In case you haven’t noticed, we have been launching a ton of new tools and features lately:  Ratings and Reviews, Pick-O-Meter, our It Works section, and (just last week!) a revamped “my submissions” section. We launched these tools with your feedback, so now the questions are: How can you use them? What’s the best way to use them?  They are still relatively new so every single use for them has yet to be discovered, but here is what I found seems to work best.

When starting a submission to one of our listings on Sonicbids, first find something that fits your genre and relative location (if your looking for live/location based stuff).  For this I would use the good ole “advanced search” tool which you can use to filter out all the stuff that doesn’t apply to you.

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The following is an interview with Mike Pinder (yes, THE Mike Pinder), founder of Songwars and founding member of the legendary band The Moody Blues (“Nights in White Satin”, “Tuesday Afternoon”).  Besides being the man that introduced The Beatles to the mellotron, Mike has started “Songwars”  to nurture emerging songwriters with the help of the pros. Songwars is a quarterly contest with annual and quarterly prizes worth over $50,000.

Having awarded prizes to the first set of winners, Mike talks about the contest, his experience reviewing and much more.

1.  Tell us about the contest.

SONGWARS was created to help songwriters refine their songwriting skills and to provide recognition for those artists that have written notable songs.

All of the SONGWARS team has a personal passion for music and the desire to see talented creative songwriters succeed and get recognized for their musically ability. It is a way for me to cultivate the art in tangible way. (more…)

Last month I started reading a book on the history of Stax called Soulsville USA: The Story of Stax Records.  It’s ridiculously detailed (the author interviewed nearly everyone that had anything to do with Stax) and provides a fascinating look back to a very different music industry.

One of the most interesting parts so far is reading about how Stax songwriters analyzed Motown songs and then used the formulas they discovered to churn out their own hits.

“David Porter figured out the lyric structure for ‘Don’t Look Back‘ and it applied to a number of Motown hits.  He deduced that they all had an opening that laid out the scenario, followed that with a bit of action, and then some sort of denouncement.  All were in first person, and none of them ended with complete resolution.” (page 91)

The first song that David Porter wrote using that formula (with Isaac Hayes as a writing partner) was ‘Hold on I’m Coming‘.

Whats your take on the Motown formula?

By Philip De Lancie

Big budgets, giant studios and seasoned engineers are becoming increasingly infrequent, and more and more musicians are recording their music at home. This article, the first in a multi-part series from Line 6, explores and demystifies the fundamentals of home recording: everything from software to interfaces and beyond. Bookmark the Line 6 Lounge and don’t miss a thing!

Whether you’re a singer-songwriter or in a band, the quality of recordings you can make at home today is vastly improved compared to the early days of Tascam Portastudios some three decades ago. But the same technology that gives you more power to make your musical ideas heard has also brought a huge increase in the variety of different options and equipment. Familiarizing yourself with it all can be a bit overwhelming, especially if you’re just getting your feet wet. The key is to break things down into the basic building blocks you’ll need, and to look at each in turn to see how it fits into the big picture. That’s what we’ll be doing in this series of related articles on home recording. We’ll start by looking at the hardware at the heart of today’s home recording setup: the computer on which you’ll run digital audio recording software in order to create a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW).

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This article was written by Ben Priceat Sweetwater. We’ve publishing an entire series of articles in the Lounge from Sweetwater. Keep your eyes peeled and check back often! And now for some motivation.

Equalization – or EQ, if you prefer – was created in the early days of telephony to counteract the frequency loss in the signal when it was sent over long transmission lines. Broadcast and studio engineers adopted the technology as a creative tool for adjusting the timbre or sound quality in reproduced sounds.

There are tons of resources out there for understanding the technical side of EQ, so I won’t get into that side of it here. In this article, I want to get into a more esoteric topic: microphone placement as EQ. Yes, before you reach for the EQ in your desk, rack, or DAW, try moving that microphone around. The relationship of mic placement to sound source offers unlimited variances in tonality and frequency response.

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Samantha Feld from Filter Magazine tells us about their “Discovering the Undiscovered” program, the submissions they receive and what bands are doing right and wrong when they submit.

In its seven-year history, FILTER has become the premiere music lifestyle publication covering on-the-verge bands and cutting edge musicians for the intelligent music lover. The bi-monthly magazine also features avant-grade authors, filmmakers and artists, and has established itself as the editorial voice for independent music enthusiasts

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