Helping you write your best songs with a focus on the benefits of innovative songwriting software, tools, resources and programs.

From Songwriting Software Plus

February, 2003

The Online Community Advancing Songwriters' Careers: Tonos

Get the benefits of sharing, collaborating and submitting your songs to a site nurturing the development of songwriters world wide. Enjoy your own homepage with up to 10 streaming audio files of your songs, an online studio in which you can get and exchange musical tracks and top of the industry song placement opportunities plus so much more! Click here to find out more.

Editor's Note (from the laptop of Robert Curtis)

Being that it's the beginning of a new year and that we're in a tough economy I thought this would be a good time to look at two timely subjects; goal setting and home recording your songs.

Goal setting because you will more likely get what you want out of your songwriting if you draw a target to aim at and home recording because the more you can do on your own the better you'll get at crafting your songs and the more money you'll likely save on demo costs.

You may still have a demo production service produce your songs but the more prepared and crafted the sample recording you present them the more efficient and less costly the demo production can be.

Along those lines there are two programs that I'll discuss today that you may want to investigate further as you look ahead into 2003.

Please note: If you've received this in AOL, Yahoo or Hotmail (and any others I may have missed) I hope it came through cleanly with all pictures intact. If you've received this in the text version (no colors or pictures or fancy formatting) I'm continuing to try to get a better conversion from the HTML version.

A final note: As you may have noticed I did not send an issue in January. I've had an ill family member and it has understandably shifted my priorities during this time. I'm hopeful things will improve soon and that I'll be more able to resume my regular monthly writing and sending of this newsletter. Thank you for your understanding.

Contents:
1. An Affordable, Capable Home Recording Program That's Easy To Work
2. Create Your Songwriting Goals And Get Them Accomplished With GoalPro

Article 1

An Affordable, Capable Home Recording Program That's Easy To Work

Home recording software can be rather expensive and indeed complicated. It may very well be wise to start simple and build your recording skills on a need to know basis.

This discussion will focus on just that tact and shortly I'll go into discussing a program that is a good starter for the newbie guitar or keyboard player to frankly experienced pros who want something fast and maybe even portable that's lap top ready to roll.

Yes, even if you're new to the very idea of recording you'll learn a lot about your songs and how they sound coming from a recording and by testing the waters you soon may be acquiring cool recording skills that before may have seemed alien.

Now please note I'm going to try and keep this simple with the focus and emphasis on recording live sound like your voice and a guitar or keyboard and then mixing it all together. I'm not going to be discussing higher end programs that have an almost overwhelming amount of capability like ProTools that you may have heard about.

Currently I'm slowly acquainting myself with PG Music's Band-In-A-Box and Power Tracks programs and finding them quite incredible but more about those in another issue as I want to talk about a recording program that's even more fundamental.

Before I began exploring the two programs I just noted I was looking to move from my two track, cassette based, karaoke machine to something more professional and capable. However, I wasn't too taken with the analog (non-digital) four tracks at the local music store and indeed in this emerging digital music world I figured there must be something computer based that wasn't too complicated to start with.

Enter The TC8

The TC8 is a computer based recording program and I was drawn to it because I found it well suited to a songwriter who may not necessarily have any recording skills per se, like myself at the time, and because it looked like it might be easy to develop applications as my recording skills grew. Also, it was and still is quite an affordable program at just $29.95 with a money back guarantee. I couldn't lose.

It has eight recordable tracks that you can mix together into a final rendition of your song and each track has its own individual controls and many standard effects.

Commonly used effects on the TC8 that you can add one track at a time are reverb to make an instrument or vocal sound "wet" like it might sound in a small night club for example all the way to how it'd sound on stage at Carnegie Hall. Then there's compression to eliminate very high and very low volume levels to help "smooth out" the sound. Next you've got distortion that is often used to make a guitar sound more full and gritty. There's also a chorus effect to thicken sound like making two stringed instruments sound like a symphony and gate to eliminate hissing noises.

Easy To Operate

The user friendly guide that accompanies the TC8 makes all of this easy to understand and apply. The guide is 25 , what I call easy read, pages. You don't have to be a techee or have a certificate in recording engineering to understand it.

With the TC8 it's easy to start simple just recording a guitar on one track and your voice on another to get used to using it.

You may only want to record a guitar-vocal or a piano-vocal to present your song to other writers (i.e. for getting their feedback on your song before you do a complete demo adding tracks for drums, base and a maybe even a harp).

Of course you can play your song on your computer for yourself or others, email an mp3 or click and burn a cd of your song.

Opportunity For Online Collaboration

A really cool thing about the TC8 is that it not only is a complete stand alone recording program but the company that developed the TC8, Tonos, allows you to collaborate online with other songwriters via their affordable membership (less than $10 per month).

Tonos is an online music community of songwriters and musicians that was founded by music heavyweights David Foster, Carole Bayer-Sager and Babyface to link the world of songwriters and players together to produce great collaborations. Tonos also offers members only song pitch opportunities throughout the year opening doors to get your songs heard and possibly even placed with a major artist recording deal.

Also if you decided to join Tonos now you get the TC8 as part of your membership. Check out more about the benefits of a Tonos membership by clicking here.

With a TonosPRO membership you get access to an online studio where you can have one of the many other thousands of TC8 users add a guitar track, a drum track and even vocal tracks with ease.

Once you've arranged for another member to record a track for you, which could be an instrument or vocal track, they record it on their TC8 and then they upload it to the Tonos Online Studio and you then simply download it into your computer and your TC8 ready to play and mix into your song. And of course it could be more than one track.

You can get started with the TC8 right now. Click here to purchase and download this virtual recording studio and it's handy user manual. Not sure if it's right for you? Just download the demo version :-)

Note: the system requirements for the TC8 are as follows (Note: these are fairly standard minimums you'd find on most newer computers out the last few years but cross check your own computer system to be sure) (Also available for the Mac)

• Microsoft® Windows® 95 and 98, and Windows 98ME (2000) - Works on Macs too
• Intel® Pentium® II processor or equivalent or better
• 266 MHz recommended or better
• 64 MBs of RAM or more (I have 64 on my lap top and the TC8 works fine in general and if you want faster and better performance out of any of your software I suggest you add more RAM.)
• DirectX compatible full duplex soundcard (To determine if your soundcard is Full Duplex, you can ask your soundcard manufacturer, consult the manual that came with the card, or visit the manufacturer's website.) Most standard sound cards on newer computers will readily suffice.
• 16 Bit color monitor (fairly standard minimum on most computers)
• Dial-up modem or broadband Internet connection and a web browser, such as Internet Explorer 4.01 or later, or Netscape® Navigator® 4.0 or later
• A microphone or other instrument that you want to record (such as a guitar or keyboard and even your great voice :-)
• A pair of PC speakers to hear what you've recorded :-)

One other program you may also want to check out to keep track of what doing with the TC8 or any recording program is TrackNotes. Click here for more information on how TrackNotes can help keep you're recording process smooth and organized.

End of Article

Article 2

Enjoy Creating Your Songwriting Goals And Getting Them Accomplished With GoalPro

It's the beginning of a new year and a great time to look ahead into 2003 to see what you'd like to accomplish with your songwriting this year.

As you may well know numerous studies show that people who set goals are much more likely to achieve their aims and goal setting software can serve as a great catalyst to setting, tracking and achieving your goals.

Goal setting software by virtue of being computer based offers the added potential of being interactive and thus can make the experience of setting and tracking your goals much more engaging.

Thus, you are more likely to be involved with the goal setting process and all good goal setting software programs allow you to also print out any number of charts, graphs and lists, etc. for fast reference on the go when you're not at your computer..

By using goal setting software you can greatly optimize your goal setting process with tools and features not readily duplicated with paper based only approaches and also if you're using your computer regularly then you may well see how such programs can fit naturally and readily into your life.

Success Studios' GoalPro is a software-based goal-setting system, designed to guide you through the steps required to define, maintain, track, and achieve your goals and I've found it to be the best of it's breed and indeed the system I use.

I've found that using a program like GoalPro allows you to create a template for your envisioned success that is also a living entity because you can change it and update it instantly. Accordingly, this way of drawing your future allows you to readily refine your aims and quickly add or subtract strategies that are working or not working to get you where you're trying to go.

With GoalPro enjoy features and benefits like:

• intelligent goal layout - the program automatically creates a flow chart like tree of your goals and each of the supporting tasks and steps you need to achieve to reach you main goals, it's much easier to see how everything flows into your major aims when it's charted out this way
• built-in success coach - at your option tap into the automated success coach to help motivate you towards your success
• daily review - brief your goals daily and you'll stay much more focused and action oriented towards their accomplishment
• multiple performance graphs - chart your progress and see how your trending towards your goals and milestones
• generation of attractive goal reports - everything can be printed out for review on the run away from your computer like maybe during a relaxing contemplative time with a nice cup of tea :-)
• number tracking-quota goals - great for keeping score or to clearly see how quickly you're advancing
• ability to implement success creeds - define the principals of your success and reaffirm your motivation
• questions and stimulants - draw on these tools to help draw out what you really want to accomplish
• daily journal - writing down your day's activities and successes helps not only to affirm your keeping on the right track but helps you to see where you're going right and where you can adjust to get even better results
• flash card creator - create quick to the point reminders to review on the fly, they can help you regain instantaneous focus and help to charge you up when you need an extra boost to forge ahead - great when your wanting to refresh your motivation while away from your computer like when you're on a plane, a subway or standing in line at the post office
• productive daily and weekly views - move from the day's "to-dos" to where it's leading by the end of the week at a glance and get a feel for what your actions are adding up to as the week progresses
• inclusion of pictures, sound and video, and more! - really see what your aiming for in vivid color, sound and action, pure visualization at it's best - when you take your visualization to this extent you going to be that much more drawn to your aims as it will be much more fully and clearly defined
• and that's just what's in version 5.0, try it now and you'll get a free upgrade to version 6.0 when it launches the first part of 2003
• online version available also - great for MAC users or those who prefer the convenience of anywhere access

Shortly a complete upgrade will be released and by purchasing now you'll get the upgrade for free.

Click here to purchase GoalPro or try out the free fully operational 30 day demo.

If you think you might need to simply get your life better organized first then check out the various planning and scheduling software programs from Franklin Covey by clicking here.

End of Article

Information & Credits

Songwriting Software Express is published monthly by Songwriting Software Plus: Robert Curtis, Editor.

You can send your feedback to feedback@songwriting-software.com.

Subscription Information