In this tutorial I’m trying to show visually what kind is typical uplifting trance song structure and how does it progress. I’m using one of my own songs (The Wall) as a example.

In this two video tutorial I slice up my song in to 16 bar sections and I try to explain the progression section by section.

Some may wonder what is a bar. Well, I’m not expert in terms, but here’s how I have understood it: 1 bar = 4 beats. If you listen to a dance music, you can hear the basskick beating. Four of those beats forms a bar. Take your favourite dance song and listen to it carefully. If you start counting the beats from the beginning of the song, you notice that usually after 32 beats (8 bars) something happens: new sounds comes in, other fades out, etc. That’s how the song progresses. Every certain amount of time something happens. That’s how you keep up the listeners interest.

So when you start to compose your very first trance song, try to progress in 8 bar sections. Add a new element after every 8 bars or fade out current ones.

So a typical trance song structure could go like this:

[first 8 bars: basskick]-

[second 8 bars: basskick + claps]-

[third 8 bars: basskick + claps + hihat]-

[fourth 8 bars: basskick + claps + hihat + bass]-

[fifth 8 bars: basskick + claps + hihat + bass + pads]-

[sixth 8 bars: basskick + claps + hihat + bass + pads starts to fade out]-

[seventh 8 bars: breakdown and everything stops. Start to build up your idea (hook) here]-

[eight 8 bars: your idea (hook) fully presented!]-

[ninth 8 bars: highlight of your song where everything plays together: your idea, drums, basslines.. everything! make it "explode"!]-

[tenth 8 bars: highlight may continue!]-

[eleventh 8 bars: maybe start to fade out elements a bit.]-

[twelth 8 bars: fade out even more]-

[thirteenth 8 bars: more fade outs]-

[fourteenth 8 bars: fade fade etc. etc.]-

You get the hang of it when you start to compose your first song. In my example I’m using 16 bars because I wan’t to build up things slowly.

So, here’s the videos. First Part 1:

And Part 2:

I think the best part in music making is the point where you finish your song, play it to your friends and start to get a feedback; whether it’s good or bad it’s very exciting. Internet provides a HUGE audience for your music plus it’s a channel full off other possibilites as well. You may even get a record deal if your song has a potential and it’s heard by a right person. This actually happened to me few years ago. I produced a track called “Turnpoint” and uploaded it to a discussion forum called trance.nu. People liked it quite a lot and they started to post postive comments and it sort of created a “buzz” in that forum and in no time record label contacted me and we made a deal! Also, I’ve got a couple of other deals as well and even a music placement in a award winning documentary film and all thanks goes solely to internet and the promotion possibilities it can offer for an independent artist.

With that said, I’m going to give a couple of music promotion techniques I’ve found to be very effective in my own music career. So without further ado, let’s begin!

Use discussion forums for music promotion

First you need to find a forum that is related to your music genre and register there as a user. For dance / trance / house music minded people, I recommend trance.nu. They have an artist promotion section in their discussion forum where people can post their musical work for feedback and comments. You can also try to find forums that are dedicated to electronic music genre in whole or other music related forums that have a section for artist promotion. But remember: DO NOT SPAM! If you register in those forums rember to participate and be active. Comment other peoples songs as well.

You also need a place to upload your songs in MP3 format. If you have a own website, you can upload it there. I really recommend you to have your own website because this will benefit you in a long run. Some of the forums allows you to upload your own music straight to their servers. But if not, you can find a lot of free file hosting services by Googling. Mediafire is a quite good.

I produce electronic music and here’s a list of some of the forums I’m using for artist promotion and am active on:

KVR Audio
Imageline Forums
The Flipside Forum
TAXI Forums
Musicradar
Young Composers
Future Producers

Also, you can find a loads of more by googling. Just type for example: trance +forum.

Use Youtube for music promotion

Yeap, Youtube is HUGE for music promotion. If you haven’t registered an account, do not hesitate. I recommend you to create an Musician account there. Next you may think you need to have a music-video to showcase your music there, but you’re wrong. All you need is a still image, your song and a windows movie maker

Here’s an example of how I did a video from a still image and my music in background:

As you can see it’s a simple still image containing the song info and my music plays in the background. Perfect way to showcase your music for a potentially millions of people! It only takes a few minutes to put this kind of “video” together with the Movie Maker. You just need to create a text like that and save it as .jpeg image. I created a video tutorial for you how to do it.

Build your own website (or blog) to promote your music

I really recommend you to have your own website to showcase your music to the world. It doesn’t have to be pretty, basic clean and simple look will do fine. When you set up a site and start to update it, you will eventually start to get visitors there through Google. That’s kind of handsfree promotion for your music: people will come visit to your site automatically

What I really recommend is to buy a domain name (your own name or artist name), webhosting space and install a Wordpress blog platform. Wordpress is a free and popular content managment system which is easy to maintain and update and there’s TONS of free themes, extensions and plugins available for it. My site, for example, runs on a wordpress platform and I have installed various free and easy to use plugins on it: music player for people to listen my music, guestbook for visitors to write a coemments, contact form for a contacting me straight. For more information about wordpress, check out wordpress.org.

Of course, there are free places too to set up your own blogs like blogger.com, but it looks a bit more professional to have an own domain name related to your band or artist name and website around it.

If you need any assistance for setting up your own website or blog, I can help you. Contact me through the Contact Me section.

Use Facebook, Myspace, Reverbnation and other social networking sites to promote your music

Create an artist profile on both of these sites, gather some friends and showcase your music. Lot of artists do not have their own website. Instead, they use only Facebook and Myspace artist pages as their ‘homepage’. Of course, these places are crowded by other artists too promoting their music, but don’t worry: there’s still room for more These kind of social networking sites are very powerful for music promotion. I for example, got a placement for my music to an award winning documentary film thanks to Myspace. I really recommend taking advantage of these sites.

Then there’s Twitter and loads and loads of other similar social places to go for promotion. Use Google for such words as: social networking +music etc You will find lots of places. Just remember: do not spam.

‘Offline’ music promotion

You have friends, relatives, co-workers, schoolmates etc. Tell them about your music. In situations like these, your own website or Myspace/Facebook style profile pages come in handy. Just write down your homepage address and give it to them.

That’s it for now. Hopefully this short guide will help you to get going on your music promotion!

Well, this is actually old news, but as it’s related to my music I decided to post it here anyway.

It’s a video clip of Dj Tiesto playing one of my songs (titled The Wall) which I produced under my artist name Primo Lux. The event was “Tiesto In Concert 2″ and year 2004. It was a 2-day event and there were 25,000 attendants on both days dancing, partying and having a good time.

I wasn’t there, but still it was one of the biggest highlights of my musical career to hear (and see) Tiesto spinning my music!

Enjoy the video!

Tuesday, 10th of November,  George Clinton – the grand ol’ man of FUNK music – and Funkadelic & Parliament throwed a live gig in Helsinki at the Circus Club and me and the the other members of our “The Red House” -band had an opportunity to be a present and I must say the gig was AWESOME!!!!!!! I’ve heard Clinton’s stuff on cd and so, but you HAVE to see these guys live! then you know what funk music really is!

Thank you George, Parliament & Funkadelic!

Best gig ever, period!

Check out these videos from the gig: