What's New...

Hello.

I thought I would give a lil update as to what I was doing on the island. First off, I will say that I am having a wonderful time. The people are much different than those at Geneva, but great. I am managing an artist and her name is Tirzah Lemmens. You should probably stop reading this nonsense and check out one of her older songs at www.myspace.com/tirzahlemmens. She is one of the best artists here in the program and is therefore sought after by the other artists for shows and recordings. I keep track of her schedule and help in any other way I can as well. Often times I go to her rehearsals and give feedback as to a better sound or trying new things. We have a solid friendship and it seems to be working so far.

I also am training daily on ProTools to learn how to do sound engineering. We usually train for about an hour and a half a day (4 days a week) and learn everything from how to mic things properly to how to record tracks to how to mix them once they are recorded. This part is awesome. It is optional if you want to do the engineering because it comes with a lot of time. It includes around 6 hours a week of recording an artist's songs plus at least one late-night session which is either from 1am-4am or 4am-9am. Those are rough because we have class from 9:30-12 and then 1-2:30 during the day. However, it still is really awesome. I also work in the kitchen, setting up/cleaning up breakfast every weekday from 8:15am-9:30am when class starts.

Class. Class is very awesome. It is different everyday of the week. Our first class at 9:30 is usually more of a lecture style and ranges from a movie discussion (we have to watch a movie every Monday night) to a short article discussion to experiences in the industry. The songwriting teacher (Will Gray - www.myspace.com/willgraymusic) and director (Tom Willett - www.tomwillett.com) is coming back from a week in L.A. and is going to tell us stories of meeting with top producers like Dr. Dre and T Bone Burnett. If you don't know who those two guys are, you should find out. Will is trying to get a contract and supposedly has some cool offers, as well as some real bogus ones.

A couple of days ago, an alumni came to teach us for the next couple of months. Her name is Danara Schurch and she is a marketing manager at Columbia Records. I was pretty intimidated by this title and her stor. As all the record labels keep firing people and downsizing, Danara was telling them that she did not want to live in New York and wanted to work from home...and the company told her to do what she wanted. So, now she is living on the island and will be interrupted periodically in class by a top Columbia director or P.O.D. will be IMing her. It's pretty crazy to me. She works on marketing a lot of the non-traditional Christian bands and has her own company (KDR group) that Columbia subs out its market research-type work to. That way she is needed by both companies and makes tons of money doing it. Genius. She is 25 or 26...

Yesterday she gave us an assignment to market the new "The Afters" video called "MySpace Girl". Personally, I'm not the biggest fan of their pop music, but marketing it...now that is fun. We have to figure out how to get middle school and high school girls (and guys too) to come and watch this "viral video". I will wait to post my groups plan for sake of confidentiality for Columbia Records, but the ideas us executives came up with, the label will actually be using! I will talk more about this once the video is released on February 13th. You can check out their site at www.myspace.com/theafters.

In case you were wondering, I'm currently listening to: Falling Up - "Captiva". I give it 3.4 stars out of 4.

That's all for now my peeps.