Your Music House
2006/09/30
  Still more miscellany and a plug for someone else
Thoughts:

-ask various people about DJ collaboration between horn and piano (I've started writing some music that might work for this, already)
-see about getting Ickle Brother on board; okay, he lives on another continent and the 8-hour time difference will be an inconvenience, but he knows a lot of musicians - ones that I don't, so there'll be very little duplication of effort - and he's saving up to study at a recording school thingum. He has knowledge and resources that some of the rest of us may not. He's seven years younger than I am, but not much younger than S. and most of the other people working on these projects at Trinity. And it would be wonderful, really very happymaking, to be able to work with him on something we both love. I don't think we've done that since snowfort-building days.
-write a post about what it's all about, already!
-S. and I need some sort of database for contacts etc that we can both access easily. Online is one reasonable option. It has to be reasonably secure (because Data Protection Act etc and because spamming all our participants is not the way to go!), and it has to be easy to use, and I don't want to code it myself damnit - learning those skills would be an unnecessary distraction. I'd rather use something open-source, as well, in keeping with the ethos of this project.

This project is eating my brain. I approve.

In slightly unrelated news, if you're into sci-fi things do go read Tikuka Station. Yes, it's released under a Creative Commons licence. You can read more about why it's been released this way at her journal, but what it basically boils down to is that as a relatively unknown writer, the publicity is worth more to her than the rights to the story.

That's pretty much the principle we'll be operating on here.

K.
 
2006/09/29
 
Okay, it worked this time, there was a problem with the .jpg is all. Go Photoshop!

K.
 
  Logo goodness
Yes, one of us will do a big long explanation post soon. Honest. Until then, please bear with us.

Had a play around with Photoslop and designed some logo-y stuff. This is far from final, but I think it could work.

For whatever reason, Blogger doesn't want to upload the thumbnail. I've tried a few times now. For something written by Google I'm starting to get a little upset with the capabilities of this; might give up and try LJ, which I know how to use, except that I can't actually access LJ properly from Trinity because of Janet offensive materials filters.

Maybe I can only do one per post or something. I'll have to have a try. Anyway, let us know what you think of this logo.

What else today? Oh yes, I talked to my horn teacher. He had some interesting suggestions. He thinks that for venues for the launch concerts it's worth talking to the Quakers about using a Friends Meeting House in exchange for organising the event ourselves (which we have to do anyway) and donation to charity. This is certainly worth looking into, and makes a nice alternative to the usual "use a church" option.

Do you have any good London concert venues in mind?

K.
 
2006/09/28
  IDEA - Alpenhorn
We should get some contemporary alpenhorn stuff on the first CD and launch concerts.

K.
 
  Miscellany
I found the old rubber stamp my father used for his Music House over twenty years ago. It's a little worse for wear but we should be able to use it to design a proper logo. Here's a really bad ASCII version:


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It's a music note in the outline of a house. I don't think we'll be going for the ASCII option, folks.

We were thinking of putting words around the bottom three sides. Also maybe change some other stuff; can we get a CD or a speaker in there somehow? I don't want anything too complicated, because logo recognition is important and keeping it simple will keep our costs down, but it certainly deserves playing around with.

And, oh, colours. Colours are difficult. I mean, we want something that will be easy to read, easy to co-ordinate with... Bright pink is lovely but it's right out. I personally dislike green and orange. Purple is a real difficult thing as far as webpages go. Yellow is too hard to read, brown won't look quite right. Black is good but on a website we should have at least some colour. So we were thinking of CC0066, which is a purply red. I like the colour but I'm not sure how easy it will be to co-ordinate with. We're going to be looking at a colour for the logo and headings, a colour for links, a colour for visited links, possibly a mouseover colour for links (do people still do this?) and perhaps a background colour for menus and the like. I'm not sure there are that many colours that work well with purply red.

I'll need to get some webspace set up for design purposes, probably as soon as we've finished our project proposal. I have a personal, recreational website, but for the moment I don't want that site and this site associated too much. It's difficult to know how much space and bandwidth we'll need, but for now I guess it's probably best to start quite small and scale up when we need to.

S. mentioned to me that one option for printing music would be to offer to print it on coloured paper for dyslexics. I'm not sure this will have a huge market niche, but it works very well with the accessibility requirements for the project.

Things to do, in no particular order:


K.
 
  Test Post
This is a test post.

We'll be using this blog to talk about our Performance Skills Project, which will be a music sharing site of sorts, with initial launch concerts featuring horn music. We'll be fleshing out ideas, making plans, and asking for feedback.

K. and S.
 

My Photo
Name:

Hi! We're K. and S., two Trinity French horn students working on a Mammoth Project.

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