Acoustic Open Mic

Freeville Music Openmic links

Contents of this page

People

Artists: That's you! You're what it's all about. Your names are in the pulldown list on the search page.
Open Mic Hosts and Live Sound: Your host, Ken Shea and the Nines.
Recording and Website: Freeville Music which is Jerry Codner and Patty McNally (with help from Stuart Allen) and impossible without the artists, the hosts and especially the Nines.
The Audience: Those loyal music lovers who come out just to listen. Thank you for listening. (Pssst. I know you want to play. Get up here!)

Recordings and Original Music

Original music was put on the website for everyone to hear. Music on this website must be original and uncommitted to anyone else or already in the public domain (for example, most songs published before 1923).

Use our search engine to find and listen to your recordings. Our sole method of distribution is by posting songs on the website. We do not make CD's and we do not send songs by email (see business below).

Freeville Music recorded Acoustic Open Mic at the Nines almost every Sunday night for 5 years. It's been fun and a lot of work. We will continue to provide this website. Freeville Music respects copyrighted material.

Cover Songs

Play covers all you want. Fortunately for you, the Nines regularly pays a hefty sum of money to companies which represent writers and music publishers so that performers may play other people's songs. But, in order for us to post music on a website, it has to be original and uncommitted to anyone else or already in the public domain.

Note to copyright holders: if we have posted a copyrighted song it was not intentional. Please contact us with the link to the song and we will remove it immediately.

Open Mic Courtesies

We apologize for stating the obvious to 99% of open mic performers. This list is for the people who come in through the fire door when it is 20°F outside, ignoring the huge sign that says "Use Other Door".

It's called Acoustic Open Mic Night, although, yes it is amplified. Please bring your acoustic instrument with or without a pickup. Electric bass and keyboard are fine. No one has ever been turned away.
It's three songs or fifteen minutes, whichever is less. Other people want to play, too.
Be ready when it's your turn and please tune up ahead of time. Don't be afraid to fine tune a little bit on stage, if necessary. Be afraid to tune for more than two minutes while we all wait for you to play.
If you play a cover, please give credit to the author and announce the name of the song. No, not everyone may "recognize this next one".
If you have a band, please tell the host and he'll try to arrange for more playing time.
Playing is free, not food or drinks.
Just as vampires do not show up in mirrors, ukuleles do not show up on recordings. It's a mystery.

Business

The Nines
They provide the stage and the sound equipment. They also pay the fees to ASCAP, BMI and SESAC so that people may play cover songs. They hope that people who come through the doors, for free or otherwise, order something to eat or drink. It's not a requirement, but it would be nice, as they are in that business. The food is excellent and not expensive. Open mic performers do have to pay for food and drink.

Freeville Music
Typically, musicians do not have a lot of money. Freeville Music is set up to record and distribute songs to performer/songwriters for free. All originals are put on the website. We are not in business. We receive utterly no compensation for this service (not even free beer!).

While live recordings may contain flaws, artists get a chance to record almost every single week and gain experience with performing live. They can pick and choose what versions get published on reverbnation or elsewhere, including demo discs for potential live gigs. A good live recording establishes needed credibility.

Some people want CDs or recordings of cover songs. Freeville Music provides a search engine, custom playlist creation and streamed audio that make it easy to burn your own CDs. For those with limited internet access, please ask a friend or family member to download your recordings and burn them to CD.

Cover songs that are not old enough (published before 1923) are usually copyrighted by someone, and they cannot be published by us without �paying royalties to the copyright holder.

Technical Details

The Nines provides a twelve channel mixer, two powered speakers and three microphones for open mic.

Freeville Music usually records and when they do they record the entire session, using an Alesis Firewire mixer at 44.1 kHz and 24 bit sampling, directly onto a Macintosh Powerbook computer running Audacity, a free audio recording and editing program available for Linux, Mac and Windows operating systems.

Four hours of music takes about 1.5 GB of disk space per recorded channel. MP3's are ripped at 128 kb/sec which occupies about 1 MB of disk space per minute of playing time.

Editing takes about four hours per week. This includes editing out interludes, normalizing volume levels and labeling all of the songs. We generate an individual MP3 file for each song, usually about 20 originals per night.

Finally, we post originals and update the database connecting each song with the artist name. As of January 2008, ID3v2 tags in the MP3 files include the artist names and the song titles.

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