Off Piste
URL/IRL Vol5
Hi all, I’m going to work extra hard this volume, to make up for the lack of one last week. It turns out that going on holiday for two weeks, subsequently getting ill on the travel home, starting ADHD medication for the first time and returning to a busy job, creates a slightly daunting adjustment period.
Who would have guessed?
This week, alongside the usual content, I’m going to take a look at a few different things we can do to financially supplement our endeavours as music producers and creatives.
This week I’ll be writing about:
Finances, Automations, Tech Nerds
Free VST - Review
Community - URL
Bristol News
Finances, Automations, Tech Nerds
Confusing title, right?
As we know, VST’s and synths cost money. Having someone write up a great EPK costs money. Mastering engineers cost money. We can supplement our self releases via our day jobs, and that’s a perfectly normal consideration for someone who doesn’t earn masses of income through their musical career, but there are other options that I’ve been personally exploring, that I wanted to share.
I’ve come up with a little pipeline that I’m building, for financing my musical endeavours and sharing it in the hope it might inspire people:
Additional Income > Bank > Saving Automations > EP Funded/Synth Purchased + Monthly Subscriptions Paid Off
Let’s start with additional income.
If you are savvy enough to produce music, then it goes without saying that you can utilise technology to some degree. There are a number of legitimate ways online to earn some extra income that don’t involve spamming your friends with links to buy Herbalife via social media, that don’t require masses of your time and can pay quite well from a time spent/payment received perspective.
Prolific.co is a survey website that actually pays well, and is varied in the types of surveys you do. Most of it is providing data for PHD research, with some product design, consensus data and market research filling in the rest.
Sometimes you will engage in something slightly more exciting, like betting experiments for some unknown university in the Netherlands, for example, and you sometimes can earn additional bonuses for winnings. It’s honestly not that boring, and all the surveys are listed with their earnings in an hourly rate - this ranges from roughly £5ph up to £15/16ph and most surveys are less than 20 minutes (often less than 8min), meaning it’s great to dip into, if you have 20 minutes spare on your lunch break.
Usertesting.com is a functions and application testing website.
Basically, you are directed through a website via a box in the corner of the screen that contains instructions whilst the site records your screen - you speak out loud about your journey through the site and assess how easy you’ve found navigating the site, completing little tasks as you go along. It’s pretty easy going and it pays well.
Most times I’ve reviewed websites, it’s taken 10-20minutes per session and you get paid $10 per recording uploaded, via Paypal.
Both of these sites vary in terms of the amount of surveys and sessions are on offer, but the more you do, the more regular they become. Both pay out through Paypal, so no tax forms to worry about, either.
For perspective, yesterday, I sat down for an hour before work to get involved - I recorded two sessions via usertesting (both 15-16min each), and took a 10 minute survey on Prolific.co.
Time spent: 41min
Earnings: £18 (this is estimated, as Dollar vs GBP conversions shift regularly).
It’s not bad going really, is it?
After a while, you can expect one, maybe two tests you will be eligible for on Usertesting per day, which equates to £8-16 at current conversion - Prolific surveys can net you £3/4 a day, with not masses of time spent.
It’s not going to change your life, but if you do that for three days every week - that’s your Splice and Roland Cloud subscriptions paid for, in the first week, and the remaining three weeks could pay for an entire EP release, if you are savvy.
Next Step, Banking & Automation
I have a bank account with Monzo - it’s a pretty known bank in the UK and offers a quick, easy way to do banking, with some cool additional features. Specifically I’m in the process of setting my Monzo account up so it solely deals with my musical + supplementary income/outgoings..
Why? Automation, in two stages
Firstly, automating direct debits, in the form of pots. We can set up a pot in which all direct debits are paid from, separate to our main account, so that we can keep our outgoings separated from our income.
We schedule the date in which money is automatically taken from the main account to cover the cost of the outgoings - let’s say 1st of the month. This means, you will always have the sum total of your direct debits set aside, and you can forget about it.
Next step is setting up something fun like the ‘1p savings challenge’ via IFTTT.
IFTTT is an app in which you can utilise ‘applets’ to interact with various apps or functions that your phone is capable of doing. It’s available on both Android and IOS, and is capable of doing some pretty interesting stuff, in terms of automations.
So, for example, I can have an applet that turns off my WIFI setting on my phone when I leave my home, or sync my Soundcloud ‘liked’ tracks to a playlist on Spotify.
The ‘1p savings challenge’ is a savings automation that puts money in increasing increments, into a savings pot. So, day 1 - your automation would put in 1p into savings, day 2, 2p and so on, and so on. Your end result on day 365 is £667.95 - that’s a new pair of second hand monitors, a fresh new synth, or sound treatment for your studio, the possibilities are endless.
Result
Time spent x3 days a week: 1-2hrs - potential additional monthly income: £150-£300.
Direct Debits are tucked away safely, and your savings are slowly accumulating, alongside your bank balance growing.
It takes a bit of time growing your user score on usertesting and prolific, but it’s well worth investing the effort.
Free VST - Review
This tool is marketed as a glitch effects VST, which it does very well - but it has a much wider scope as a sound design sculpting tool in itself, as the below video goes into with a good bit of detail.
It’s worth mentioning that Fracture has since had a GUI overhaul, and is now more intuitive to use since the above video too.
Used sparingly, Fracture can provide some classic ‘Sabres of Paradise’ vibes to your mix, and used heavily can push out some full Autechre sounding chaos.
Community - URL
This week we look at Pianobook.co.uk - the global community of samplists and contributors who have together created over 1000 virtual instruments for Kontakt and Decent Sampler, from entirely original recordings. Absolutely mental.
The site community also has an active discord channel, with members collaborating on monthly challenges, often in the form of assisting in sample projects.
Not only that, the sample libraries and virtual instruments are virtually all free too!
This is an incredibly comprehensive library of recordings formatted into virtual instruments (which is amazing in itself) and the sheer depth and quality of what you can find is mind blowing.
Let’s look at Hunter’s Hammond
“The Hammond Rhythm II, is one of the last home/consumer models that Hammond manufactured using tonewheels (honest to goodness metal wheels which spin in the chassis of the organ).
This means warbling, inconsistency, and noise <3”
This is a collaboration between two Pianobook members, Hunter (and girlfriend) on recordings, and member obolig, who did the Kontakt Sampler formatting, creating an incredible instrument that sounds perfect, and has 19 different presets for different styles of playing.
The site features a review system, where other members rate the following:
Sound
Character
Playability
Inspiration
GUI
Members also leave highly detailed feedback too - this no doubt contributes to the incredible overall level of quality found on the site.
Many people are aware of the quality of LABS by Spitfire audio, but I reckon Pianobooks instruments comfortably match the quality of recordings and because of the use of Kontakt sampler and Decent sampler, often beat LABS in terms of GUI functionality (which I’ve found to be almost unusable in the past).
This site is an absolute dream for composers, sound designers, hobbyists and ‘garden variety’ audio nerds. Utterly astonishing stuff - wish I’d found it sooner.
Bristol News
Birthmark has a huge new release forthcoming on Cold Light Music: 28/10/22.
The first track available for preview: ‘Black Sheep’ is beyond powerful.
Brutally honest, thought provoking prose laid over an incredibly intricate instrumental that wouldn’t sound out of place in a Silent Hill OST. Really excited to hear the rest.
If you want to get a clearer picture of what J is about:
Psychotherapy Sessions + Illegal Data have announced the lineup to their inaugural spooky Halloween collaborative show for 2022 and it does not disappoint:
PTS x Illegal Data Halloween, Saturday 29th, 2022
Exchange, Bristol
9pm - 4am
Kai Whiston
Jennifer Walton
DJ Fingerblast
Jurango
Silver Waves
Buffee
cutmesum.flac x NE$$
Room 2: Health & Beauty
MICA x Ophanim x Pearl
Psychotherapy Sessions Resident and all round very excellent DJ & Producer Jurango has a busy Autumn/Winter ahead, with a Love Inn residency starting late October - running through til December.
Dates are as follows:
8th October – The Cider Box. This is one of Bristol’s best kept secrets – amazing cider + incredible inhouse rig ‘Murmur Sound system’.
27th October – first of the Love Inn residencies: Jurango all night.
29th October - PTS x Illegal Data - Halloween special - Exchange
24th November – The Love Inn: Jurango b2b Special Guest (Livity Sound) all night.
15th December – The Love Inn: Jurango all night long#
Kate Havoc and myself, went B2B for a power hour on Bristol’s brilliant and relatively new radio station Longthrow Radio - it was the best fun I’ve had on radio in AGES and I can’t wait for another B2B with Kate, as she’s one of my fav Bristol DJ’s, easily.
You can find the 1hrish mix recording and a very cute picture of me and Kate here. The mix contains remixes of the following artists:
Vengaboys, The Whispers, Atomic Kitten.
Finally
Also, at time of reading this: Big Sean Mcgovern (1020 Radio head honcho) will now officially be the grand age of 30! Happy birthday, for yesterday mate.
See you all next time.