Placement on HGTV's Real Estate Intervention

In addition to the MTV placement I also found out about another placement today on HGTV's show Real Estate Intervention.

You can view the episode online at the following link:


http://www.hgtv.com/video/do-i-stay-or-do-i-go-video/index.html

Their video player counts down instead of up. You can hear my track, "I Said Too Much," starting around the -20:26 to the -19:56 mark.

Placement on MTV's Pete Wentz: EMOgul

I found out earlier today that I had a track placed on MTV's Pete Wentz: EMOgul show and I was able to find the clip online.

You can view it at the following link:

http://www.mtv.com/videos/misc/451732/ema-2009-pete-wentz-emogul.jhtml

My track is used from around the 0:13 - 0:39 mark. It's one of my pop-punk tracks.

Hard work really does pay off

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 Need Your Help

I'm sorta having an identity crisis. OK, actually... I think I've resolved the crisis part, but now I need some help. Confused yet? Let me explain what's going on.

A few months ago I participated in a blog contest. One of the areas that we had to complete was coming up with a "perfect pitch." In other words, we needed to be able to describe our sound/music within 15 seconds. This is also known as the "elevator pitch." I actually didn't have too difficult a time coming up with mine (it's the phrase on my site that starts with "Imagine a steel cage match...") but that was because I had decided in the previous section that I was going to take on this contest as "Big Blue Barry, the artist" and not "Barry French, the composer."

Fast forward to a couple of weeks back. I found out that I was one of the 1st place winners in the contest and I was going to receive a free 6 week PR campaign. And that's about the same time when my identity crisis hit...

Stories From The Studio: Printing FX

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.