I’ve talked a lot about MySpace in the last month or so, starting with the importance of having a MySpace profile in Part One of The MySpace Diaries. In Part Two, I discussed how to sign up for a MySpace profile and find people that you already know on the site. Part Three covered how to customize your MySpace profile, and Part Four looked at how to find more MySpace connections as well as how to keep those connections informed and meaningful.

But the proof is in the pudding – February is over and it’s time to see how my results have stacked up against my goals.

My goal, simply put, was to acquire 200 friends for each of my MySpace profiles by the end of February. In doing so, I hoped to achieve something more important than numbers – to spread awareness and appreciation of my music. As of February 28th, my classical MySpace profile had 66 friends, while my pop MySpace profile had 37 friends.

My friend counts fell short, but I still found new people who really appreciate my music, reconnected with old friends working in related industries, and landed a couple of opportunities to compose and play music that would have otherwise passed me by. And of course, I’ve appeared as a guest blogger on MXTabs! In numbers I may have failed, but in the results I have achieved far beyond my expectations.

What else have I learned? Don’t be discouraged if the results are slow in coming at first. While 106 of my email contacts were signed up for MySpace, many of them haven’t signed in for months or even years, and others have enabled settings to automatically reject friend requests from Music accounts. Not every friend request I’ve sent to a stranger has been accepted. None of this has stopped me from plugging away and achieving positive results – as with any form of networking, you just need to put in the time and effort. One of my profiles has fewer friends not because of the music, but because I focused on it less.

So if you haven’t started your MySpace yet, what are you waiting for? Get out there and get heard! Need a friend? Feel free to add me and keep in touch: http://myspace.com/candacebilyk and http://myspace.com/pommedeterremusique.

Start by browsing your friends’ friends – look for people you’ve met, people with musical interests that describe your style, and anybody who just looks like someone you’d like to know. Accompany your invite with a short introduction or write a longer one by sending a separate message. Mention why you’re interested in them and the friend you have in common so you look like an interesting artist instead of a spammer.

Look for other musicians and do some networking. Just like any other career, it’s smart (and fun!) to meet peers in your field. I spent some time browsing profiles from my area in my music’s genres, listened to their tracks, and sent friend requests to artists I really liked. Again, introduce yourself. Tell them why you like their music, let them know if you’re local, and invite them to listen to your music as well. The more you get involved in your scene, the more opportunities you’ll find to play at gigs, collaborate, promote yourself, and be heard and recommended by others.

While you generally want quality connections (people who are fans of your music), it can also be good to pad your friend count a little in the beginning. Padding won’t help you if your music is terrible, but it can make you look a little more alluring to the passerby if your music is good.

To do this, send friend requests to your favorite bands, radio stations, organizations, celebrities, YouTubers, etc. These are useful connections even if none of them pay attention to you, because it keeps you up to date with people and groups you care about. Don’t send requests to random people – some of these users may like your music, but most who accept are also hungry for numbers and won’t give you a second thought. Even worse, someone may think you had a real interest and be hurt when they realize the truth.

But what do you do to keep your friends interested? Stay active on the site. Sign in regularly, check your friends’ status updates via your “home” page, subscribe to your favorite blogs, and comment. Reply to messages and comments on your profile. Also, keep an accurate event calendar, make occasional status updates (so you appear on everyone else’s “home” page), and blog. This will keep you in the thoughts of your friends and fans and increase the chances of getting them out to a concert, release party, or merch vendor.

So far my friend count is up to 22 for my pop Myspace, and 58 for my classical MySpace, with pages of requests pending. I may not reach my goal count, but the important thing is to keep trying and marketing my music.

What will be the final results of my February experiment? How has having a MySpace Music page already helped me? Find out next time in the final installment of the MySpace Diaries. Meanwhile, I invite you to watch in real time as the mysteries unravel by adding me as your friend: http://myspace.com/candacebilyk and http://myspace.com/pommedeterre.

The second thing I found were the MySpace forums! Oh, glorious forums, filled with information from other users who have time to help the confused. Therein I found my answer – with Profile 1.0 (the older version of MySpace Profiles, and currently the only version available for MySpace Music profiles), users can customize a profile with CSS by inserting code into the “about me” section of “edit profile.” Music profiles do not have an “about me” section, but HTML and CSS are currently accepted in any text field under “edit profile > musician details.” When experimenting, be sure to start by clicking the “safe mode” link on your “home” page so that if you accidentally screw anything up it’s easy to get back into the section and delete the code.

If you are adept at computer programming as well as music you can create your own CSS template, but if you are like me and barely understand HTML, simply search the web for “free myspace layouts” and you will find a plethora of choices for existing templates. You might also look for profiles that you like, and see where those templates came from (most free templates include some sort of identifying stamp).

Meanwhile, some people have been accepting my friend requests, which is great. Oddly, though, I have no idea who many of these people are! I realized a little too late that I have all sorts of obscure people in my email contacts from message board interactions or lists that I needed to “reply-all” to. At first I felt a bit guilty for not checking who I sent the invitations to, but then I realized that they must not mind too much if they accepted my friend request. I’ve also gotten some friend requests from other musicians networking, which I didn’t expect but is obviously awesome. Currently I have 35 friends on my classical profile and 7 on my Pomme de Terre profile (which serves me right since I haven’t been working on that one much).

Since most of my time on MySpace this week has been spent figuring out the answers to my profile customization crisis, I haven’t done much to pursue the making of new friends. I have some more ideas and suggestions, but you’ll just have to wait for the next post in the MySpace Diaries! In the meantime, I invite you to watch the mysteries unravel in real time by adding me at MySpace at http://myspace.com/candacebilyk and http://myspace.com/pommedeterremusique.

It should be pretty self explanatory from here on out. Fill out the information, upload a photo, confirm your email, etc. Don’t worry about getting stuck in a musical genre on the first page, because you can pick a set of up to three genres that describe you under “edit profile > listing info.” Go through all of the sections in “edit profile” and fill out as much as you can – a flushed out profile is always more alluring and impressive than one with minimal information.

Now it’s time to make things pretty, right? RIGHT?

Or not. I simply cannot find a way to change the appearance of my profile. I see a group of themes that to choose from, but it’s essentially an administrator theme that is only seen on the
“home” page. I read help files about Profile 1.0 vs. Profile 2.0, but can’t figure out which I have. “Customize Profile” and “Edit Profile” bring me to exactly the same place. I’ve had a profile for ONE DAY and already I’m contacting MySpace for help.

In the meantime, I’m uploading my music (”edit profile > manage featured songs”). You can upload up to six songs, which is a nice number. Not too many and not too few.

The bigger question, however, is how on Earth am I going to reach my goal of 200 MySpace friends in 28 days?

First, I gave MySpace the password to my email (”friends > invite friends”), so it could crawl my contacts and find people I already know. Never underestimate the power of your friends and family to promote you! They already love you and your music. Let them know about your activities, and they will be enthusiastic when they let others know in turn.

I was floored – I already knew 106 people with MySpace profiles! I sent friend requests by selecting all and clicking “Add to Friends.” You also have the option of inviting your remaining contacts to MySpace. Afterwards, I changed my email password. While I may be overreacting (MySpace states that they do not retain your information), it is always better to be overly cautious than casual.

Will MySpace ever answer my email? Will anyone accept my friend requests? How will I make more “friends?” Find out next week in the MySpace Diaries! In the meantime, I invite you to add me on MySpace and watch in real time as the mysteries unravel: http://myspace.com/candacebilyk and http://myspace.com/pommedeterre.

After posting these words on Twitter, I was invited to write the blog post you’re currently reading. Lesson number one: social media clearly brings opportunities that wouldn’t exist otherwise. So in addition to a MySpace page, go get yourself a Twitter account! You can follow me there if you like: @candybilyk. (Note: you can follow MXTabs on Twitter, too! @mxtabs)

In all seriousness, if you are in a band or make music of any kind that you are interested in marketing, you should really have a MySpace Music page. I know, it is probably the least secure site ever to hit the internet, as well as one of the least user friendly and most confusing for a lot of us. Clearly I have my reservations about it, but it is a powerful tool and if you use it effectively it can go a long way towards getting the word out about your music.

Not convinced? Just think for a moment about those “crazy kids” (as their parents might call them) who spend hours on MySpace every week or even every day. Think about the people with pages that play music as soon as it loads. Now think about how that music could be your music. Immediately a whole new audience has been exposed to you! If they like what they hear, they will probably follow the link from the player to your profile, perhaps become your “friend,” and perhaps buy a cd or go to a show or concert. While you definitely have to put some effort into getting yourself seen and heard, MySpace is a great way to get others to spread your music for you.

This is my journey in the month of February: to make two MySpace Music pages (one for my classical music, and one for my new music project called Pomme de Terre), to spread my music, and to gain a following of 200 “friends” for each profile by the 28th. Welcome to my journey! I hope you learn something from my successes and mistakes, and create or enhance your own profile as well.

But how does it begin? How do you find friends and make connections on MySpace? Find out next post in the MySpace Diaries! In the meantime, I invite you to add me on MySpace and watch in real time as the mysteries unravel: http://myspace.com/candacebilyk and http://myspace.com/pommedeterre.

What Is Taboo?

Taboo is purely and simply a drum tablature editor written by a drummer to give drummers out there a more powerful way to work with ASCII drum tablature. It lets you create and edit drum tabs quickly and naturally in an ASCII environment without putting any complicated interface between you and your music. There are one or two other drum tab editors out there, but they seem intent on taking your input and telling you how the tab will look, rather than giving you complete control.

Why Would I Use Taboo?

Consider how you currently write drum tabs (assuming you do, or how you would) – probably with a text editor like Microsoft Word or Notepad. The problem with using these programs for editing drum tablature is that they were designed to effectively handle lines of words, rather than lines of columns of characters. Taboo was designed specifically to create and manipulate ASCII drum tablature, so it’s intuitive to use and provides many powerful commands to modify meaningful regions of text, rather than words and paragraphs. The aim is to offer comprehensive functionality while keeping the controls and interface as simple and clean as possible.

At the end of the day, tabbing can often be a frustrating process. Taboo attemps to dissolve the tedious bits, like pressing letters on your keyboard to add notes, or adding extra -’s to each line to extend a bar, so that you can quickly write 95% of your tab with the mouse and a few keys and get on to the fun part of playing your song.

What Can Taboo Do?

Before we start, it should be mentioned (for clarity) that the program keeps a few lists of all the available drums and the notes for each one that you can use in your tab. This lets you scroll through the available options with a simple click of the mouse. These lists are completely customizable, so you can add uncommon notes and drums if you need them or remove the ones that aren’t present in your song.

You can check out the documentation for a full, detailed list of available commands, but here’s a brief summary:

Simple clicks perform basic edit operations. Left clicking on a note will change the symbol of the note by scrolling one step through the list of available notes. You’ll be using this most often to turn a – into an o or x. Right clicking on the other hand will clear any note to a -. Clicking the drum label with the left/right mouse button will scroll forwards/backwards through the available drums.

Modifier key combos (Ctrl, Shift and Alt) allow you to perform more complex operations with the same level of simplicity. A single click from the left mouse button can create empty lines of tab and line breaks. A simple right click can reset entire bars or lines to -’s or delete lines of tab.

Most songs are quite similar throughout, so you’ll often be wanting to copy and paste chucks of tablature that you’ve already written. Taboo lets you cut or copy just about any arbitrary rectangle of text with 2 clicks, and provides a range of single-click paste methods to suit almost any situation, such as overwriting, inserting inline, or inserting below.

Any patterns you find yourself pasting often can be saved as templates to a kind of persistent clipboard – you can restore any of these templates to be pasted with a single click.

Most of these more fundamental operations have been implemented, but the most exciting area is the non-essential commands that are right at your fingertips for your convenience. Pull down the Edit menu and you’ll be able to remove every empty line in the tab with a single click or add/remove the lines of count below every staff. Speaking of the count, you can also instruct the program to add a line of count below every new staff you create, and update it automatically whenever you change the length of a line.

Taboo is still relatively early in development, so these commands have some great potential for growth. There are also a number of major features planned for the near future, such as Live Input (playing the keyboard like a drum kit to create a tab), Live Output (audio playback), and eventually direct conversion to sheet music notation.

Wow! Where Can I Get Taboo?

The fact that Taboo is still in active development and something of a niche product means it doesn’t quite warrant its own website yet. However, all the progress so far has been recorded in the Taboo Thread on the MXTabs.net Forum, and that’s where you can get your Free Download of Taboo: An ASCII Drum Tab Editor. It’s also where you can leave any questions and comments. There’s a strong chance anything you bring up will find a way into the next version!

And finally, a big thank you to all the users out there who’ve shown their support by downloading Taboo and especially leaving their constructive feedback. Your demand is making this happen, and there will always be further development so long as there is interest. Grab Taboo now, and keep in touch!

Reading ASCII Drum Tabs

The original motivation for tablature was to transcribe guitar and bass guitar sheet music to a simple format. However, while guitar tabs remain the most prominent, drummers have since started writing their own tabs, mainly because of the simplicity they afford.

This here is a brief introduction to the most fundamental skills of interpreting a drum tab, and by the end you should be well on your way to grooving in John Bonham’s legendary footsteps to the timeless classic Stairway To Heaven by Led Zeppelin!

Reading a Drum Tab: The Basics

The main difference between guitar and drum tabs is that while a line of guitar tab is made to resemble the neck of a guitar (with each line corresponding to a string), drum tab is more like simplified sheet music, where each line represents a different drum (or cymbal, or whatever).

Guitar tabs generally don’t worry too much about how long their bars are, or how many hyphens (-) are between each note – figuring our the rhythm of the song is left as an exercise to the reader. However, drummers are concerned primarily with rhythm, so each character in a drum tab represents an exact unit of time. The most common drum tab format is for each character to represent a 16th note (semiquaver), so a bar of 4/4 would be comprised of 16 characters.

But what do the characters mean? While there are many ways to play a single string on a guitar, there are relatively few ways to play a single drum. Let’s briefly make the very naive assumption that there is only one way to play each drum. In this case, each character in a drum tab represents an instruction to either play or not play the drum. For actual drums, a note (instruction to play) is represented by an ‘o’ while a note on a cymbal is an ‘x’. These characters come from the conventional drum sheet music notation, where drum notes have normal, round heads and cymbal notes have an ‘x’ for a head.

With this knowledge, we can interpret the first two bars of groove (starting at 4:19) in one these Drum Tabs of Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin, with the count included below to illustrate the integration of the rhythm in the tab:

CC|x---------------|----------------|
HH|--x-x-x-x-x-x-x-|x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-|
SD|----o-------o---|----o-------o---|
BD|o-------o-------|o-------o-o---o-|
--|1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a|1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a|

The easiest way to read drum tab is to simply think of it as drum sheet music without stems coming from the notes, where every note is the length of a semiquaver and a hyphen represents a rest. As tabs lack the staff of sheet music, the 2-letter labels on the left describe which drum the line refers to. There are many, many variations our there and everyone will have their own preference, but the XX| format seems the most consistent.

The above pattern is one of the simplest to play, and one of the first any drummer will pick up. You simply play the snare on the 2 and 4 count, the bass drum on the 1 and 3 (with a couple of extra notes at the end), and a hi-hat on every 8th note, except the first (which is a crash).

Reading a Drum Tab: The Subtleties

Remember that assumption we made that each drum can only be played in one way? That’s rubbish, forget it. Despite a drum set’s lack of pitch, each and every drum and cymbal possesses a range of expressions, and there is at least 5 different ways to hit each one. You will very likely encounter these non-standard ways of hitting drums in any song you try to play, so they require their own character representations for the drum tab to be accurate.

The common symbols for drums:
o = normal hit
g = ghost note (played very softly)
O = accented hit (often omitted under the assumption that o is loud and g is soft, leaving specifics up to the reader)
f = flam (played with both hands almost simultaneously)
d = double, or diddle (2 notes played in rapid succession, each half as long as a single unit of tab)
z = buzz roll (let the stick bounce on the head)
x = cross stick (palm on the drum head, stick hitting the rim)

And for the cymbals:
x = normal hit
X = accented hit (played harder with the shoulder of the stick for hi-hats and crashes)
b = bell (sometimes X is simply used for the ride)
o = open hi-hats (play as the left foot is lifted)
# = close hi-hats (by lowering the left foot

A few of these symbols (the very common X, g, and f) are used in the following 12 bars (6:49-7:17, note the repeat meaning “play 5 times”) to add more texture to the music than the previous example:

--/----------------x5---------------\
HH|X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-|X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-|X-X-X-X-X-X-X-X-|--------------#-|
SD|----o-------o---|--o--o-go--o-gog|----o-------o---|f--f--f--f--oooo|
BD|o-o----oo-o----o|o--o--o--o--o---|o-o----oo-o----o|-oo-oo-oo-oo----|
--|1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a|1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a|1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a|1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a|


In addition to various characters, there are many situations where special markup is required (e.g. tuplets, repeats, time signature changes), all of which have different implementations depending on who you ask. For more details and discussion of these issues, take a gander at the MXTabs.net Community’s attempt to develop a standard drum tab notation,

Hopefully this post has given you the insight to get out there and try out a few MXTabs.net drum tabs. If you’ve got any questions or opinions and drum tab, post away over at Tab Central!

Patience is the Key

Every great painter had it. Every great inventor had it. Eddie Van Halen, Steve Vai, Metallica, Jimmy Paige, and even Green Day had it.

Patience.

There’s nothing more important that you can acquire. I remember having started guitar at 16 years old, and all I wanted was to learn my chords, songs, drills, and play shows immediately. But I quickly learned it would take work, and over time I eventually grew to be a successful, patient, confident, and appreciative musician. I worked hard, did it every day, knowing that if I wanted something I just had to work for it.

The fact that you’re reading this blog right now means that you have a level of dedication, and that already means you have an advantage over others. But this blog post isn’t simply about music, its about everything. Be patient in everything you do. Be patient when stuck in traffic, or when trying to solve a problem, or trying to learn your guitar chords.

You know all the MX Tabs you get frustrated over? Well, understand that if it was so easy everyone would be good at it. You can’t give up – No, you’re better than that. Just be patient, and you’ll get it. Understand that short term profits create long term losses. The practicalities of increasing one’s skills slowly and steadily will make you a much better musician in the long run.

By doing things slowly and steadily you’ll actually become better, faster. So you may be asking yourself “How is that possible?” Well, if you rush into learning a song then you may have ‘learned it quickly’ within a week, but you never ‘mastered’ it. So 2 months down the road you may have to break a bad habit and re-learn that one riff which you didn’t pay much attention to. On the contrary, if you took your time, then you would have mastered the song, its techniques, and more within 3 or 4 weeks.

It took you nearly 5 years to learn how to speak your native language, so why must you rush learning the musical language?

This stuff happens in everything, not just music. Start-up businesses take time, learning a language takes time, and even becoming a decent basketball player takes time.

I know because I’ve been there – I wanted to play faster, longer, and louder than the next guy or girl, but it’s about the long-haul. I don’t know where many of them are. Some got burnt out, while others never learned the proper technique and therefore don’t get many gigs/jobs. Even if you do it for fun, you should still be patient and learn your passion correctly. Truth is, I took the long road and worked hard to get where I’m at. So as you continue to use MX Tabs in order to grow your musical horizons, just understand that you’ll get there, it just takes work, passion, and patience.

Author Bio for Walt Ribeiro

Walt Ribeiro, AKA ‘The Internet’s Music Teacher’, shares his lessons, passion, and knowledge of Music Technology, Guitar, Piano, News, Interviews, and more every day at his website. He has written full songs with his community, as well as leveraged them together to create neat experiments in music and technology, and helps every student in the world with their music questions.

We recently spoke with Jeremy, the founder, and he asked that we post the following comments from him:

“As the former webmaster of MXTabs, I’m thrilled to see that the site has been relaunched and that the tabs are once again accessible to musicians. I’m confident that under Musicnotes’ capable stewardship MXTabs will once again become a place where guitarists, bassists, and drummers can enhance their knowledge of their instrument and learn how to play the latest songs. Long live MXTabs!”