Is SonicBids worth the money?

In my ongoing efforts to become a sickeningly wealthy mega star, I've signed up for SonicBids, which is a sort of poor man's Taxi. My verdict? Kinda neutral, to be honest. But first, here's a brief description of what SonicBids claims to be.

First and foremost, SonicBids offers promoters and artists a chance to connect, enabling promoters to find artists for gigs and for artists to find gigs. SonicBids' whizzbang idea is what they call an EPK, or Electronic Press Kit, which is essentially a web page you fill out with info about yourself, samples of your music and a few pics. Naturally, because an EPK is onlne, promoters can access it and you can point folks to it very easily. For example, here's mine.

Now, I'm not exactly a performer, so this aspect of SonicBids doesn't really appeal to me. However, SonicBids also lists literally hundreds of opportunities for artists to get their stuff into contests, onto sampler CDs, even onto commercials and the like. Sounds cool, right? Not so fast.

When I signed on to SonicBids, I assumed that since they charged their members for every opportunity -- plus demanded a monthly fee -- they vetted all the promoters and opportunities they link their readers to. Nope. They're like a hooker on on the streets of Russia. Anything goes. So if you sign up for SonicBids, it's up to you to read about each opportunity that interests you and to determine for yourself if it's both legit and right for how you want to present yourself. I learned this the hard way by spotting an opportunity that seemed perfect, submitting, getting selected and then discovering that the outfit behind the opportunity barely had a web site. In fact, I'm still not sure there's an actual company out there that has my stuff! I alerted SonicBids, but they pretty much ignored me. And took my money. Like a good hooker.

Anyway, all of this is not to say that SonicBids is crap. It's not, it's a cool service. You just have to shoulder the responsibility of figuring out whether an opportunity you want to take advantage of is the real deal.

I've got the brain on my brain: a new article in the New Yorker has got me thinking.

In the July 28 issue of the New Yorker, there is an article on insight called The Eureka Enigma, by Jonah Lehrer. You can save yourself a few bucks by reading the abstract here, but if you're into doing creative things, such as, oh, I dunno, songwriting, this article will help you understand how you get those great -- and not so great -- ideas, and you'll be glad to have the whole thing.

In a nutshell, when an idea flashes into existence in your brain, it is not an act of God or a random event. Rather, it seems to be the result of the cortex initiating some waves in the right brain, which propagate along in a pretty random fashion before suddenly coalescing into something coherent -- and possibly brilliant -- and ripple back up through to the pre-frontal cortex, from which a signal gets sent to your vocal chords and you go, "Holy s--t!". Or something like that. Anyway, the cool takeaway for me from the article was the clear, scientific evidence for not trying to force creativity. The best approach is to think hard, really go at it, and then, when you feel like you're simply at wit's end, go for a walk or just find some way to let your mind wander. I can't say how many times this has happened to me while writing songs. I work and work and work, try this word or that, pluck a chord, hum a melody, all for naught, and then, maybe as I'm brushing my teeth or, yes, out for a walk, the solution will hit me. Nine times out of ten, when I try the idea on the guitar or hum it over a chord, it works. And if it doesn't, it leads to something that will. My kinda theory! A rationale for daydreaming!

The details of my visit to Madison. Corrected version!

After I posted about my visit to Madison, I got an email from the team there gently pointing out a few things I got wrong. Most important, I was not using a Brainport, which provides Balance Sensory Substitution, but a newer treatment with the catchy name of Cranial-Nerve Non-Invasive NeuroModulation (CN-NINM). The difference is that the BrainPort therapy, which I tried on the the first day, stimulates a spot on the tongue and teaches the the taste center of the brain to take over the balance function. CN-NINM -- a literal mouthful -- stimulates a much larger area of the tongue and boggles the brain with a specially modulated signal to allow the brain to form or renew functional connections. Most of the benefits I enjoyed came from this second treatment, which the Brainport can help maintain, but not necessarily provide. To read more about CN-NINM, please visit http://tcnl.med.wisc.edu.

Sadly, the benefits of CN-NINM do not last forever after such a short period of treatment, and my brain is already reverting to its dizzy ways. Worse, I can only buy the Brainport, not a CN-NINM device, so while my home treatment program will certainly help, the benefits I experience won't be as dramatic as what I experienced in Wisconsin. So my plan going forward is to buy the Brainport and use it daily, plus go out to Wisconsin 3-4 times a year for CN-NINM treatments. Sounds like a pain, I know, but I am DESPERATE to get better, so if this is what it takes, so be it.

Once again, thank you to the team in Wisconsin, lead by Yuri Danilov and Mitch (sorry Mitch, didn't get a photo of you!) and assisted by Kelsey and Joe.

Writing and recording in my hotel room. Not. And why you should skip Digidesign's MBox 2 Micro.

Meant to post this earlier.

I confess, I’ve always thought that being holed up alone in a hotel room in a strange town would be the ultimate songwriting/recording scenario. Au contraire. Perhaps if the weather were a blizzard, rain or nuclear winter, such a scenario would be great. But here in Madison, Wisconsin, the weather is balmy, breezy and bodaciously nice -- from sunup to long past sundown. So even though I packed my laptop, external drive, Steinberger guitar, book on songwriting and Digidesign MBox 2 Micro*, I wrote not a note and recorded nada. Lyric writing was another matter. As you can see from the photo at left, I found a nice coffee shop (okay, a Starbucks) and once I figured out how to use my Blackberry Curve as a broadband modem connected via BlueTooth, I was in business. I blogged, surfed, worked on verses and choruses and emailed from this upper terrace -- as I am now -- while back at my empty hotel room my recording gear sat and gathered moss.

* If you, like me, fancy the idea of getting some serious song work done on the road, you might be tempted to get a Digidesign MBox 2 Micro. SAVE YOUR MONEY. The Micro has no record capabilities at all -- which I knew when I bought it, but didn’t fully appreciate the full suckage of this fact -- and is basically nothing more than a dongle that allows Pro Tools to work. Yet it costs $249! Sure it comes with Pro Tools, but who cares? If you’re buying this detuned piece of junk, YOU ALREADY HAVE PRO TOOLS. Damn, I’m pissed. Anyway, for less than fifty bucks more, I could have got the MBox 2 Mini, which would have been a FAR better choice, as it has audio inputs yet is only slightly larger. If Digi were cool, they would sell you this device for about $100 sans Pro Tools, but they’re not, so you pay through the nose for software you most likely already have. Bad, Digi, bad.

Missing the good feelings of Madison.

Sadly -- doubly, triply, quadruply sadly -- I was laid low today with extra dizziness and a migraine (just for old times' sake). I will write to Yuri and ask him why this might be. For example, do the health benefits of the Brainport fade after a few days, did I forget to do something I should have, should I not have taken Angel Dust? Argh, this is so frustrating. I CANNOT WAIT TO GET MY OWN BRAINPORT and start feeling better again. I have talked with the company in Canada, but I'm waiting for them to call me back and let me know when my Brainport will be ready.

Soon, I'll start posting about music again, but as you can imagine, my focus as shifted to GETTING BETTER.