1a (10): You-ing the Tube...
A great way to get an idea of the album you're reviewing across to your prospective readers is via YouTube clips. You can select a number of tracks that you want to represent, aurally, the album, and add them to your review. There's no actual limit on how many clips you can include in your review, but consider two things: one, if you put in too many clips it will not only break up the narrative flow badly, making your review look shorter than it actually is, but it will also take longer to process and upload, as the mods have to check each YouTube clip to ensure it works ok and is allowed. The more clips you use, the longer the time to check it, with a knock-on effect of delaying the time between your submitting the article for approval and its being posted.
Two, if you put too many clips in your review the chances are that any reader is just going to run those clips to get a flavour of what the album is about. Why read if you don't have to? Of course, some people will want to read anyway (I seldom click YouTube clips at all, being more interested in what's written than how it sounds: the text usually informs me as to whether or not these might be clips I would be interested in listening to), but not everyone will be that way inclined. So overloading your review with clips may mean that all your hard work in doing the writing may be ignored.
As a general rule, I restrict myself to three clips per album, four or five if it's a double. What those clips are, from where in the album they are taken is up to you. Of course, sometimes the clips you want are not there for the tracks you want to feature; not every clip of every song on every album ever recorded has been uploaded, naturally. There are ways around this, which I'll discuss later. But for now, if you go for a clip that's not there you may end up having to instead use a different one, and then your text becomes all the more important, as you now can't let people hear what, say, Track 4 is like, and they must rely on what you've written.
But how do you
get those clips into your review? How do they work? You've seen them embedded in other people's work, but how did they get there? Well it's actually quite simple. When writing your review, or after it, pick either one spot for all your YouTubes or, like me, spread them through the review. Whichever way you do it, choose a separate line or lines, type in the tags youtube and /youtube (you need square brackets around each, but if I try to type them in here for the purposes of demonstration only, the system gets confused) and then find the video you want to use. Check its URL as below.
Highlight ONLY the text after “V=”, again as shown. Copy this and paste it into the space between the two youtube tags, and preview it.
It should work. If not, then you need to begin checking your work for errors. Did you place a [youtube[ tag wrongly, like that one just now (closing bracket is the wrong way round)? Did you make both tags (i have to misspell here, as otherwise the system thinks I'm trying to add a video and does not display the tag)[outube] instead of [outube][/outube]? That backslash is critical, as it tells the program to look for data before it and then display it. More likely though, have you misspelled, incorrectly copied or pasted the YouTube URL? It's easily done: a hyphen or a comma out of place, a letter or number missed out, the “V” included in your pasted article. So my advice is, until you ensure that your YouTube is working, keep the page you pasted from active, so that you can always go back and if necessary, manually check the letters and numbers to ensure you have it right. Once everything matches up, there's no reason why it shouldn't work.
Whether you direct people's attention to the videos or not is entirely up to you. I usually don't, letting the text speak for itself. Some people do. If the YouTube you select has some obvious defect, like perhaps very low audio, is jumpy or cuts off suddenly, you might want to note that above or below it, possibly in brackets and preferably in italics. In case you don't know, to italicise a word, sentence or paragraph, ie
make it look like this, you simply place a tag with an "i" in square brackets in front of it and another with a backslash and then the same "i" in square brackets behind it. Again, that backslash is all-important. If you don't want to do that, then highlight the piece you want to italicise and hit the second icon over, on the left, the one that looks like a falling tower.
1a (11): And in conclusion...
When you've finished your review there are a few ways you can go. You can add in a short piece, what I like to think of as an epilogue or afterthought, maybe explaining again why you like or dislike the album, whether having heard it again that view is still held by you, what you have learned listening to the album or any other information you want. You could talk about where the artiste went from there, if at all ---
”On every street” was the last album by Dire Straits, though Mark Knopfler continues to have a very successful solo career” for instance, or
”This was the last Supertramp album to feature Roger Hodgson. After his departure, their sound went in a pretty different direction” --- whatever you want to write, or not, as the case may be. But I usually find that just ending as the album ends is not enough for me. It may be for you.
I often also include a list of other albums by this artiste people who enjoyed this album may also like to listen to, and like everyone I write a tracklisting, just a simple numbered list. Many people rate their albums --- I don't, at least not at the moment --- and if you want to do that you're free to either show the rating at the beginning or end of the review, as is your choice. You can rate them any way you want: marks out of ten, percentage, little icons to indicate good or bad, smileys, frowneys, whatever you like, though as with everything else, once you choose a system you should really try to stick to it. Not only will it confuse and annoy people if you keep trying out new sytems for rating, but if you stick to the one they will get used to it and know where to look.
One more point: if you're planning on using pictures, other than the album cover, do be aware that there is a maximum restriction of ten per post. There is no way past this, and if you go over the allowed amount your post will not even preview until you fix it. Smilies count as images, by the way, so don't throw in too many emoticons if you want to include pictures.
That's about as much as I can say on album reviews specifically, but as I said at the very start, in the final analysis it's up to you what you do, how you conduct your review, how you approach it, how you write it, and what you choose to write. These are only guidelines, but hopefully will give you a basic grounding on what to expect, and what to avoid. Don't forget to comment if you have questions, suggestions, or anything you need corrected or edited.
Next time we'll be moving into the journal deeper, cutting our way through the underbrush and discovering what else you can do with this versatile tool. In many ways, the possibilities are endless, limited only by your time, your imagination and how dedicated you want to be to your music journal.