get done. I am going to make a much stronger effort to keep this blog updated in the future.
Until next time...
-Big Blue
What a crazy month it's been! I had a wonderful time hanging with my buddy Logan over the weekend and we made some great progress on the Crushing Gray album.
In addition to that weekend of awesomeness, I got to hear my music on TV for the first time ever. During the 2nd episode of a very popular daytime talk show one of my cues was played as they were cutting to commercial. It was only for a few seconds, but it felt great nonetheless!
In total, I landed 4 cues with this show and so far I've heard one of them used at least 3 times this week! Again, a great feeling!
Next month I'll be heading up to KY for some UK Basketball excitement. Can't wait to see what October holds!
I'm about to head to the airport to pick up my partner in crime, Logan Pepper, or as my wife and I call him, Dr. Pepper, for a weekend of writing and rocking in the studio.
This is going to be his first trip to Nashville but we're not going to have a lot of time to do any real sight-seeing while he's here.
We've got some ambitious goals for the weekend so we're going to hit the ground running tonight. Hopefully by the time he leaves on Sunday, we'll have made some significant progress on the Crushing Gray album.
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