The new single from Simply Three is now available! Watch the official music video and the behind the scenes video: OFFICIAL VIDEO:
BEHIND THE SCENES:
We just got a letter in the mail, and it was shockingly from ASU, Office of the President! To our shock, the letter was from Michael M. Crow, President of Arizona State University! We are so humbled and grateful to have the support of such a wonderful leader and from an incredible university. Read the letter here.
Hey guys! Just getting ready for my recital! It's on April 26th at 7:30PM at the ASU School of Music recital hall. RSVP HERE. I'm so stoked!! I'm still working hard on the Kodaly (today I practiced for like 6 hours haha), and I'm finishing up the original sonata I'm writing with Elliot. But yeah, I'm so excited! If I have time to prepare, which I maybe kind of probably won't , I might even try to do an encore with my loop station! I'm even looking to see if I can plug in to the house sound!
I'm also really excited about Simply Three's newest songs/arrangements! We have a brand new original song called "Street Theme," which was composed by Nick and his friend Andrew Griffin. It has already been performed by the Alkali Ensemble last week in Texas. The audience loved the piece!! That's good news, because it's a brand new venture for us! We just adapted it for the trio, and we have planned where we will build a huge loop for the climax of the song. We're so excited to get going on it!
Oh, and speaking of which, we now have pickups, amps, and LOOP STATIONS!!!!!! Nick and I each got a Boss RC-30 loop station. It's legit. We've already been toying with them, and the music just writes itself. They rock! Can't wait to show you guys! We will definitely be using them at our upcoming performances (TBA). As far as pickups, I got a Fishman RC-100, and Nick got a Realist. Nick also got this nice Roland bass amp. I got a Roland Micro Cube, and I think Olivia's gonna get a micro cube, too. Olivia has picked out her pickup, too, but I forget which one. It's the same one Lucia Micarelli uses.
Anyway, we're so ready to expand our live, now-amped show, and take it on the road!!! PS We are planning a tour in Utah and Idaho this coming fall. Stay tuned. :)
Zack
Hey Everyone! I'm excited to keep you all informed on whats going on with myself and Simply Three on this blog! We have a lot of exciting opportunities and we can't wait to share them with you. I'm not much of a blogger but I hope that at least some of the posts I write will be interesting and possibly help others in whatever they are pursuing. With that in mind, let me tell you about some exciting events coming up!
We recently have been performing for a lot of high schools. Doing this has benefited us in many ways. We get to perform regularly, hundreds of people have heard our music, and we have been getting CONNECTIONS! One connection that has happened recently is with Dr. Alex Zheng, conductor of orchestras at Perry High School. He invited us to perform as a part of his orchestras concert at Perry Hugh School, which was very fun. After we were done warming up for the concert he approached us with an offer to solo with the Chandler Symphony in September. It just so happens that he is on the board of directors and also the assistant conductor of the Chandler Symphony! We are scheduled to perform with the Chandler Symphony on their concert September 6, 2013 (MARK YOUR CALENDARS). Not only do we get a chance to perform at the awesome Chandler Center for the Arts, but we will be able to reach a group of people that we wouldn't have been able to if it wasn't for the connection with Dr. Zheng. He made it happen! AND! Hopefully by playing this concert, we will make more connections! This all happened because we put ourselves out there and made a connection. You don't have to be the best in the world at something to get great opportunities. You have to work hard and let people know what you are doing. Give people a chance to help you, there are many people out there that want to! You just have to let them know what you are doing.
I could go on and on about other great stories but I don't want to waste all my material on one blog post. I promise there will be more to come!
Nick
Hey guys, In case any of you are interested in web or graphic design, I'm thinking I will post a little about the work I do for Simply Three. Just now (it's 1:45AM) I finished making the new splash/landing page for the site. It's the one that has links to iTunes, Amazon, and Google Play and says "enter site" (I will probably update it as of April 23rd, when our new music video comes out). I have been wanting to make a landing page like this for quite some time now, and since our debut album was just released on iTunes, etc., I thought it would be the absolute perfect time to make one! To see it, click here.
The way I get my ideas is by looking around at other artists' websites to see what they do. Today I mainly referenced maroon5.com. Their landing page used to be the tour dates with Owl City, but now it is the new one featuring Kelly Clarkson and the Civic Tour. Anyway, I really like their top bar, the one that stretches across the screen and says enter maroon5.com with those symbols " »«". So I basically stole this top bar, except I made it in our color blue and our font. There are so many little details that need to be sorted out, and this all takes time. For instance, how do you type the «» symbols?! Well, since I work on a PC, I google "windows alt codes", and there is a list of special symbols/characters that you can type via your PC, using special codes. So you can scroll down and find "»«" and discover that they are alt+0187 and alt+0171, respectively. Try it! If you own a PC, go to type somewhere, and then hold down the "alt" button, type "0171" on your number pad, then let go of the alt button. Voila! When I discovered alt codes even existed I was excited for like six hours.
Well, our site is Wordpress. If you're looking for a website that is FREE, and can handle ANYTHING YOU CAN IMAGINE, go with Wordpress. We used to use Weebly, and I looked into other sites like Wix, but Wordpress is just sooooo much better, and it's FREEEEEEEEEEEEE. For goodness sake people, the choice is clear. All you have to do is learn a bit of .php .html/css coding. And it's a piece of cake once you figure out the underlying rules. Seriously; if you have questions, leave them in the comments below. I would be happy to answer basic questions, and for more complicated coding questions, I can direct you to somebody who will know.
So about the new splash page: All in all, in order to make the splash page, I first needed to create a custom page template. Piece of cake. I just copied one that already existed then renamed it "splash." Then, I had to figure out how to change the current header and footer (basically, I just wanted to delete them, so I could start from a blank slate). Well, the header.php and footer.php files are separate files, and the rest of the website is using them. So I discovered you can create custom header and footer files (header-splash.php and footer-splash.php). I had no idea you could do this, so I was excited when google showed me this morning! So again, easy; I just duplicated my current header.php and footer.php files, renamed them as stated before, and then started deleting chunks I didn't want. Then, once I ran it down to the bare essentials, the rest was CSS; styling what was there. This always takes me forever, since I never actaully learned how to do it. Granted, I have learned by doing, but my knowledge is limited. So I open up Mozilla Firefox, right click, inspect element, open up the style inspector, and start guessing properties that I think would work and just see what happens. Chrome also lets you do this in real time, without refreshing, but I like Mozilla's layout better.
For the buttons with the logos, I used Photoshop to resize the icons, saved them as a PNG, then uploaded them to my server (images/file.png). Then I used the background property in CSS to put the image behind the box of text (ie. BUY ON ITUNES). Then, to get the text below the image, I just used margin-top (or was it padding?) to move the text down below the image. I had to be sure to add "center no-repeat" to my background images, cuz they were repeating down the span of the padding. As you can tell, it was just guessing and checking, moving things around, then googling to find out how to do something I was struggling with, like "css center multiple links" to get all three of those images/links to be centered with each other. There were lots of other things involved in making the splash page, but that was the gist! All in all, I think I have been working for 5 hours straight tonight. And I worked a couple hours on it earlier today, too. I am a perfectionist, so I don't stop until it's just the way I want it!
Well, that was all stream of consciousness and confusing I'm sure. But it's 2:03AM; what else did you expect? :) Again, if you have any questions for me, I will be happy to answer them! Sign in and comment below.
Zack