DAN WEBB
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Friday, January 18
Yours & Owls
Tickets: $10 at the door
In a changing and saturated industry, musicians need to do something a little different to get themselves noticed.
Enter Melbourne keyboardist Dan Webb.
Instead of producing a new album this year, he has decided to release a free download of a new song on his website on the first day of every month of 2013.
By releasing the songs in this way, some of which he has been working on since his 2010 EP Hyperspace Clearance, Webb hopes fans will give him feedback before he hits the studio to create a full-length album.
‘‘Not only is it a way of pitching the songs to a producer, but a way of also getting some feedback on the songs and showing people where I’m at with my ideas,’’ he says.
‘‘Since I’m going to be re-recording some of them for an album, these aren’t the finished product, just pointing people in the direction that I’m headed, giving them a taste of some ideas I’m playing around with.’’
As for making them free, Webb figures if people like the song, they will find a way to download the tracks without paying for them anyway.
‘‘I’m really happy with how they turned out, but I still consider some of the songs as demos, and I don’t want to be asking people to pay for demos.’’
So far only his track Departure has been released, featuring the vocals of The Bamboos frontwoman Kylie Auldist, but the response has already been positive.
‘‘I was checking the stats on the website and people are coming in from all over the place, New Zealand, Germany, America, Hungary. It’s a bit overwhelming, the response, really,’’ Webb says.
The musician has been playing the piano and keyboard since he was four years old.
When Webb, 23, first started playing professionally fresh out of high school, he felt he had to prove that a musician and a band could get by without a guitar and made his music loud and crazy as a result.
‘‘Originally it was quite heavy music, it’s just evolved over time,’’ he says.
‘‘It’s a bit more mellow now.’’
But that doesn’t mean all his songs sound similar. Webb listens to a wide range of music, from Radiohead to Stevie Wonder, and says this, combined with constant experimenting, means no track turns out the same.
‘‘This month’s track is a funk/soul sort of thing, the next one is a rocky sort of track, going back to The Beatles sort of vibe, and the following month is going to have a reggae vibe.’’