First off, you have to join the Club.  Do this by clicking on the ‘CLICK HERE TO JOIN FOR ONLY £20’ button on the right of the homepage.  This will take you to the payment page where you will be led through the Stripe payment process.  Next, you need to have a Google account and have downloaded Google Drive onto your computer desktop in order to participate in the Club, so if you don’t already have one please organize that straight away.

Once you’ve paid your membership fee, you will receive 3 e-mails:

1. An invite to join The Knowledge – the Club’s shared online directory on Evernote.
2. An invite to share a folder on Google Drive.  This folder will bear your name.  Once you’ve set up Google Drive on your desktop and accepted this invitation this will be your own personal (and private – only you and I will ever be able to access it) upload folder for all of your future recordings that you want to share with the club.  Just copy the file(s) into that folder then I’ll check your recording and move it to the appropriate theme folder (e.g. ‘Dog Barks’) then I’ll invite you to join that folder.  When you accept, the entire ‘Dog Barks’ folder will sync to your Google Drive – the more themes you contribute to, the bigger collection of folders you get on your desktop.  PLEASE READ THE LEGAL DECLARATION BEFORE YOU UPLOAD ANY SOUNDS. The link is up in the top right hand corner.
3. An invite to the Club’s private Slack discussion group.

Please provide as much metadata as possible with your uploads and also a photo whenever possible.  I don’t want to be too specific about exact info that you should provide (or how much) but do please include your name in the track title, and also the location of the recording is nearly always important to include in the title or metadata.  I would like us to move towards using the UCS naming system as much as possible – though this is discretionary for now.  More and more people seem to be adopting the system so hopefully over time it’ll become the default way to present your recordings.

It is no longer essential to include a vocal ident, i.e. say your name, on the start of any recordings you contribute to The Club, but this is still a welcome inclusion whenever practical.  I’m sure most of us normally do a verbal ident at the start of our recordings anyway in order to describe what we’re about to record so it won’t hurt to quickly add your name into that info as well.

And that’s it!  You can contribute to any of the themes (they’re all listed in the BROWSE THE COLLECTION drop down menu on the website.  Oh and also I recommend you follow @TheSCClub on Twitter because I use that to inform members when new sounds have been added to the collection.

I’m pretty sure that this is a watertight description of what to do but if you’re having any issues please feel free to contact me at michael@thesoundcollectorsclub.com or via the form below and I’ll guide you through it.