Managing money while you’re on the ship
March 6, 2012
Dear Musicians,
Once you’re on the ship and you’re getting paid, you will have to figure out what to do with your money. Here are some of your options.
March 6, 2012
Dear Musicians,
Once you’re on the ship and you’re getting paid, you will have to figure out what to do with your money. Here are some of your options.
August 21, 2011
Dear musicians,
Your input is needed.
As you may know, we have a discussion forum on our site, that has provided a lot of information over the years. The idea of the forum was to have a place for us cruise ship musicians to discuss all aspects of our jobs and travels and to make available as much information as possible.
The forum is really successful in that people go there to read the information that’s there. We can tell this by the traffic the forum generates. However, we found that musicians don’t participate in the dialogue as much. In other words, they read the information but they don’t post a lot of questions and/or comments.
This is why I’m wondering if the forum is really needed. We have several options to deal with this:
- Get rid of the forum and post some of that information on our blog, twitter, Facebook presences.
- Keep the forum as is
Let us know what you think.
Thanks.
Update!
We have decided to make the forum readable only, as soon as our new site goes up. We’ll keep the forum around for a while in that state and eventually remove it.
We feel that we already have other tools that provide ways for us to make information available and we wouldn’t want people to have to go to many different pages to gather information. In order to consolidate information, we’ll be posting the important information on our blog which will then be announced on Twitter and Facebook.
You can still comment and ask questions on those services.
Marco
Dear musicians, friends and clients of Oceanbound Entertainment Inc.,
Over the next couple of weeks (or months, depending on progress), we’ll be making changes to all of our web presences and this will ultimately affect how you can stay in touch with us. Here’s an overview of what the overall plan is:
- There will be a complete re-design of www.oceanbound.com (also available at www.oceanbound.ca)
- We will add a Facebook fan page for Oceanbound Entertainment Inc., and we’ll convert our followers to fans of that page.
- Our twitter presence for Oceanbound Entertainment Inc. is “oceanbound_com”. Please follow us there as we’ll be posting updates about the changes as we go along.
Thank you.
Marco
April 26, 2010
Dear musicians,
I’m especially excited about this episode because we’ll get to look at music jobs on cruise ships from the perspective of a Cruise Director. I have recorded a conversation with Karen, Cruise Director with several cruise lines, whom I had the chance to work with a couple of years ago. Enjoy the podcast.
If you have questions about anything, feel free to contact us via email at info@oceanbound.ca or phone number at 450-714-0964.
Karen, thank you very much for your help with this episode.
January 20, 2010
Dear musicians,
Just because you’re at sea doesn’t mean you have to stop being creative. If you’re planning to record some of your song ideas the minute they pop into your head, you need a flexible recording device with you. Korg just announced their “Sound on sound” multi-track recorder, that’s small enough to fit in any gig bag and it’s packed with some nice features.
The unit can record an unlimited amount of tracks (not that you need that but nice to see it could), it’s got 50 preset rhythm patterns on board, can record up to 200 songs, uses AA batteries and it’s even got a tuner built-in. It’s also got “sound stretch” built-in, which lets you speed up or slow down music without changing the pitch. This actually comes in handy when you want to learn a difficult passage of some lick.
Oh, and it’s also got 100 effects built-in for guitar, bass and vocals.
A big drawback is that it doesn’t have any XLR inputs, only a 1/4″ balanced phone jack and a 1/8″ stereo mini jack. The unit isn’t shipping yet so yo have to be patient, and the list price is a bit of a enigma since many sites show a different price. The “buy now” feature on the Korg site shows it as selling for $299.99 once it ships. Probably safe to say that you’ll be able to get it for less soon.
Check it out.
January 19, 2010
Dear musicians,
I’m always on the lookout for gear that either makes it easier or more fun to perform on the road, and I’ve come across a gadget that definitely delivers. TC Electronics has introduced it’s new guitar and bass tuner “PolyTune“. It’s called that because it let’s you strum all of your strings at once and it tells you which ones are out of tune. This is a huge time saver over the older tuners that made you tune the strings one by one. All you do is strum all of your strings at once and the device will display in green the strings that are in tune and in red the strings that needs to be tuned.
You may remember TC Electronics from a previous post on this blog about their Harmony G, a box that adds harmonies based on your voice. This company is coming out with really high quality products that enable you to keep your performances fresh and, now with the PolyTune, makes your life easier.
Check out the video below.
November 23, 2009
Dear Musicians,
Just a quick note to let you know that you no longer need to worry about whether our domain end in .com or .ca because both of them work now.
September 22, 2009
Just a quick note to point out that Carnival Cruises reported that their third quarter earnings are up. Cruise bookings are up and fuel costs are down. Maybe we can start being a bit more optimistic about the economy, although Carnival’s Chief Operating Officer Howard Frank says Carnival is cautious about 2010 because of expectations that high unemployment could hinder consumer spending.
Royal Caribbean Cruises Carnival’s rival, rose 73 cents or 3.1% to $23.97.
April 10, 2009
Dear musicians,
Cover bands have a different role on land as they have on cruise ships. It is thus important to know how you need to modify your package to be suitable for cruise ship gigs.
First, one general comment about music on cruise ships as opposed to land. On land, your cover band gets announced weeks before you appear at a venue, and people come to see your band in particular because they may have heard you before and like what you do. This is drastically different from cruise ship entertainment. Passenger book a particular cruise because of the itinerary or the ship, not because of one particular cover band that appears there. In other words, they don’t expect the uniqueness of your band the way people would on land. more info
March 27, 2009
Dear Musicians,
With the apps you can install on your iPhone, you can turn your phone into a flashlight, a metronome, a piano, an ocarina and even a radio. Today I’ll talk about the latter.
My favorite radio iPhone app is called “Tuner” by Nullriver.
The app is not free and compared to some of the other apps it may look expensive at $5.99 but I believe that the app is well worth the investment.
The app has four buttons, one of which is to bookmark your favorite radio station for quick access, a second lets you browse through the various genres of stations, a third lists the top 500 stations and the lets you search for a particular station.
Most importantly you can add new ones if you know the link to it.
I have found that the app is very reliable and the music doesn’t get interrupted at all, which is a feat given that the music is streamed as you go. So, if you’re getting sick of listening to the same stuff over and over, give this app a try, you won’t be disappointed.
