Sharing information: two views

“Those who know don't tell and those who tell don't know.”

— Timeless wisdom from the East, attributed to Lao-Tzu.

“All the pros I know freely share their prime locations, techniques and business practices.”

— Photographer Ken Rockwell, who has a website. 

I said two views, but they are not mutually exclusive, actually. I don't want to put words in Lao-Tzu's mouth, but he was not talking about how to erect a pup tent, or about the correct procedure for operating a table saw safely. He was talking about enlightenment; ultimate understanding in the cosmic sense, but his line is sometimes abused by people who want to undercut someone else's authority to speak on a subject, without engaging them on the specifics. Rockwell is really talking about sharing merely all the things that can be shared. Which is not the same as everything, period. His point is that sharable information is not enough to make a person a successful artist and professional.

More after the break:

Google is really starting to piss me off.

They have implemented this annoying thing of not always giving direct links to items in my search results-- so if I do my usual thing of right-clicking on a link and hitting "copy link address", when I paste the link it gives me crap like this:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=friberg%20and%20sundstrom%20swing%20jazz&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CE8QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww-scf.usc.edu%2F~ise575%2Fd%2Fpresentations%2F8-fribergsundstrom_schankler.pdf&ei=0KC7T4KeGIagiQLi3MChDg&usg=AFQjCNFaVA5zSutyEInxjvwneBtFeBPsjg

...which is not the actual URL of the site. Worse, the link was to a pdf file, and when I use Opera's handy "right click>save to download folder" option, it just downloads an html file of that stupid Google link, not the pdf.

I don't know what Google is playing at-- I guess they want to be the sole gateway to the entire Internet. At this point I highly recommend switching to Duckduckgo as your default search engine;  it appears to be the choice du jour for Linux people, and is basically what Google was before they started avalanching features all over me.

Your own drumming blog: final thoughts

...or on the blog. Thanks Librarian.net
and Timothy Vollmer.

A few final thoughts on writing your own drumming blog, and things I forget to mention in our previous entries. I know I promised to outline my workflow for a downloadable post, but this writing-about-non-drumming stuff is getting to be a grind. If you want to know about it- how to use ftp, or accomplish any of the obscure Finale tasks you need to know to make a decent-looking pdf- email me your question and I'll do a dedicated post about it in the future.


Copyright, fair use, and just not being a jerk
This is largely a sharing medium, so it's a good idea to get at least a passing acquaintance with this, so you do it legally, ethically, and gentlemanly-ly. In general:

• Credit and link to non-original material- both the original author and your online source- or chain of sources. Like if someone on the Drummerworld forum posts a link to something written by someone else, published in a magazine, and posted on the Four On The Floor blog, it's good to credit and link to the referring DW user, FOTF, the author, and the magazine.  
• Don't copy the whole thing. You're allowed to excerpt; you're not allowed to republish without permission.
• Don't link to copyright-infringing sites. I've mostly stayed true to that one, though I've bent it occasionally for the greater good, when it's basically harm-free. That's what I tell myself, anyway. But linking to pirated material that is currently available commercially, especially by living artists, does actually hurt people. And by people, I mean artists. Not corporations.  

Quite a bit more after the break:

Your own drumming blog: software

Continuing our little series on getting your own drumming blog going, today we'll look at the software I use , and that might be helpful to you. I try to use free software whenever possible. Your computer OS may include acceptable versions of some of these; and if you don't like my choices, you can look for free alternatives on Sourceforge. Lifehacker is also a good source for software recommendations.

Apart from routine web browsing, and things that can be done within the Blogger interface, the tasks I have to do include writing (text and music), transcribing, notating music (is it still called copying when you do it on the computer?), generating pdfs and jpegs of notation, editing pdfs, editing images, uploading files to the server, editing audio, and creating/editing videos. Here's what I use to do all of that:


Transcribe! is the best transcription software I've found. Not free, unfortunately. There is an open source program which came bundled with my new Free Geek Linux box, Transcriber. It's made for transcribing speech, but could easily be used for music.

Audacity. Audio editing software. Can replace Transcribe!, though it may be a little more ungainly to use for transcribing. I mainly use it for making sampled playalong loops, for assembling podcasts, and for making excerpts of recorded music.

Finale, Sibelius, or the free MuseScore. Or other music notation program. I use Finale, and frankly the program is a behemoth and all-around big PITA, but I've figured out how to do most everything I need to do fairly quickly, and it will likely take me more time than I will save to relearn it all with another program so, so it looks like I'll be with Finale for awhile. People say Sibelius is easier to use. I haven't heard a lot of feedback about MuseScore, but it's free and open source, which we like.

CutePDF is what I use to generate the pdfs you download from the site. It operates like a pseudo-printer- you print the file in Finale, selecting CutePDF as the as the printer instead of your regular hardware printer.

Continued after the break:

Your own drumming blog: useful skills

I'm determined to follow my own instructions in the previous entry and tackle this starting-a-drumming-blog series in manageable pieces. Blogger's interface has actually made doing the work very nearly idiot(?)-proof but maybe this will help you get your work done a little more efficiently. Today we're going to look at some useful skills:


Typing
You don't have to be blazing with it, but you can't hunt and peck your way through a blogging career. Get acquainted with the touch typing method- if you aren't already- using one of the billion-or-so free typing tutor programs around. I'm partial to GNU Typist; you could maybe get yourself a copy of Typing of the Dead for fun, too.


Searching
Along with writing, using search engines effectively is really a primary skill. Here at CSD! we produce a lot of original content, but in most of the rest of the blogging world much of the job consists of seeking out things online and writing about them, and sharing a link. Google is pretty fool/idiot/lazy person-proof in that regard- you can just type in any old thing and get some kind of useful results- but it's worthwhile to take it a little further and learn to use the various query operators / wildcards / whatnot to open up some of the actual power of the search engine.


Using the keyboard
Put down the mouse- well, it's already down, but take your hand off it- and get used to doing a lot of tabbing, ctrl-c-ing, ctrl-x-ing, and ctrl-v-ing, and alt-whatevering to access the menus. Highlight text with the arrow keys, in conjunction with the ctrl key. Find out what the little bank of keys above the arrows does- Page Up, Page Down, Home, End, etc:

Over your blogging (and computing) career this will save you countless hours of waving the little pointer around the screen, hours you could spend practicing, writing, getting to know your family, etc.

Read on, fun stuff after the break:

Your own drumming blog: general practices

Three easy steps, followed
by a bunch of other steps. 

A lot of new drumming blogs have been cropping up recently, which suggests to me that there are even more people thinking about starting blogging, but haven't yet. That's a good thing- there are a hell of a lot of knowledgeable people out there, and the more information circulates the better and stronger the musical culture.

This series of posts will outline how to go about it, first dealing with general practices, then with useful/necessary skills, software, web sites; finally I'll outline my workflow for making a single post with a downloadable pdf.


General practices:

Post often. It helps generate traffic and cultivate a regular audience. This means you have to:

Keep it brief.  Because brevity is the soul of not wasting everyone's damn time. Every post cannot be a dissertation, nor should it be. This is blogging. Every extra word is a barrier between your audience and the point you are trying to make. This goes quintuple for video lessons, should you choose to include them.

Research. Blogging- or even "real" writing- is not just about being a fount of knowledge: it's about finding and recognizing things that are good, and directing people to them. Your message and identity as a writer is a composite your knowledge and of the things you recognize as good and pass along.

You should hopefully have a fair amount of original work in you, too.

Links are currency. The lifeblood of blogging. Maintaining a blogroll and linking to things in your posts- videos, articles, and other blogs generates traffic for yourself and others. You're doing something nice for someone every time you do it. I need to do more of it, in fact...

Read on after the break: