Most fans of experimental string instruments are familiar with the StarrBoard, an invention of luthier, microtonalist, and mathematician John Starrett:

http://infohost.nmt.edu/~jstarret/StarrBoard.html

One of John's clients, Tim Meeks, liked his so much that he has now started a company making them, with a bit more fancy woodworking. You can check them out here:

http://www.marcodi.com/

Packaging Your CDs

The first tangible thing someone sees of your music can be your CD, whether they are receiving it in the mail, or finding it in a store music bin. Appearances do count and first impressions are of critical importance. If you not yet well-known, ordering 1000 professionally replicated CDs for $1500 can leave you out of cash and with too many CDs. And the $1500 price is usually only for an album with a two color disc print, and a single sheet two color booklet.

The first 50 out of that nice new box are sold to your friends. 150 are then sold to fans when you gig over the next year, and another 200 you send off to radio stations and reviewers for promotion. You are still left with a big box sitting out in the garage.

That's why so many musicians make CDs at home in limited quantities. But you can spot these home jobs right away. The CD is green, it has the name of the album scribbled on with a magic marker, or ink jet printed onto a sticky label, and the booklet sports amateur graphics and washed out ink jet color. It reeks of amateurism. And when your listeners put it on, they smell that amateurism and it works against you.

Spend Time on a Great Insert Design

Don't be stingy on the design. That little color booklet full of your thoughts, dreams and inspirations is the one thing that your customers can't get when they run off and illegally download your music from file sharing services. So give them a little something that makes them feel appreciated for buying and not acquiring. This is your captive audience! They want to know more about you. What's this music all about? What are you all about? This is your big chance to let people know who you are and what you stand for. Wow them with your wit. Write some great prose. Spell check it. Write it again and again until it seems like someone else wrote it, someone who knows things about you that you didn't even realize yourself.

Now you have a great idea of what you want to communicate, what the vision of the album is.

What you need at this point is a decent graphic designer to explain your vision to. If you don't have an eye for this and you don't have a sister or cousin who is a graphic artist who can put something nice together, don't even try. Hire a professional and pay $200 or $500 or $2000 or so for something that really stands out and grabs the attention of your fans and listeners.

(Tips or recommendations regarding artists and design services to forward to others are welcome: email "microtonal at charter dot net".)

The booklet design is done. Now all you have to do is print it. That is what this little article is about.

Avoid Inkjets

Here is how to do it at home. First, don't bother with ink jets for your booklet. They smudge, the ink is often not even water proof, they are slow, and no matter how you do it, it is going to cost you a fortune to print. Full color designs printed on inkjet can run more than a dollar a page just for the ink! You'll go bankrupt selling your CDs at cost, or you'll be stingy about your design. Don't be stingy on the design.

Laser is the One True Path

What you need is a color laser printer. Yes. OK, so only five years ago these things cost a cool five grand for the economy models and were the size of a small refrigerator. Well, they are still big, but the cost has come way down. You can get a great color laser for $500 and a fantastic one with duplexing and multiple paper trays for $1500. The first thing people will tell you is that the toner costs a fortune. That's true, it can cost $300-$500 the first time you have to buy four toner cartridges, cyan magenta, yellow and black. But what they don't tell you is that you can print 5000 color pages off of some of these toner cartridges. We are talking a dime a page. That is at least ten times less expensive that using ink jet, and you aren't having to buy a new set of ink cartridges twice a month. When you are printing a bunch of booklets, or stylish concert flyers, the color laser pays for itself quickly, even when you do include the toner. About those concert flyers - if you print them in ink jet the first foggy morning that comes by will make the ink run. That doesn't happen with color laser flyers.

Which is Best

So what model to get? Do what I did. Buy an Okidata C3200n. I bought one for $399, but you can probably find it cheaper. That price is insanely low. if you think it's too high, you're just plain nuts.

So what makes it great? Pretty much everything.

It's not postscript, so you save a $100 there. You need postscript you say? No, you don't. I used to think that way until I printed with this. It's incredibly fast even without postscript.

Connections

The C3200n has both ethernet and USB 2.0. Don't try to use this through a USB 1 connection - it's 12Mbps data rate will be way too slow. There are some reviews out there that say this printer is slow for heavy graphics. Don't believe it. I think these reviewers were connecting to an old Mac that only had a low speed USB 1 port. If you have an old Mac with no USB 2.0, you can buy a PCI expander card with 4 high speed USB 2.0 ports for under $30.

When you connect to your printer via a direct 480Mbps USB 2.0 connection, you can share it with your other computers by enabling Printer Sharing in your security settings. But if you connect it to your router via 100Mbps ethernet, you can share it among all the computers on your network without having to make sure any one of them is on or configured - each computer connects directly to the printer using networking protocols.

Note: The pokey slow USB 1 is sometimes called "USB 2 standard speed" or "USB high rate". That is just part of a diabolical plan by the official USB standards committee that wanted to fool you. But anything new you would buy nowadays would almost surely be the real USB 2.0 480Mbps standard.

Color and Speed

The colors are perfect. Better than a photo quality inkjet. They come out exactly like the colors on the screen, assuming you have all apple hardware with its tightly color-calibrated goodness. The image resolution is so fine you can't even see the dots. And speed? It prints as fast as you can throw stuff at it. Pages come out one after another, bang bang bang.

One reason this printer is so fast is that technically it's not really a laser printer. Most laser printers have to print in four passes because they only have one printing drum. The toner cartridges have to rotate in and out of position, making loud clunky noises as they do, and maintaining alignment between colors is nearly impossible. The OKI works totally differently. It uses special LED technology and instead of one laser, it has four separate LED print heads. So paper just flies through this in a single pass.

Here's an example. Today I printed an enormous 32MB color image - the first high resolution color photo of Mars taken by the new Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter onto 14" legal paper. It took a minute to warm up, and then the image came a few seconds later. When printing several pages or copies of something, paper comes out one sheet after another with no delay in between.

Texture and Paper

The color prints glossy because instead of normal toner, it uses a wax based toner that makes everything shiny just like a glossy magazine. This also enhances the vividness of the color. Print on glossy paper for even a better experience. Glossy paper can be pricey if you don't shop carefully. Most glossy stuff is used for photo printing and the photo printing companies are socking it to consumers. But photo paper isn't the only choice. For your CD booklets, you want to grab some "65 lb premium gloss laser presentation paper." It is sometimes called "brochure paper." This is designed for business presentations and so they can't jack up the price as much as the photo paper they sell to people who want the best for the pictures of their family. You can get a page of 100 sheets for $16, or 16 cents a page. It's worth it.

Normal matte laser paper costs 1 or 2 cents a page in a ream of 500. Don't print on your glossy paper until after you have verified that everything is laid out correctly.

Now there is also a "32 lb color laser gloss" that you can buy at $8 for a stack of 300 sheets, or around 3 cents a page. It looks beautiful to print to and I use it for photos. It's worth getting to have some around. But it's half as thick as the presentation paper and is too flimsy for a CD insert unless you have a large number of pages. Even so, you should use at least 65 lb paper for the outer cover. Up to 90 lb would be fine as well, 65 lb is maybe even a little thin for covers. But 90 lb is getting in the photo paper realm and starts to get awfully pricey.

When you use different types of paper, be sure to set the printer driver's "Printer Option->Media Weight" setting for the right weight of paper. This is found in the Print dialog. The printer will use different temperature and alignment settings for different types of media and it should be correct.

Special Features

This printer also will do a couple things that almost no other laser printer will do.

First, you can print to full thickness 115lb index cards. Most lasers will totally choke on this because they can't get the thick cardstock wrapped around the printing drum.

The other thing is you can print to paper that is four feet long. I know of no manufacturer that does this for an inexpensive machine. What's it good for? A lot. You can make awesome fold-out band posters with this feature, and you can make band tour promotional calendars, and you can make exotically long and memorable fold-out liner notes with a uniform design motif all the way across. I am currently uncertain where to find the paper you need. It's probably expensive.

Mac Compatibility

Not all printers have full Mac compatibility. This one does. Works in OS X perfectly, with all features supported both when accessing as a network computer through Ethernet, or USB. You do have to use the included install CD to install the drivers. If you have Tiger, you should know that you need to go to the "More Printers..." panel in the Apple Printer Setup Utility application to find and activate the driver, either "OKI USB", or "OKI TCP/IP" depending on if you are connecting via USB or Ethernet. If you have an Intel based Mac, you'll need the latest drivers off of the Okidata web site and not the CD.

Alternatives

OKI makes a whole series of these printers and they all look the same on the outside. The C3200n is the least expensive one. If you do a lot of printing, the 5500n at $600 may be better for you because it accepts toner cartridges that print 5000 pages, not 1500. A complete set of cartridges costs $476.96, bringing the nominal cost per color page down substantially to 9.5 cents and black and white down to 1.5 cents. Our C3200n expends $195.88 to replentish a set of cartridges, with a toner cost of 13 cents for color and 1.9 cents for black and white. The C5500n also has more memory so you don't have to upgrade the memory if you want to add a duplexer, and it's quite a bit faster since it has a faster processor and the more memory. Also, you can add a second paper tray to the C5500n. You should also know that with the OKIs, every 10000 pages require the replacement of the drums, which come with toner, so if you keep the printer that long, you have to cover that cost as well. Even so, with all this considered, laser printers are substantially less expensive per page than ink jet.

Conclusion

Don't be afraid to get a fine color laser printer. It's a great investment for your music career.

See you later for now. We'll hit on this topic of marketing and promotion here in Music Promotion for Mac Musicians. Periodically take a look back and you'll learn about other aspects of getting your work looking as fine as it can be. Looking your best for success doesn't guarantee you'll find an appreciative audience of fans, but it is a necessary step if you want your music to be taken seriously.

Know a good printing or packaging tip issues for musicians you want to share? Thoughts, suggestions or feedback about the column? I'd love to hear from you. You can write me, Sirius, at "microtonal at charter dot net".

Many musicians interested in unusual tunings and greater control and choices over the domain of pitch seek out exotic musical instruments and controllers which they hope will help them in their explorations.

Some of the most daring artists — for example Harry Partch, Ivor Darreg, Buzz Kimball and Cris Forster — have become instrument builders in order to experience the ultimate level of control and creativity with regard to their musical inspiration. This may require decades of time spent experimenting and honing skills at wood and metalworking. Experimenting with a single new tuning may take months of work to build an ensemble capable of playing in it.

Some seek out array instruments which have hundreds of keys arranged in a honeycomb matrix, able to support hundreds of pitches and large scales. There are many array designs, with many more to come. All of them are very costly to build due to the large number of keys.

Others acquire continuous pitch acoustic instruments such as the fretless bass, the violin and the trombone, requiring a well-developed ear, practice, and skill.

The Haken Continuum is an elegantly designed polyphonic keyboard with no keys. The inventor, Lippold Haken, calls it a fingerboard. It is to a normal musical keyboard what a fretless guitar is to a fretted guitar. You can play the board anywhere and you will get the pitch at the position you play, and not the pitch of some specific fret or key. Then, if you rock or wiggle your finger as you would on a guitar or violin string, you have control over vibrato. The Continuum is also sensitive to polyphonic pressure, and it is also sensitive to motion of each finger along the x and y axis. This instrument has all the expressiveness of a violin. Like a violin, mastering it takes dedication, but the pay off is an expressivity which you can attain through no other means. Because of the complexity of the design and its cutting edge technology, the Continuum is as expensive as a finely crafted guitar. You get what you pay for — this is a beautiful and powerful instrument, each one individually hand made.

Here are some musical examples of it being played.