cool site: e-chords

If you play guitar, you may very well be familiar with this site – E-Chords. If not, you may not have a reason to…. since the site mainly deals with guitar chord charts. But, just in case you do play guitar and don’t know the site, it is definitely worth checking out. 12,000 charts with over 200,000 tabs including chords, tabs, bass, and drums. Most those are available for free – for $24.45/year you can become a member, get rid of annoying ads, and – much more importantly, transpose any song to any key you want. I love this site. It’s not always correct – the site is very-Web 2.0 in that it relies on chart submissions by lots of individuals – but at the very least it usually gives me a really good start on a great chart for a great song.

cool blog: ari hest

Another cool site, and concept. Ari Hest is a songwriter/musician who will release one new, original song per week for all 52 weeks of the year 2008. He just started this past week. You can subscribe to all 52 songs for $20, and if you pay more you get all kinds of extras. Of course Ari is going to be blogging about his efforts as well, and I liked the first song “One Two” as well as the concept enough that I am subscribing.

cool music site: Bob Baker’s Indie Music Promotion Blog

I just took Berkleemusic’s Music Marketing 101 course, taught by Bob Baker – and I loved it, by the way – so I have started revisiting a lot of Bob’s sites and online resources over the past three months. This is one of my favorites – a blog focused on “news, notes, and ideas on music marketing, self-promotion, artist empowerment and more”.

A recent post that was very usable: Five Music Website Design Tips – including a lot of great links, and since we just started the process of redesigning and overhauling our entire site, this is a timely resource. Another cool characteristic: the blog has been going for quite a while, and there is an extensive archive of past blog posts, very much worth browsing. And since it’s a dreary, rainy, lazy Sunday afternoon here – that’s what I am going to be doing.

Happy surfing!