CompuServe Messages

Vic: Sorry it took so long to respond to your explaination of what you were trying to do with the music. Now that I see you were trying to take commercial CD music performances and put them over the tape, I understand your problem. This is not a good way to go for small run projects, as you found out. For future reference, you should consider a couple of alternatives if you ever decide to do this sort of thing again: a) If someone in your group plays music, or if someone has some musical ability and has something like DMCS, you can take a lead sheet (i.e. the melody line of a piece of music in notation form) and either play it in via midi, or enter it with DMCS (or Sonix), and then do your own arrangement with various harmonies, percussion, etc. That way you can use existing tunes, but NOT the commerical performance. The royalties are fairly inexpensive under this scenario! (< 5 cents per cut, I believe). I do this all the time for my own use, and have not tried to distribute, so I can't absolutely guarantee that the royalty thing is easier. But, I have been involved with folks who put out records that occasionally contain "covers" of songs written by others, and have worked with folks who play "cover" music in performance. That's where my impression about covering songs with your own arrangements comes from (as opposed to using another artist's actual performance). b) There is an entire industry surrounding soundtrack music. If you know anyone in the advertising or radio business, they might be able to get you access to a library of tunes for just this purpose. Generally, the music is pretty good, comes in all kinds of flavors, and is available for reasonable royalties. I've used this quite a bit in the past for industrial slide and tape shows (tho I don't do that sort of thing anymore, and don't live in the same city anymore, or I'd get you some names of sources — some other folks around here might be current on sources and rates, tho.) [ MORE ]