021112: We're slowly but most certainly aquiring more and more MP3 demos for our gear. We've a little plan that we'll be putting into motion soon, it goes something like this:

That's anotta my tube .. thatsa YOU TUBE!

I've always felt a little uneasy when I think of having all of our product demos done up as videos posted on You Tube. There's many reason's not too ...

• Sound quality.
• If You Tube has any ~issues~ your demos may not be accessable (that is if YT went ~down~ for whatever reasons).
• You Tube's ~policies~ getting in the way at times.
• The promotional environment you're creating for your own product is corrupted, you're basically allowing others' spam to leak into the mind's eye and distract the viewer's attention away from what you're trying to get them to pay listen to. (I'm speaking of all of the other videos along the edges, as well as all of the other spam-crap you have to deal with on You Tube that interrupts the listening focus.)
• The moving pictures tend to disengage the brain from the messages the ears are sending as your mind switches between visual and audio input stimulus. Think of the old saying about how "blind people have superhuman hearing". Well they don't have "superhuman" anything, but their brains are now far more focused on what is coming in through the ears holes rather than being distracted by what's coming in the eye holes. You'll pay closer attention to the sounds the pedal is capable of when listening to an audio demo than you will a video. Audio demos sortof force the "listen to this!" issue, just as whisper causes people to listen more intently. (These are only my opinions).
• While the comments portion can be cool, it's also a vehicle for a lot of bad wordsmithing.
• A lot of swearing, and many many idiots.
• For the most part all you're really watching is a sortof *still shot* of the guitar pedal while some over-compressed demo riffs are playing in the background. Now and then a pointer (succh as a pen or finger) will come into view to direct your attention to something relevant, but other than that you sit there looking at blinking lights.

That said:

We're going to try something odd (us? .. do something odd? .. it can't be!). We're going the whole MP3 route, and I'm doing voice-overs on top of them. The MP3 will have cue-points to draw your attention to specific pictures on an acompanying webpage as the demo progresses. Something along these lines ...

• "If you look at image number three you can see how the Model 9 is adjusted for this sound .. here's the clip"
• (riffs play .. clean, then affected).
• "Ok so look at image number four, as you can see I've turned the gain all the way down and have adjusted the volume to suit."
• Riffs play .. clean then affected).
• Bla bla, so on, and so forth ...

I think this type of setup will be just as effective in providing some sortof demonstrations of our gear without having to rely on You Tube, or having to worry about what crap some little punks have scribbled all over the product demo video comments.

Way better sound options:

This way you'll have far better quality playback, and not only that for some of them I'll create the demos as WAVs in orginal form then convert them to MP3s. Which means that if a customer needs a much better quality sounding demo I can easily email them a full-on WAV file of it.

Far more engaging:

The little excersize of making the listener follow along to know when to advance their gaze to the next image makes them listen more intently and are less tolerant of outside distractions .. they tend to do a better job of blocking out the outside and focusing more on what their ears are engaged with.

Not completely "You Tube Free" around here though:

We gotta eat ... so we'll still need the promotional exposure that You Tube offers. But I think that might end up being more of a collage of a few pedals, or perhaps just a short video demo of the Model 9 .. just to get folks' attention, then they can follow up by going to our website. This way I still get the YT exposure as well as having it my way (the MP3s) on the product demos. We'll just shut the comments off. :)

I'm likin' it!

I'm a control freak, that shouldn't be much of a surprize by now. This whole idea gives me a lot more control over production and how it all is presented. I most asuredly do NOT have the time to educate myself (quickly) on video production to create satisfactory videos suited for retail promotions. We'd also have to buy more gear ... something I just do not have the cash for (medical bills out-prioritize ~wants~). So, in the spirit that we keep around here of "Make do with whatchya got" I've come up with the good old 20th Century USA Public School Film Strip analog of providing demonstration productions.

We've been begging some of our current and previous customers to see if anyone is interested in providing simple audio demos that we can use for our demo productions and the response has been pretty good .. better than I'd hoped for sure! So hopefully we can start messing with this idea soon enough. The backlog must be completed first, but once done I'll be free again and will be going *great guns*.

Press On Regardless, mangs!

Price

To be announced.