1. Diddy Bop – Noname, Cam O’ Bi
   We love this track because it gives you that “down to earth” real feeling. The barely out of tune synth in the background and KRS-one like backbeat give it that old school feel that is sure to put you back in your old neighborhood.
2. Agnes – The Glass Animals
   Our friend Bill recently told us about this album’s release – and we’re thankful. Agnes is the last album on the track and tells a compelling story in a radio ready, pop-infused dreamscape with themes of drug addiction and loss. Give the whole R&B / electronica / indie album a listen.
3. Hero – The Asteroids Galaxy Tour
   More known for their song featured in a Heineken commercial – “The Golden Age”, The Asteroids Galaxy Tour have a few more tricks up their sleeve. Hero is an end-of-the-day slow jam. The lead vocals are haunting and the big-band instrumentation in the background give this a late 70s feel.
4. Mystery Fish – Aesop Rock
   Mystery Fish is the first single from Aesop Rock’s newest album ‘The Impossible Kid’. This guy’s words and rhythm fit each other like a glove. Sometimes he raps about intricate scenes and stories, this time it just seems to be a bunch of badass technologic and multi-syllable words. He’s purported to have the highest vocabulary in hip hop, and if you give it a listen you won’t be disappointed. See for yourself.
5. Wait – M83
   We have always imagined this song in a movie. We can picture this playing just as all seems lost and the protagonist builds up the strength to keep moving. It could be a sci-fi movie, a film about war, or even a rom-com. It still fits!
6. Express Yourself – Jon Batiste
   After that M83 song you may need some tissues – or this song. What a happy and upbeat tune this is. We heard this song when Jon Batiste featured it on a late show. He now plays with his band on Stephen Colbert’s late show.
7. As We Ran – The National Parks
   Folkiness, mentions of geographic locations, and a chorus of trumpets – what we need for good music. You’ll find all of ’em here. The instrumental parts make this song and are what attracted us originally. They refrain is “We belong here in the Grand Tetons”. We had to look it up ’cause we both thought it was the GREAT Tetons.
8. 4×4 Ever – Morgon Dorr
   This song says “4×4” way too much. It’s true. But it’s a song with enough build to psyche you up, especially if you’re going to be building something with 4x4s.
9. Our Apartment – Aaron West And The Roaring Twenties
   This song tells a sad story, and it tell it very well. Guy and girl get into an argument: but it’s the small details like having lunch with her family that draws us in.
10. Simple Song – The Shins
    Just about every part of the melody is something that sticks with you. The verse, bridge, and chorus combine in a great way and build on each other to create a really memorable song. Match that with The Shins sharp lead vocals and awesome songwriting ability and you have one of their greatest pieces of art to date.

Local Artist: Don Kim
We met Don playing a We Are the 9 show where he brought his video camera and started recording everything. Before long, he started threatening to beat children at the zoo during his music and we were hooked. We bought a couple of CDs, and went out to find him on the internet one day and we found out that he’s a legit internet personality! Check him, and the Queen of Akward Louisa Hall, out below and make sure you visit Don’s website!

A spotify playlist with this month’s songs is available right here!

Banner Ads

This may very well be the first step in most people’s journey. A lot is attributed to the little known and improperly thought of planet called banner ads. People often shoot blanket statements into the air like – “Oh, that site makes its money off advertisement” or “I will slap an ad on there and X will happen”. I would like to correct these ongoing misunderstandings by saying this: It is the people who look at the ads who are important and not the ads themselves. Remember that. Banner ads are not the end all, be all of promotion. It is a sexy idea that doesn’t get the proper attention of most people and is often an afterthought of a, failed from the beginning, marketing campaign.

That is not to say banner ads aren’t useful promotion tools – or they don’t make anyone money. They are only successful if they get in front of enough of the target demographic. Let that sink in for a moment. It may be common sense – but even when this is taken into consideration it is easy to launch a misguided web promotion campaign centered around banner advertisement.

In order to make the most out of an online banner ad campaign, there are a few things you must do. Targeting ads to people who like music should be obvious, but make sure you are also targeting the correct music listener. Who does your music appeal to? If you have Google Analytics set up, a ReverbNation page, or a Facebook page, you should be able to identify the age, sex, and gender of the people who visit your pages. This is key in making sure you are hooking the right potential fan if they so happen to click on your ad.

There are other things you can do to make sure you are pinpointing your ideal fan when serving banner ads. It is important to set up a target area for your ads geographically. In most advertising tools, you are able to serve your ads to a set of countries, cities, and even narrow down to a particular radius. If you are doing most of your gigs in, let’s say, Charlotte, NC – you can make sure you are only serving up ads to people in that city.

And now to the fun stuff.

Our band took the time to create an ad campaign using two popular online advertising vendors: ReverbNation Promote It, and Google AdWords. They both have nice tools for creating responsive banner ads, though we will mention ReverbNation’s won in the looks department. To keep thinks fair we used the default banner ad tools (assuming most DIY bands would rather spend time elsewhere instead of learning how to create responsive and eye catching banner ads). You can view the ads created by each respective tool below:

Reverb Nation Promote It Ad

Google AdWords Ad

We also set up the same budget for both tools – 5$ a day. Below are two charts depicting the results of each respective campaign. In the first chart, you will be able to compare the total impressions of each tool. An impression, by definition, is considered when your ad is served on a given network. The second chart illustrates the number of clicks your ad received by day in each tool.

Analysis

The big takeaway from the information above is the cost per each impression and click is drastically lower for Google AdWords. When you take into account we spent 5$ a day (70$ total) for each tool, it is apparent Google AdWords is significantly cheaper based on the results. It cost us about 1/5^th of a cent every time our ad was served with ReverbNation Promote It, but Google AdWords only cost us 1/14^th of one cent – almost three times cheaper. Overall our ad was served about three times as much with Google AdWords over ReverbNation Promote It (32,959 vs 92,088).

While those numbers look overwhelmingly in favor of Google AdWords, impressions don’t mean much in the grand scheme of things. We care more about who actually clicked on our site (and who hopefully looked at our site for a while). Google AdWords beat out ReverbNation Promote It in terms of cost per click and total clicks. ReverbNation cost us $5.38 per click and Google rung in at 11.5 cents per click. ReverbNation only logged 13 total clicks during the amount of time we spent 70$ versus Google who got us 605 clicks.

The Conclusion

The data above seems to be overwhelmingly in favor of AdWords. Every day we were able to get a higher number of views and clicks that reduced the cost per click to our website. Great right?

Before you go out and start setting up a Google AdWords account, let me caution you. The ReverbNation ads are highly targeted – meaning they reach a smaller set of people. This is both a good and bad thing. The ReverbNation tool is set up so the views and clicks are more valuable because they reach a very specific set of music listeners. This causes you to get smaller, but more valuable (and expensive) results. The only problem is there is no way to customize your target. In the targeting aspect, I would prefer to use the Google AdWords promotion. It is a more transparent tool that allows you to tweak every detail of you campaign. On top of all that information – I did seem to notice ReverbNation ads appearing in normal AdWord locations on some of the target sites. While we have no way of knowing how they actually work – it looked like the Promote It tool was a glorified middle man to Google AdWords. With that being said – I am sure ReverbNation has some connections to get your ad in places AdWords will not – but that is pure speculation.

What can we say next? After all of this effort and looking at juicy numbers… Thinking to ourselves “all of those people seeing our name.. clicking on our ad!! We must have a hundred more fans now!”. We have to look at the results. We didn’t see any marked change in our fanbase or feel an added listener presence. What gives? The issue is there is no real way to identify the problem. You are tossing out an ad (of which most people hate and ignore) and hoping to reel someone in. It is like you are fishing – only way less successful than actual fishing. It may simply be the fact people just don’t pay attention to ads – or on the conspiracy side of the equation – ad companies fake results. Or maybe it is because we have an extremely small fan base and people pay more attention to things they recognize.

All in all – this experience has made us come to the conclusion online marketing campaigns using banner advertisement is a relatively weak means of getting new fans. The culmination of the above has lead us to believe these advertisements only work for the big boys that have a foothold in the industry already and have the funds to cast a widely larger net than us.

Thank you for reading the first article in the series Your Band And Promotion. We are working hard to help DIY musicians get the most out of their time and effort so check back to read more about what has and hasn’t worked for us in the promotion realm.

DC Music Download

The local Juggernaut. Alongside wonderful artist interviews and event reviews, and tremendous web design, DCMD offers an amazing array of artist resources that we’re sure local artists don’t take advantage of enough. Hint hint: This includes notices of upcoming festivals. DCMD accepts artist submissions via email and it’s a fairly simple process. They also put on contests from time to time and we won one! This one time, they shared / tweeted some of our posts on facebook and twitter. We were happy since they have a massive audience.

DC as fuck

Fuzzy Logic

Hipster as hell and featuring music (and some art) that’s worth more than a gander. Fuzzy Logic is a one woman show that interviews artists and informs everyone about the music-what-happenin’s goin’ on throughout DC. This blog is high quality and has a serious audience. We visit regularly since it’s got great music and it’s updated fairly often. She accepts music submissions via email. True story – we submitted a couple of times with no luck, possibly proving she has good taste?

The cool kid in class

Chunky Glasses

Chunky Glasses is a very good blog slash podcast. No way around it. They’re pretty heavy on the hipster spectrum, which is doing you a service. They have some of the best design, and they leverage that to cover DMV music and beyond. Don’t worry about the beyond part – you need what they got. Check out their interviews and musings about some of the best local artists.

How local? Even house shows

Dominion Collective

The Dominion Collective is a blog highlighting local culture and flavor, and a large part of that is highlighting DMV musicians. The site has a sleek feel that really showcases their content. Having featured us in a wonderful piece about busking around DC, we’re a “mite bit” partial when we recommend that you go visit their site right now. They do a good job interviewing local artists and make it all worthwhile.

Newest contender sporting the thickest beards

Capitol Sound

Although Capitol Sound is locally produced, it features music from everywhere in a heap of genres. They have great web design and don’t necessarily focus on the new – they’re just fine featuring a track that’s aged beautifully. A cool aspect of their blog is that they sometimes travel to other states to review festivals. Capitol Sound is run by about 5 people, mostly hailing from the DC area. Go focus focus your earballs on them for a while.

Stereotypically DC: Overachievers

This is Our Jam

This is Our Jam is a 3 woman show thanks to Krista, Kristen, and Stacey. Aside from featuring music (both local and beyond) they also include details about local concerts, sports, brunches, happy hours, and much more. They update the site often, and keep a clean site. We think they tend to feature pop, indie, rock, and folk type genres.

Updates twice before you can click refresh

WRGW District Radio

A number of GW students run this music blog and it has an internet radio station associated with it. The blog’s focus seems to be getting the noise out about local shows and they do interviews with artists every once and a while – and their concert reviews are impressive! They accept artist submissions via email.

The Hogwarts of the local scene

A Note Two Self

We’d say A Note Two Self is a blog that’s quite similar to our music blog. They’re a local band of the same name who also likes to write every once in a while. Although they might not be as prolific of writers as we are (which is prolly a good thing), they post shows and artist interviews. They were kind enough to feature us a while back, so make sure to return the favor and send them some web traffic. Much like the Lannisters, we pay our debts!

Feels like home

DCist

DCist is one of the best locations to go to for DC related news and their Arts & Entertainment section often has great stories. They’ll have reviews of concerts with very high quality pictures taken with nice SLRs. And you’re just one click away from great local news. Remember to sign up for their daily email blast featuring the best DC has to offer.

More than you bargained for

Showlist DC

We know this isn’t a normal blog, but Showlist DC is doing God’s work in terms of constantly updating their site. All a musician needs to do is send them a show and it’s added to their giant showlist that’s insanely up to date. We’d say it’s the go to spot for what music is going on around the DC metro area on any given evening.

The gift that keeps on giving

Hometown Sounds

More of a podcast than a blog per se, but Hometown Sounds is definitely one of the best known local DC podcasts. Featuring most genres, they play songs and then offer banter between the hosts about the track. They also feature local music news that is really useful to DMV musicians. They have a loooong memory of who played in what band and can often provide context among new bands forming from older artists. We listen to what they put out via Soundclound. They accept submissions, but we ain’t got anything accepted yet. Maybe next time!

Always has the backstory

The Circus Life

A project by local artist Justin Trawick and company, The Circus Life podcast typically interviews local DMV artists and other folks from the DMV with projects. The podcast is recorded in a professional studio where they ask guests to lay down live tracks for EACH PODCAST, which are then posted to YouTube. Great show notes are included with links back to the artist’s page. That’s a lot of work. All of this coupled with some great web design makes this one of the best places to get your DMV music fix.

Frequent, original, and high quality

Capital Bop

Here’s our first genre specific entry, where DC jazz blog Capital Bop fills some very big shoes with our fair city’s history of jazz. Their slick design tag-teamed with professional writing packs a serious one-two-punch. You’ll often see posts here about local jazz musicians, festivals and other concerts. Time to get familiar with the local Jazz venues folks.

It’s bebop, not Mmmmbop

DC Heavy Metal

When we found this blog, we were excited! The DC heavy metal / hardcore scene is a murdertrain that doesn’t sleep and we were excited to see someone like Metal Chris giving it its due. Chris seems to be a huge fan himself that showers other fans with how to best experience metal in the area. He’s got interviews, album reviews, news, and also covers events. He even dives deep into merchandise. This guy loves what he does, and if you’re a metalhead you’ll love it too.

Gives new meaning to Lincoln Park

Bandwidth.FM

Bandwidth.fm is a new-ish site from WAMU 88.5 FM that’s reviewing and publicizing DC area music. Bandwidth is run by WAMU 88.5, which is DC’s NPR station (thanks!). Their site is phenomenal and has a great use of color. Many local bands premiere their content on Bandwidth.fm, and historical pieces are often posted. They’re big on video. They actively want local artists to get in touch with them, so make sure you do so.

They have a pedigree

Glory in Sound

Glory in Sound is a local music blog focusing on supporting emerging artists in the DC area and beyond, featuring album reviews, interviews, video and single reviews as well as hosting shows and events to support the local music scene. They frequently interview often overlooked local acts and seem to really pay attention to the little, yet just as important, voices.

Focusing on the artist

Blisspop

Blisspop is written in DC, and features house, techno, and other electronic music from all over the world. They have a pretty big following that loves to read this blog’s featured music and artist interviews. Many of the blog’s contributors are musicians in their own right, and the Blisspop staff sometimes hosts events where their writers go and perform.

Like the beat, we can’t wait for their posts to drop

DC Rock Live

We were contacted after we posted this article by a few fans of this blog wanting to ensure that we include it. After some review, we can tell that David Hintz runs DC Rock Live with great care. There’s artist reviews and music recommendations here dating back to 2008. Also, this blog has a cool calendar feature that we like where they keep a list of recommended events for their readers. Help bring this blog into the spotlight!

They sweat the small stuff

In addition to music blogs, there’s a collection of DC facebook groups that can be wonderf’ly helpful to musicians and fans alike. Folks post shows, event reviews, instruments to sell, and provide general knowledge about playing music in the area. Rumors fly about what venue isn’t paying their musicians or how you can get a gig playing at your favorite venue. There are four main groups that we think folks should take a look at. Keep in mind that some of these are closed groups, so you may have to ask for attendance before they allow you entry.

There’s tons of variety out there in terms of DC blogs, and they each have different audiences, motivations, and goals. Some are a platform for promotion while others just wanna bring you great music. Still others seem to serve a smaller, more niche population, such as DC artists or a specific genre. If there’s one thing for certain, there’s definitely more content out there than you have time to consume. You are what you read – choose wisely.

Note: If you know of any blogs that we missed, add a comment below or shoot us an email to let us know!

1. Photomaton (Jean Tonique Remix) by Jabberwocky
   Get up and dance. You know.. In a way you would dance at a Cake concert – above shoulders only with a duckface. That’s what you have to do when you turn this one on.
2. Polite Dance Song by The Bird and the Bee
   Imagine this song had a choreographed dance like the Cha Cha Slide. I bet it would look something like a college art film. Only speculating.
3. Animal by Miike Snow
   The beginning gets us off beat – Every. Damn. Time. Try to not imagine flying a kite as the chorus kicks in.. Now you can’t unthank it, can you?
4. Compliment Your Soul by Dan Croll
   What a tune. We are jealous of the brass. We are like Christopher Walkin – we need more cowbrass.
5. Let’s Go by Matt and Kim
   I guess we are in a dancey mood. This upbeat song has catchy written all over it! The ooOoooOos will stick with you don’t listen to it in the morning or you will be busting it out at your morning meetings.
6. Black Rock by The Infamous Stringdusters
   Bluegrass without vocals. You can put this on and just work away the same way you can with techno / EDM.
7. The Story of My Life by Astronautalis
   This Astronautalis track has another artist on that effortlessly weaves their words back and forth. It’s a great song that really makes you think hard on when they’re actually speaking in metaphors. Plus – They mention DC!
8. Vagabond by Caamp
   This band will really make you think of a slightly more southern version of Mumford and Sons. When they scream “YIP” is when they go full Mumford.
9. The Hymn of Acxiom by Vienna Teng
   This might be our first a capella choral tune that we’ve featured. Vienna definitely channels Imogen Heap throughout this song with her slight use of vocoder.
10. Birds of Broken Wings by Ben Caplan
    Emo, gothic, gypsy, folk? All of those words apply here but we’re not sure exactly what to call it, but it features clarinets and fiddles. Give it a listen and let us know.

A Spotify playlist with this month’s songs is available right here!

First thing we did was google the radio show, and we were astounded to find very little information about it online. We found a Youtube video with gospel singers with the similar title and we both gulped, and wondered what we’d gotten ourselves signed up for. Turns out, Voices from the DMV is a very new local radio show produced by Antonio Villaronga. The show airs on WERA-LP 96.7 FM in Arlington, VA every Friday at noon. Each week, Antonio invites a new local artist to showcase their talent. The show is pre-recorded live in the Audio Production Suite at Arlington Independent Media, although some folks play pre-recorded music.

The Arlington Independent Media building is in Clarendon, right around the corner from Galaxy Hut and Iota Club. That means its geographically close to some neighborhoods with very good taste in music. Josh used to live a few blocks away from this building and jogged past it thousands of times (okay, okay, jogged by it a few times). Each time Josh ran by, he thought it was a place that sold tickets to music events for some reason. I guess the giant satellites on top of the building just weren’t enough of a clue, but it leads to a nifty fact: This building actually broadcasts on a local FM station. It’s the only local station that actually gets picked up at the FCC’s headquarters across the pond in DC. Noice.

We learned all this when we met our new best friend Antonio. We walked into the studio and found it to be remarkably posh. This place has state of the art recording equipment that’s available to rent at shockingly low prices to Arlington County residents. So if you’re local – look into it.

When it became time for us to use the studio, we all got to work. Antonio setup mics, stands, and other recording equipment that was needed. We got our instruments out of cases and into working order. First things first, Antonio asked us to do some self-interviews, where he’d ask us to describe our music, our influences, and the local music scene – and we’d ramble an answer his way. We’re not sure how, but we ended up talking to ourselves for like an hour, and thankfully Antonio chopped this down to a few minutes. After we got done talking – it was time to make some noise!

We came prepared to play 2 songs. Turns out… Dan had played like 6. So we were already behind. But whatever, we setup our video camera, pushed play and did a few takes. Antonio ended up mixing and mashing a few takes together via his workstation to get the best outcome. He was really cool about all of it and we had a great time playing. We’ll admit we were a little nervous at first, but Antonio cheered us on and we got into the swing of things. As we were all packing up, Antonio said that we could’ve played a few covers if we were worried about it being a short show… D’oh! Since we didn’t have a lot of original material to offer, we followed up afterwards with our home recorded track Sequestered Together to help make our set a little longer.

With everything packed up, we left the studio, and headed over to Galaxy Hut for some camaraderie. A few days later, Antonio got back in touch with us after doing a little bit of mixing, and voila! We had finished tracks. The results were astounding. The Voices From the DMV setup is amazing and the quality is just as good as professionally recorded live albums released by big name acts. Do yourself a favor and be prepared to feature the best originals from your catalog. Listen to our show below.

Once the show aired we asked if we could put the tracks on Soundcloud and YouTube. We took a still from the video and used it to create some simple album artwork. The album was called Live on WERA 96.7 FM. We hated not using Voices From the DMV in the album name, but we thought it was useful from a marketing standpoint to show that we had played live on the radio. In our Youtube videos we made sure to feature ‘Voices From the DMV’ loud and proud.

If you get the call to be on this radio show, we really recommend that everyone come ready to play LOTS of songs, bring a video camera to turn it into a Youtube video, and offer up some desserts to Antonio for his time. He’s a great guy doing a wonderful service for the local music community. He’s also got a huge sweet tooth. He informed us his favorite dessert is apple pie. Bring that too.

See below for us playing Spec, VA, which is hosted on our Youtube channel.

Here’s the Soundcloud album, and both tracks are downloadable!

There were more than a few bands showing up to compete that night:

• The Letter 6
• NOE
• The Capitol Heights
• Devin Clawson
• The Ballroom Crisis
• Existential
• Capital Offender
• Divine By Night
• Spit Dirty
• Fellowcraft

The battle actually took place in 2 distinct phases: preliminaries and finals. Winning prelims took you to the finals. Just like how we applied to the Band Battle, all the coordination between the venue and bands happened via email. Eventually, each band was allocated time to play about 3 songs (excluding stage setup). Now that’s a short time slot, but you can get a lot’ve work done in that timespan. The exact set times for each band didn’t seem to be decided until about a week before, which is pretty reasonable.

Day of the battle, we got to Vienna a little early hoping to grab some food at Pure Pasty. They sell what are essentially british empanadas, and some have curry in ’em! Unfortunately it was closed, nearly crushing our soul, our plans for dinner, and our collective self-worth. Not a good start to the evening. When we got to Jammin Java, there wasn’t quite enough room to place our equipment inside, even with the 10 bands arriving in a staggered fashion, so we had to leave our stuff out in the car until later that evening. Which was a little scary, since it was SUPER cold and our instruments are made of wood.

Jammin Java sells both food and drink so we opted to eat some nachos in lieu of “brittainadas” while we waited for the show to start. Good food mind you, but not Pure Pasty. While eating, Josh kept trying to chat and joke around with the judge before the show and get him to like us before we went on. It didn’t really work, so we had to rely on musicality and showmanship by everyone in attendance. But both of those qualities were had in spades that night. There were a lot of really good acts and we’ll touch on a few just due to time’s sake. The first band up was The Letter 6, seen below.

This band was a little hard rock, a little hardcore, channeling a sing-scream vibe with both male and female vocals, with the female vocals being mostly clean. Frankly, the interplay between the two vocalists really made the set. They had lots of energy and stage presence and definitely took us back to playing shows at The Warehouse in Kennesaw, GA.

The next band we’ll take about was just a good set of dudes called The Ballroom Crisis. Now I don’t know what happened at this alleged ballroom or why they need FEMA there ASAP, but we definitely enjoyed their set. They say that they’re an alternative rock band on their website, but we’re gonna have to mansplain them that they’re a little more toward the hard rock end of the spectrum. Here they are with a good crowd shot between songs.

By the time we got onstage we were a little bit nervous since it was apparent that we were the only band there with anything acoustic. But whatever – we were there to bring the noise. We played You and Me, Spec, VA, and All Things Go by Sufjan Stevens. Our set went pretty well, but in hindsight maybe we shouldn’t’ve played a cover song? Whatever, there was lots of energy and fun to be had. People seemed pretty receptive out there in the crowd. We legitimately thought we absolutely killed it. Here we are with a sweet pic taken by roXplosion.

Note: Photo credit roXplosion

So Devin Clawson is up next, but we have a confession! We didn’t see you play. WE ARE SORRY. We’ve checked out your Soundcloud and liked what we heard! We were busy trying to get in some extra practice for our stuff while you were on stage. We went out the back way to the smoker’s area to play, but the cold kept throwing our tuning off and we gave up. Besides, right before most performances, Josh tends to create inane fake emergencies on accident that Kenny has to solve, so there’s that. Anyway – although we were sad that we didn’t win, we are definitely / begrudgingly happy for you. You better beat everyone in finals so we can say we were beat by the champions!

We didn’t do our homework and check out the other bands first. Had we done that, we prolly would’ve seen that most of the bands range somewhere between the hard rock to metal spectrum, which may have mentally prepared us for this ordeal. But we’re not making excuses, whatever criteria Jammin used to accept bands to the show worked fairly well. None of the bands we played with that night were terrible. Every single one could make music and was comfortable with being onstage. That was great because we saw 9 bands in a single evening, and since we mostly hangout with the singer-songwriter crowd it was a nice change of pace to see real bands. And while we’re wrapping this thing up we feel the need to mention that we didn’t get the sense that this was a popularity contest, like some battle of the bands that we’ve played before. This definitely left us with some warm fuzzies about the whole situation.

Hrmmmm, what else do people need to know about this event and venue? The sound and mixing was wonderful even though we didn’t get a sound check beforehand. The parking situation was great, even with the combined effort of 10 bands bringing people. The house was nearly packed with a bustling crowd, which was a testament to the bands playing that we all could get a great crowd together on a weekday so close to New Years. And that’s about it! If anyone’s got any questions feel free to drop them below.

Artist Info

The Letter 6
The Letter 6 can be found on their reverb nation page and facebook. It seems as if they’re looking for a vocalist, so if you’re thinking about picking up that mic… get in contact with them!

The Ballroom Crisis
They have a facebook page and their twitter handle is @theballrmcrisis.

Devin Clawson
facebook page and bandcamp. An excerpt from his Soundcloud is below.

roXplosion
We definitely gotta thank roXplosion for the great pictures that evening! RoXplosion took superb pics of every band there! They are @roXplosion, they gots a facebook page, and finally the good ol’ homepage: www.roxplosion.com. Here’s the link to the amazing album of pics they took that night.

But before all that, we’d like to thank our wives for putting up with the countless practices, performances, times we have played a “different version” of a recording (“no the high-hat is different in this version”), and various other miscellaneous band nuances. If we could take one thing back about the band it would be our only true regret: the time we have lost spending it with you – our wives – our biggest personal fans. Without you we wouldn’t be who we are today, and we want to thank you for allowing us to pursue music and graciously understanding all of the things that come along with it.

Secondly, we would like to thank our friends, family, and fans we have picked up on the way for supporting us along our journey. Without you we wouldn’t have the success and attention we have. It’s truly been an awesome experience. None of our previous ventures have had this amount of notoriety and it is thanks to you we can look back on our first year as a band with fondness.

The First Dollar

Once Kenny got settled in his new apartment after moving to D.C., The Capitol Heights got down to business. We set up a list of songs we both already new along with some we thought might be fun to play and commenced jamming together. We decided to kick things off by going around to open mics and playing some covers to get accustomed to playing again. Before our first open mic, we took the streets of D.C. and busked for the experience. We treated it like it was a “live practice”.

We didn’t realize this, but, in the end, the band had made it’s first dollar. It was the quintessential “We are something” moment every entity has once they get started. To date we haven’t made a dollar in all of the digital channels from our song plays, so relatively speaking, our first dollar is still pretty important. Okay, okay – so it really isn’t that big of a deal.. It is really just a symbol of where we came from. It is something we can look back on that puts where we are presently into perspective.

Ireland’s Four Courts

Awwwww, our first show. Why did we pick this spot? Because Kenny’s lived next to it! It ended up being a good time, but we made every rookie mistake over again. We basically forgot our everything. Picks? Nope. Tuner? We don’t need tunes – we make ’em. Brian Franke was a great sport and we appreciated his working with us. We will always remember our first time out as a duo, and how Irelands Four Courts helped kick us off as a band. It was actually here that the Open Mic Challenge was birthed at the 3rd table immediately to the right of the stage. Yeah that’s some VH1 behind the scenes shit right there, holmes.

We also appreciate the apostrophe in the name of the restaurant. Well done.

Sequestered Together

Our first song took a LOT of work. It felt like such a lift, with us dusting everything off again. It definitely felt like the opening sequence from one of the early batman movies with that montage of each piece of the batsuit snapping into place in a really aggressive manner. The song was fairly well received and provided us with an avenue to start playing original songs – what every band needs!

We sent it to all of our friends, got feedback from Reddit, posted it to Soundcloud, and navigated the passageways of getting it posted to Rdio and Spotify! Those silly Spotify bitches even paid for the plays

Iota Club

Our first show at Iota Club made such a huge impact on us. (Iota club open mic review) We met Alex and Jahnel, who’ve both had a monumental impact on our band in the past year. We still connect with and see people around from that night. It felt like it was our first true integration with the D.C. music scene.

You And Me

You and Me Blogpost marked the next age of The Capitol heights – or it felt that way, at least. In ten years we will talk about it like when you study the history of the earth. It will be our “Precambrian Period”, if you will. The release of You and Me was well received and we saw it in our social media outlets and website analytics. It was awesome to see people actually talking about us, liking things, and sharing our music. We’ve written other songs, but this song is the only one we have recorded that really shows the direction of the band that we’re thinking everything will flow.

To Infinity and Beyond

Fuck Buzzlightyear. Enough said.

The Next Year

We’ll probably be finishing up the open mic challenge in the next few months. We’re still figuring out what we want to do with this whole music thing. We’re playing originals but also having great times with covers in bars. We love it when people sing along. Whatever happens down the road, we will surely remember our first year as a great one. Thanks again to everyone who has helped us have a great year one!

Note: We only wish our home set-up looked like that

We all wish we had unlimited free access to a studio backed by Sony or Capitol Records and we all fantasize about our tracks being produced and mastered by the best in the industry. The unfortunate fact is we don’t have the dough to cough up every time we want to immortalize our music to an mp3 (or vinyl if you roll that way). Our best bet (especially for us DIY-ers) is to record our music ourselves, but we find most of the time we hit record at home we aren’t as impressed as we should be with the result.

Luckily for us, there are many options available to us nowadays that open the door to near-studio quality sound on the cheap and sometimes free! We pride ourselves with the fact we record all of our songs ourselves, here at The Capitol Heights, and we want to share some of our recording techniques and tips. You can view this article as a baseline approach to get the most out of the money you have in terms of recording. We hope you find this article useful!

1: Equipment and Software

2: Mic Placement and Environment

3: Equalization

Equalization (or EQ) is a great tool to bring out the best, or hide the worst tones on your tracks. Before we go on – one thing must be stated. Do not rely on EQ to save the way yout tracks sound. Usually, if you aren’t a big fan of how your voice of instrument sounds before you EQ it, you won’t be happy with it after either. It is a tool that should be used sparingly and only to compliment your recording – not define it.

In a previous life we recorded at a studio and had a pretty bad experience (long story short we hated the guy recording us [mostly due to his personality]). One thing that stuck with us (I don’t know if this is because he said it so much or it is a really important proverb) is “less is more”. We apply this rule when we EQ our tracks. We generally pull down different frequencies when instead of boosting them. This technique is called subtractive EQ. Think of it like you are sculpting the equalization of your sound.

4: Compression

Just like mic placement, getting the right compression is often trial and error. We tend to only do enough compression and limiting during the physical recording process to prevent maxing out the track. This way we can go in and compress the audio again with a plugin and tweak it however we like.

We suggest you use a compressor that allows you to input two channels simultaneously while using the same compression settings. This is 100% necessary for compressing stereo mic-ed tracks as it helps prevent phase issues. It is hard to describe phase shift declaratively; Instead, we will point you to it in action. If you listen to the song Chicago by Sufjan Stevens (preferably with headphones during this exercise), notice the cymbal during the trumpet solo. You will hear the cymbal traveling from the center-right to the left speaker. This could be intentional, but most of the time it is unwanted. This can happen if you recorded something in stereo, but compressed the two tracks independently. Just be aware of this when you are recording and compressing in stereo. Most of the time you want to make sure your compressor is compressing the left and right tracks the same exact way.

5: Digital Instruments and Plugins

Just like hardware, software can get out of control. Without saying words like doodads, whozits, and thingamabobers – just know software can do pretty much anything you can imagine to your sound. Below is a list of some plugins we have used and seen used over the years.

• Wave Arts
• Celemony Melodyne
• Native Instruments – Komplete
• T-Racks
• List of Free VST Plugins

You might notice a couple of items that stand out in the list above. The last item (free VSTs) is a nice list, compliments of bedroomproducersblog.com, we found if you don’t wish to spend anything on plugins. If you start to price them out they begin to outweigh hardware costs. We recommend, at least, getting your hands on an EQ, parametric EQ, compressor, limiter, gate, reverb, and delay plugin. Those will take you pretty far.

Melodyne is probably the only controversial item on the list because it is used for pitch correction. There is a vast and deep divide between people who approve and can’t stand vocal correction. Personally, we think there is nothing wrong with making your music as close to perfect as possible. There is so much production that goes into recording it doesn’t make sense to stop at the voice – but let’s end our tangent there. Correcting your voice is all up to you and we understand both sides of the argument.

6: Mastering

You are probably wondering what this is. Everyone talks about how important it is and how you should have a specialist do it … blahdy blah. Here on planet DIY, we explain and do things the easy way. Mastering (in less words) essentially ensures your song is about as loud as all of the others in the world. If you are pointing out the issues with that statement in your mind, you should stop reading this section =]. We know mastering is a complex subject and there are a multitude of standards and techniques. We are trying to underline the easiest way to get a good sound.

The way we approach mastering is simple. After we mix down the whole song, we import that audio into a new project. We are then able to apply adjustments to our audio as a whole. We add in an EQ plugin to do some finishing touches, then we add a type of compressor/limiter plugin afterwards. We suggest you play around with the compressor and volume of your audio for a while. The goal is to get your song relatively close to the same volume as a professional song. The compressor/limiter will ensure that your song won’t get too loud causing distortion.

This section oversimplifies the mastering process. The above method is more or less how we do our mastering, so if you like how our tracks sound, then you should have no problem employing the same technique.

7: Testing, Trial, and Error

You have heard this time and time again throughout this article and you will hear it again. Recording is all about trying things out and tinkering with different things. You aren’t going to set up the mics and settings once and immediately get the final result. It takes time and practice. Over time you will know what works and what you like. It will eventually get easier and take less time to record different things because you will get better at it.

Make sure you mix your recordings down multiple times, play them on a myriad of sound systems, and let plenty of people critique them. Our friends and loved ones can attest to us following this principal (sorry guys… we know it gets old). We have also found a couple of communities on Reddit that will give you feedback on your music. Check out these subreddits: r/WeAreTheMusicMakers, r/ThisIsOurMusic, r/songwriterscircle, and r/listentothis. Those were helpful to us. It is important to get as many ears on as many speakers as possible. This will ensure you are mixing your tracks to sound great to the widest audience possible.

Conclusion

Getting a great sound is easier than ever. With a few pieces of hardware and software, you can get pretty close to radio-ready sound. We hope this article helps musicians beginning to branch out into DIY land and gets them started on the right track (see what we did there.. ?).

Questions, comments? Feel free to drop us a line below.

This week’s band name is: The Write Brothers.

2 dudes, writing songs…get it?! Geez. Gotta be a bluegrass band tho.

Note: Feel free to use any of our band names. We create all of them ourselves, so you don’t need to worry stealing or borrowing names or anything like that. The only thing we ask is that if you use one – let us know cause we’ll mention it!

Lyrics

Meaning & Development

Let’s talk about the song! It’ll be fun.

My girlfriend, let’s just call her Em, is in law school. For those that don’t know, law school is typically a 3 year ordeal that buries your soul in the graveyard of your own nightmares like you’re in some twisted version of Groundhog Day but BILL MURRAY NEVER COMES. Or so I’ve heard. But because my girlfriend decided to work and attend school at the same time – she has an extra year tacked on. Obviously law school is the villain in this story.

The idea for this song began over a year ago (before the band existed!) when I told a friend that law school stole my girlfriend. I thought that was a funny concept, and I wrote a bunch of joke lyrics because I had envisioned it being a comedy. When the notion of relocating to DC was swimming about in Kenny’s head, he sent a funky piano part to me which was something quite different than the music he had made before. Months later, our banding commenced, and I still was jonesing to write a funny song that still evoked emotion. That ended up being a challenge and I don’t think we accomplished THAT goal with this song. But to work towards that goal, one day at work I took some paper out to where nature comes from (our work garden) and made a mind map about all things law school.

Here’s the mind map!

Once I left the secret garden, I more or less came out with this version of the lyrics:

Once chez Kenny was settled, we started playing music out at our open mic challenge and didn’t do a lot of recording. Eventually we realized, to be a real band, we needed at least one real song to our name. So we stopped playing our shows over the past 1.5 months to get this thang song done post-haste. So let’s get to the meat of the matter.

To get the party started in here, I brought the lyrics to Kenny who thought “Hey that piano part from a while back would work here”, and we used it as our foundation. We began meeting every other week saying “Man we gotta get this song done” but nobody had a guitar part. Or vocals part. Or idea of where it was going and that kinda kept happening. We were arriving in songwriting limbo. And then, our muse finally appeared when Kenny sat back in his giant black chair like Dr. House staring into space, and then started singing the verse melody (Home after midnight…) out of nowhere. Just genius! In my opinion, that was the most important night for song development. And it progressed from there.

Once we finally had the first half of the song finished we didn’t know where to go. My early idea was to completely change keys & play both the major and minor versions of the same chord in that part of the song. (Sort of how Creep by Radiohead does, but that’s just an example.) I had never done that and thought it would be cool. I wrote a guitar part for that and brought it to Kenny who thought it was “a’ight.” We started futzing around and eventually arrived at a skeleton of what was to come. No synths. No vocal harmonies. But it was a song. Playing from beginning to end.

Here’s the part where we’ll take a walk thru the lyrics.

For the first verse, I reference the fact that, especially during finals, it’s commonplace for Em to arrive at our apartment well after midnight and be gone again before I wake up. Apparently, one of the trials of law school is the ability to work without sleep for extended periods of time. And because I knew that she’d be coming home late, I always left the lights on so she wouldn’t fall and die in the dark forest of our apartment. It’s almost happened before. And the “sing so selfishly” part is the realization of – what am I even doing? I’m not the one doing all this crazy studying and hard work. But it still kinda sucked cause I lacked my partner, which made me feel selfish.

The chorus is really me just hoping she gets out of Bill Murray’s nightmares soon. The hammer is supposed to symbolize the “gavel” from a courtroom, which is kinda weighing Em and I down for the time being. But we’ll “get there soon” and everything will be all right. Rock-a-bye.

The second verse went through the most upheaval, both musically and lyrically. It also caused the largest creative divide via the infamous “Netflix section”. With Em not home, I’ve been watching a lot of Netflix. In bed. And I kinda wanted to express my frustration with myself for wasting my life away doing that. I originally wanted to include some profanity to show even more of that teenage angst that is allegedly leaving me as my age becomes asymptotic to infinity. Kenny wasn’t a fan but I really wanted it to stay in. (You totally don’t know which one of us is writing this post.) And it wasn’t even the profanity part per se, but it was coupled with the fact that it was supposed to be so off rhythm and unexpected. We both got a little frustrated at each other, and I kept having to explain what I wanted over and over again. Kenny didn’t wanted to include profanity, because it might turn some people off of the song and there would be no reason to do that. Which kinda makes sense. We eventually settled on removing the profanity, playing the part sort of off-kilter but still in time (whatever that means), and changing the chords a little.

Instead of having intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus in the song, we tried to do something a little bit different. Therefore, I don’t know what to call the next part. How about Post Chorus 1? Post Chorus 1 is basically about how law school isn’t really changing Em, it’s just helping her find who she is. She’s always been smart, logical, quick-witted, and slightly argumentative – law school is just refining those qualities. : ) And as that portion comes to an end, we have to pass through ‘the vortex’ to get to Post Chorus 2. The vortex, which is that BOOOOSH part, is really just the last few measures of Post Chorus 1 cut out, reversed, brought slightly out of pitch, and then crescendo-ed into the downbeat of Post Chorus 2. The gap between these two parts was silent, and due to listener feedback, we knew it needed to be fixed. I think that part turned out phenomenal!

As for the lyrics of Post Chorus 2, that’s the part of the song Josh is most proud of. They really help describe his current state of mind. Em’s new friends really aren’t just fine – they’re wonderful! But sometimes, she just needs to go home. And sleep! (She never sleeps and I worry.) And I do worry that she’s creating something that’s so separate from me that I can’t participate in, but …we’ve all got our “work lives”.

After we finished the song we decided to send it out to about 20 friends via email. We included the lyrics and just asked for feedback. Some didn’t respond, some just said “nice job”, and others really gave an in depth review. We decided against posting it to Soundcloud again and shopping it on social networks. We tried a similar strategy when we were choosing our band name and it wasn’t helpful. Listener feedback helped identify mixing/volume issues, production quality, mispronunciation, pitch, and just parts our friends didn’t understand. It was stellar and we’ll definitely do it again. We also plan to post this to some of the songwriting subreddits on Reddit. Maybe we’ll get some good feedback from there?

That’s most of the big stuff about the song!

The Music

If you’re really curious of how to play the song – let us know! We’ll write it out. (Hint: it’s in D.) If you want to follow along with the song on on guitar, you’ll need your capo on the second fret. The intro is basically FM7 (no low string), GM7, and CM7, and the verse goes back and forth between FM7 and GM7. On the chorus we more or less repeat the intro, but we also drop in an Em which may touch on Em9 at times. Remember that we’re talking relative to the capo. The netflix part is a little crazy, as with each downbeat we change to a new chord: Dm, Am, FM, and Em. The parts of the Post Chorus are completely different.

Here are some of the early versions of the song, all one month apart from each other. Except for September. We were just lazy then. Looking back on this now, it’s kinda cool to hear the versions with ridiculous autotune and the long intros. We even re-recorded all of the vocals at one point.

Cover Image

That’s the supreme court. It should be self-explanatory with the law school motif. Don’t judge – we’re cheap.

For the foreseeable future, there’ll be a super simple cover image for our singles. We’re picking pictures from around DC and just kinda splashing our logo on top. DC is one of the MONUMENTous cities in the world and we ain’t gon’ do better cover art than what these architectural behemoths made after years of training! Getcher eye holes ready.

Final thoughts

This song was a first for us, because we recorded as we wrote it. As we’re putting the finishing touches on it now, we’ve still never played the song live. There’s lots of sounds and tracks we can’t play in a performance and we’re going to need to sort that out, which’ll be a lot of work. But we made the song into what it needed to be.

The song’s available for streaming and download on Soundcloud now and iTunes and Spotify soon!