Showing posts with label DJ. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DJ. Show all posts

Thursday, March 3, 2016

Throwback Thursday : Black Velvet

This week I have pulling records to DJ at a Girls Rock! RVA charity event with a bunch of my favorite people / record collector types. I will be spinning an all female artist set spanning records from the late '50s through the early '70s.

This is one of my favorite charities as this volunteer group offers young girls the annual opportunity to play around on a bunch of different instruments in a city summer camp type setting for one week. At the end of the week the girls form bands, write songs, and are given the opportunity to perform them in a local music venue for friends and family. I am a proud supporter of Girls Rock! RVA and really look forward to this Friday's fundraiser. Hope to see you there!

Here is a favorite 7" single I am bringing with me this Friday night. It is Black Velvet's "An Earthquakes Coming" from 1972. Mindblowing funk from a trio of teenage girls!


Monday, November 30, 2015

Fighting the Good Fight

Did you know that fewer than 5% of record producers and sound engineers are women? How about that when you review a huge festival line up, the number of women headliners of the bill make up for maybe one tenth of the line up? The numbers are discouraging when it comes to women verse men in the music industry however more and more women are working hard to change that number.

Antye Greie-Ripatti inspired by a 2015 interview with Björk who openly described women's role in music as "unacknowledged" and "uncredited" from personal experience, launched a Tumblr page called female:pressure  that gives visibility to female producers, DJ's, media artists, and electronic music performers at work. The idea is that the more of us there are documenting our work and celebrating the work of our female peers is to remind people that women making music is normal and happening daily all over the world.

For more statistics of women in the music industry, go here. If you are making music behind the scenes and feel comfortable sharing images of it, you should post them on your social media pages and or pass them along to sites like female:pressure to share with their readers. As I write this I am reminded that I need to do this more too as I often record at home and never think to document this part of my writing process. I intend to practice what I preach.

I am far from technical when it comes to getting down my ideas for a new song. I have a PC and use a program called Mixcraft 5 to record my vocal rough drafts for Positive No and have also used this program to write whole songs electronically for my solo project Ringfinger.