Hello to all and happy new year!
I didn’t really intend on taking a 2-week long vacation from this blog, but the xmas spirit got to me. Eating 50% of your annual amount of food in just a week induces laziness no doubt, and I spent some time playing around with my new toys, like my brand new Zoom H2 (portable digital recorder) that I used to seize many jolly moments.
I also read a lot and helped myself to some healthy hours gaming away. Oh how I miss gaming. A substantial part of my childhood was spent behind screens moving around sprites, pixels and what not. Now my brain dismisses gaming as a big ol’ waste of time and proceeds to hammer me with self-reproach every time I launch a morpg (talkin’ about them brains, I’m having loads of fun on this FPS called Left 4 Dead. If you love zombies, and you love guns, you’ll love Left 4 Dead. Let’s just leave it at that).
Anyways, with my co-gigdoggy Greg, who also works on the blog as editor, we took my H2 and put it to work a couple of times. I’ve uploaded some tracks to Gigdoggy’s SoundCloud account if ever you wanna listen to some music-revolutionizing material.
‘The Brussels Session at Gus’s’ first piece was recorded in a friend’s basement. He has a comfortable amount of gear for a three-piece rock formation, so we had our share of sonic delights. That take was the first I had done with my H2 in a band environment, and I was pleasantly surprised by the sound quality for a $200 device (and pretty sturdy too – already made it fall once:) Oh and the drums on that thing are made out of an old army field drum as the bass, some sort of Algerian tamborine as the snare (which really sounds amazing by the way) and a cracked-up splash. I’m still impressed.
‘The Brussels Session at PM’s is a medley of musical extracts from another jam night we did. One of our pals here is no other then the notorious MC Maboul. Believe him when he says hes crazy (maboul mean crazy in french slang). He’s capable of doing his one-man-band set dressed-up in a chicken suit. I’ve already seen him jump up to a horizontal bar and frantically start kicking air in front of the audience, all the while freestylin’ in a gangster hip-hop way to some indian scaled be-bop tango. Very talented dude.
This is just an image and not the actual soundcloud widget (wordrpress doesn't support it). Just click to go to our profile and have a listen.
Apart from playing mindless music all holiday long, Greg and I took time to plan the next few weeks ahead for a web based project we’ve been working on for some time now.
Since we started this blog back in March 2008, we’ve been posting articles on everything we found exciting and new in music 2.0 and have tried to keep on top of the new social networks and services provided for musicians. Doing so lead us to distinguish different trends amongst these social sites. The first generation of social networks for bands, the MySpace generation, is about bands communicating with their fans. The street team networks like Fancorps and the yet-to-come MuckWork, hence the networks that are about fans helping bands, are part of a newer brand of social network that focuses on concrete offline work rather than online virtual tasks (in geeky semantics we could maybe call this the dawn of music 3.0).
And amidst the myriads of social sites out there for bands and their fans, very few are those that concentrate on bands helping bands. Band matchmaking websites almost only focus on finding musicians and Craigslist and other classifieds have tons of bands roaming around asking for rehearsal rooms to share, a place to sleep when on tour, or a gig swap with a band from out-of-town, but those websites aren’t built to help bands centralize the logistics surrounding their gigging activities.
It is by following that train of thought that we have been developing a web based social service that focuses on allowing bands to share and manage those activities.
We’re currently hard at work testing and getting the last bugs out and plan on letting the first beta users in on February 1st.
If you would like to know more about our project, or if you would like to be a beta tester when we open please contact us at gigdoggy@gmail.com
woof.
