Eric Guenther's blog

This would make a solid ringtone… repetitive and annoying

im losing my mind, but this is how i feel today exactly

I recently had the pleasure of playing keyboards on the first Levi/Werstler record, Avalanche Of Worms. It was a recording session full of all-nighters and an entire list of reckless behaviors that my team of lawyers have advised against disclosing here. Eyal Levi and Emil Werstler are two of the most talented and complimentary players and writers I have ever heard, and this record is undoubtedly their best work. Sean Reinert of Cynic plays drums… This monster makes the whole thing sound so easy that it’s embarrassing to consider how stressed the rest of us were in making it.

You can listen to a track here: LEVI/WERSTLER MERCH

This is neither here nor there, but I’m on an epic vacation right now… Spent a week in Amsterdam, I’m almost done a week and a half in Paris and I’m leaving for Prague Tuesday…

I’ve actually been playing a ton of music on this trip, although I was worried about being away from my normal practice and studio habits. While in Amsterdam, I played in open mic nights no less that 4 of the 8 nights I was there, usually on other people’s instruments. I was able to make some great friends and some professional contacts with (hopefully) potential for future work.

Paris was nearly as fruitful. I spent an evening playing blues with a fantastic player who taught me some new tricks, and then two days with a career jazz bass player, studio-ing out… Sharing music, production tricks, jamming together on some new riffs, recording, talking shop, and just general dudes-in-the-studio time… It’s pretty awesome how universal music can be; this guy is ~30 years older than me with countless more gigs under his belt (under a different style of music, I might add), and we were still able to relate and talk about all aspects of making music, managing the industry, and jam out.

This site had an interesting idea: Someone on Twitter re-tweets a link and gets a free mp3 from your band. It seemed too simple that they were providing this functionality for free, considering that I had toyed with the idea of paying someone to do it just for From Exile alone.

And then today I get this killer email from them:

Hi!

We at Tweet For A Track wanted to let you know about an exciting announcement and feature for your account:

You can now download the email addresses and twitter usernames of the fans who tweeted for your track!

We are having a 24 hour special, where we are dropping prices 83% for you. It is just $24.99 to enable this download feature for 3 months. (normally this would cost $49.99 per month)

To enable your account, login, and then click the Enable link at the top of your artist page.

Here is the link to login and take advantage of this special today:

http://www.tweetforatrack.com/auth/login

Please let us know if you have any questions, and happy tweeting!

- Team Tweet For A Track

……RIGHT

At least sites like Bandcamp still seem to have artists’ best interests in mind instead of a few bucks… I really wonder how many artists will be paying that money for email addresses. My bet is very few.

This will begin a series of shorter, more experimental tracks that I will release here and eventually package as a collection (ZERO SERIES). A chance for me to open up and surprise you. No rules.

I was going for a specific feel with this; rough, nasty, and big. Fun.

You can download an mp3 at my Bandcamp site.

“If this was engineered, it was genius. During filming of the video for “Down In It,” Chicago film crew H. Gun Video were faking a helicopter shot by using a camera tied to a weather balloon. The shot was a pull away of singer Trent Reznor lying in an alley looking like he was dead. The wind caught the weather balloon and took it to Iowa where a farmer took the camera to the police. The FBI thought it was a snuff flick and next thing you know, it’s all over Hard Copy (a fore-runner to Access Hollywood airing each day at 4:30 p.m.). Before this video, I think Nine Inch Nails sales were 8,000-9,000 units; after, they went through the roof.”

– Tour:Smart by Martin Atkins.

The Harmonic Center of the Universe from Jesse Stiles on Vimeo.

scary

Some great comments here on the direction of the music industry and how things will be changing for artists. He suggests that artists should give their music away and monetize elsewhere, which is something that has been said by many people for a while, but it is particularly interesting for someone in his position (multi-platinum artist) to say. Some would even go as far to discount what he says because of his success.

Although I’m not 100% sure how I feel about this, it made a lot of sense… This was the best quote from the segment:

“The true art isn’t necessarily creating the music, the true art is seeing how many people that music can touch in various ways… you can be as artistic as you want, and no one hears it and no one likes it, but I always thought the true art was trying to break through the noise and getting millions of people to notice what you’ve created.”

Watch it here: