This is it!

If you wanna be mentioned as well, feel free to add comments.

We are starting with epic cover of “Next To You” of Chris Brown and Justin Bieber. The song sounds different and.. better!

Well, ok, let me explain in the “top 10 shitty eeky ways of becoming somewhat green and ugly” style.

Define the goal.

I already did and made a bold move. Told everyone that I am releasing a single this Autumn. Everyone said something like “Hey, wait, you can play some instrument?”

Of course I can, I did this pretty well for 7 years when I was younger. After a 5 year break I continued, yet with guitar instead of violin.

Does anyone want to be envolved as well? We have got the whole summer, 3 months for our creative juices to transform into something people can actually hear and enjoy.

Beatport announced its change from flash version to the new html5 one. So what does that mean for the users?

First of all, it’s great! The web standards are upgrading, so the sites should upgrade as well. The new html5 standard is a new worldwide approved web standard for building websites. What’s the problem with previous versions?

The Flash sites

Adobe Flash technology is widely used across the web. It is used for streaming video, music and other digital content on the sites. The largest service ever using Flash is YouTube. The problem is that Adobe is slow on improving their technology, and CEO of Apple Steve Jobs dismissed the support of Flash on the iOS devices. So these sites are not working correctly on them. HTML5 provides the technique of streaming video, audio and animation without the Flash technology. And guess what, YouTube is testing the new html5 video service as well. Moreover, Flash consumes a lot of CPU, and mobile devices are sometimes not capable of showing the website, or does it laggy and choppy, consumes battery and so on.

Support for devices

So this is evident, the Beatport is going to support those devices without the special clients for it (apps). The so popular iPad will be capable of showing the website correctly, this means mobility, more visitors on the site and more exposure for you as the artist. Isn’t this great?

Distribute and promote your music!

Remember how many social profiles you got? MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Soundcloud, Reverbnation, Twitter, Blog and so on. This is so exhausting to update them manually every time you write something new and interesting. But there are ways to do that faster and automatically. I’ve found a solution (best by far):

http://www.artistdata.com/

It does the dumb work for you – updates your profile everywhere. From tweets to gigs.

They support a wide variety of sites, e.g. PureVolume, SonicBids, FanBridge and other more familiar and wide ranged facebook, twitter, etc.

I hope this is helpful for you.

Note – Soundcloud & Sellaband are still manually updated though. Any thoughts and suggestions?

First of all, think of the budget that you have. 500 USD? 1000? Or maybe you worked hard and saved around 5k bucks? Let’s see.

My first recommendation will be as follows: Get a Mac.

What? I’ve got a PC and Fruity Loops up and running! Why I should pay more?

Well, predictable reaction. Let me be honest. First of all, I am NOT a Mac fan boy. Why I choose a Mac over PC even it costs more, the DAWs cost more and so on? It is compatible. Yes, this is it. When you buy a PC, you never know if your motherboard has nice codecs, will it work fast with many tracks loaded at once, will it work with your guitar and mic, will it chop and other things. This is just bad. When I used to work on a PC, i had troubles even with inserting another sound card and choosing between the new one and the default motherboard one. I freaked out. When I bought Mac, I had no worries. There is a wide variety of hardware designed especially for Macs. It is All-in-One producing studio.

Choosing a Mac for work.

Lets make things clear from the very beginning. A MacBook, MacBook Pro 13.3″ and Mac Mini are suitable not.

Well, MacBooks Pro 15 and 17 inch are ok. iMacs and a Mac Pro.

The Macbook Pro

The Early 2011 MacBooks Pro feature the i7 quad-core processors. And this makes them a great choice for every thing concerning work.

How much that will cost you? Pretty big amount of money – more than $2.000 USD. Why? First of all, you will need more than 4GB of RAM, at least 8GB. A faster hard drive will do as well. Keep in mind that a 15″ MacBook pro is not capable of many plugins loaded at 1 time as you don’t have enough real estate for mixing and playing at the same time. Choosing a hi-res display will make your eyes suffer from everything being too small. So, the solution is a 17″ with 8GB of ram and a nice HDD. This is more than $2.500 USD. This costs, but it is portable and powerful. It has thunderbolt, sooner or later devices will use this connection.

The iMac

The best solution for a starter or semi or even a professional.

Latest iMacs feature quad processors, fast video cards, thunderbolt, and most important, the 21.5″ and 27″ LED display.

The best thing about iMac is its price. The 21.5″ with 1920x1080pixel display with 8GB ram onboard will cost you less than $1.500 USD. This computer will be fast as lightning with the quad-core CPU, handle all your plugins and has enough space on the display to show everything to you. This is also invaluable for graphic designers, illustrators, web designers and more to count.

Having that said, the 27″ iMac is and absolute killer for any creative professional.

The Mac Pro

Not so cost-effective, but the most powerful solution for creative minds.

Whats so special with the price? Well, it features a bit outdated processors “Westmere”, yet it can be Quad, Eight and even 12 core monsters.

Well, lets decide to stop on a 8-core one. More than $3.500 already, add a 27″ LED Cinema Display (costs $999) and.. whoa, that costs!

Note, that iMac 27″ features the same display and the newest processors.

The Primate Labs benchmark of new iMacs

Take a look at this graphic:

It shows the raw power of new CPUs. As for me, I own a late 2009 3.06GHz iMac and as far as I can see, the new 21.5″ one is twice as fast as mine. Yet, my iMac does well with Photoshop documents and huge

Logic files. But not so fast as I want them to be.

All in all, I’d recommend you the new iMacs for any work you can imagine. You will never be frustrated.

Credits:
- MacBooks Pro, iMac and Mac Pro by apple

Ok, I’m on it. I want to create music.

That was a great day for sure. This day is a must have for those, who attended music school for musicians, love to sing or play (or learns to play) guitar or any other music instrument. Now ask yourself – do you have the needed equipment for composing?

Lets see different situations of the needed stuff for your way of music.

You are a singer

Well, you already got your fantastic voice (even if you specify on growling and screaming, yep). “What else do I need?”. That’s a good question. First of all, you’ll need a mic. A microphone. Not the one from your 12 years old headset you used to play Counter Strike. Wrong! You need at least a semi-professional microphone to record your voice and singing. Maybe a stand for it. Running around with mic is cool, but you can become tired. Think of condenser microphone. It will cost you 150-250 USD (100-200 EUR) and it will worth it.

Of course, you need something to attach your mic to. A computer. And software to record your voice. A Mac computer is bundled with GarageBand, a very good starter package for music creation. A PC does not have that good solution for free (or am I wrong? – please comment). The Mac vs PC dilemma is not the point here (anyway, we will cover it later, be sure to check out the equipment tag).

You play an instrument.

Well, you’d better buy one if you haven’t done that already!

If you play an acoustic guitar, you might also think of buying a condenser microphone to record your chords with precision and quality.

Electric guitar should have an external audio I/O solution (will cover this later as well) e.g. external soundcard to process the incoming signal, make it digital and transfer it to your computer. Here again, the software for production and recording comes (DAW). And yet again, for a starter the GarageBand will do the best (only on Mac).

That said, you will guess what a MIDI controller and keyboard will need – a computer with DAW to process the MIDI signal and software instruments so you can hear them.

Drums need a mic too. Be sure to have one for your drum kit.

You do everything.

That’s it. This is my favourite. Why? Because I do so.

I sing, I play, I record that all and then mix, cut and produce the final product. The song.

In this case you will definitely need a computer, a DAW, mics, a guitar, a midi controller (a keyboard) and many other stuff. But first things first. Of course, if you are into electronic music, you don’t need a guitar, but think of those great bands: Infected Mushroom (guitar, electric guitar), Shpongle (guitar), 1200mics (electric guitar) and many others including Astrix, DNA, Daft Punk and so on. Make your sound richer and more interesting with a single guitar (and double it with two of them – acoustic and electric ones).

This style would be chosen for our creation life. And remember, this is only the beginning.

Credits:
Condenser microphone by Wikipedia
Yamaha Keyboard via pianoandsynth

From now on, the slogan is

Stand out. Be outstanding.

We thought that a little rethinking of it will do a great job for the community, us and you, our readers. Why this was done? Lets find this out.

First of all, the repeating of word “creative” for a couple of times is not that creative itself. Second point, this was something from the “lifehacking” sort of things. Honestly, I don’t like this style of conversation and engagement. I don’t want to be yet-another-success-true-story teller. And last but not least, this is what I really mean being creative. To be outstanding you should do something different. We’ve got a great example :

The Beatles were different, Michael Jackson was different, Buckethead and Lady GaGa are different as well. They all stand out of the crowd, that is making them awesome.

So, start thinking of yourself as something completely new. Create your own alter-ego if you wish, and think this way: “What would I do if I was (someone you admire or thought of)?” How can you change the world?

Are you fond of playing music? Inventing something? Recording and editing videos? Digital photography? Start doing it as soon as possible. Better – now, or when you are inspired. The Creative Universe is waiting for you!

The Creative Universe is greeting you!

We plan to clear the mess up, redesign the site and work hard. We hope that you will be engaged as well and become a part of the creative community.

We are planning to be creative! Not only write about different sorts of things, but create them as well. Compose music, draw pieces of art, change your life, at least a bit. We hope that our readers will contribute their work as well.

Stop the world from being boring. Invent, compose, draw, share and do whatever you want!
Sincerely, the team behind the site.

Credits:
Mystic Nebula by hameed