The dream of having a record of my own began the day I brought home the school owned upright bass for the first time when I was in 6th grade. I remember designing my first album cover in my head: A blank background with a picture of me leaning my back against side the acoustic bass so that the instrument and I formed a sort-of “X” complete with my head turned to the camera with an all-to-serious expression. I think I even practiced posing for it.
I’ve never told a soul about that until just now. In junior high and high school I used to sketch album covers for a fictional stadium rock band my friend Dave and I called “Arcaz”. Their live album was called “Backstage Gossip.”
Bitchin!
Through the socially painful high school years the thought of being on a record, of seeing my name in the credits and hearing my music come through the speakers, got me through a lot of tough times.
On the albums I have played on I often felt frustration of not being able to take my own direction follow my own instincts in both music and recording, like any self respecting control freak.
I majored in audio recording in college, not so I could get a job as a recording engineer (in reality, a babysitter of large fragile egos) but so I would be better armed with knowledge when recording my own music.
Now I am finally getting frightfully close to finishing my album which I have recorded entirely myself. The only problem with being in total control however, is being in total control. Releasing my project to the world means letting go, losing control.
It will be well worth it! Yesterday, I finished work on the CD artwork. I can’t stop looking at it. Even as I write this, I keep flipping over to the Illustrator window where the front and back cover artwork are open.
I’m not all impressed with myself; it’s just that looking at it makes this all a bit more real for me, not just some shadow I keep chasing; that dream that began thirty-some years ago.
I can just imagine opening one of the boxes taking one out and holding it in my hand. All my work and creative juices realized in one little disc with my name silkscreened on.
No, I’m not going to post a picture of the artwork, you’ll just have to wait for the CD to come out.
On the music end of things there’s a bit more work to be done. Final vocal performances for more than half the tunes are complete and one or two tunes need some more instrumental tracking. After some clean-up editing, it won’t take long to complete the mixes which have been in progress since I began.
The final step before delivering my master to the manufacturer will be mastering.
Mastering is a voodoo art form that few people understand really well (myself included). Mastering used to be the act of an engineer operating a lathe that literally cuts the grooves onto a lacquer disc that is ultimately creates a die for pressing vinyl records. The mastering engineer would also make adjustments to the audio to accommodate the physical restrictions of the lathe and lacquer disc.
A mastering lathe
These days it is more about the format of files and running the music through one final layer of processing to make it sound like and match, for lack of a better term, ‘music on the radio’. It is as critical a step as it ever was, perhaps more.
Mastering engineer legend and
Bob Ludwig.
Go look at ten of your records of CDs from the seventies and eighties,
It’s time to introduce the villains in this story: time and money.
Those basterly dasterds!
My own procrastination has at least been an accomplice in the theft of time spent working on the album. In the past six months especially, I made little progress the recording and mixing. I have been thinking about it and rehearsing the songs constantly though. I have to believe that some of that delay and deep thought has allowed the songs, arrangements and my vocal performance to develop naturally. Many details of the songs have changed in that time and have made them better songs and arrangements.
To keep this from becoming one of those perpetually developing projects that eventually rots on the vine, it’s time to call the ball and move forward. I’ll beat myself up over time wasted when I have the time to.
In exactly one month’s time My wife and I are embarking on a cross-country road journey home to Upstate New York for my parent’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. While I’m in town I will be playing at least one gig sharing the bill with some friends of mine and possibly a couple more (I’ll give details upon confirmation). It is imperative that I have some product in hand to sell. This is just the real world deadline I need to push this project out the door and into the um... real world.
Scary!
The turn-around time for manufacturing (without paying extra) is twelve days plus approval time of proofs, so I will have to have a master to them in a little over a week at the latest. I am having the discs shipped to my parents’ which will save me a few days.
Villain #2: Money. With the expenses of the upcoming trip, I barely have enough to cover the manufacturing. I am having only three hundred discs made this run which is the bare minimum. I can make more at a later time financed by sales of the first run.
Don’t you just love the word “parlay”?
At this point, having the recording professionally mastered, as I have so taughted, has its problems. First of all, the music on my album is too widely varying from some in-your-face rock, to blues, to a blue grass-ish tune, for a cheap set-it-and-forget-it mastering job, the only kind I believe my small budget will bare right now. Also, the turn-around time of a mastering job would probably put me beyond my deadline.
Digital mastering tools—and yes, I am rationalizing here—are a great deal better and more accessible than they used to be and I know more or less what needs to be done for each tune. If I use my audio knowledge and common sense, take my time, stick to practiced audio principles and use the very nice audio monitors where I work, I’m confident can do a pretty fair job of mastering.
It’s unlikely that most folks who buy a disc from this run will even know the difference and be any the wiser…
Um… except you.
Not all that long ago it was inconceivable that someone could record an album in their home using a fold out portable device, software, an digital recording interface, and a few microphones that all together cost roughly a month’s pay.
My studio in a few of the locations I’ve recorded my album from
including a hotel bathroom in Milwaukee Wisconsin
Not shown is my parents’ basement in Canandaigua New York
I had no mic stand with me so I simply hung my microphone from a nail in the ceiling.
There is a quiet outcry about the ‘dumbing down’ of audio quality, and rightly so. MP3s, Youtube, ear buds, and laptop speakers have all conspired to bring the general audio fidelity of our everyday lives to a theoretical point somewhere in the sixties.
Kind of like the space program.
But at that same point in the sixties, it would take several months pay to go around the tightly guarded gates of the recording industry by going into a studio to make your own reasonable quality demo over a weekend and hope your best performance occurred while the clock was ticking.
Forget about world-wide distribution and the self promotional capabilities of the Internet.
I hope audio fidelity ‘smarts up’ again one day, but until that time I’ll take the jaw-dropping possibilities and freedom of what’s happening right now.
I have little doubt that you’ll be pleased, even impressed with both the music and the quality of the recording. As I mentioned, I studied audio recording in college and have made a careful study of modern recording techniques both through the Internet and audio professionals I know. You’d never have guessed I created it all on my no-frills PC laptop—lyrics, music, recording and graphics. I even used it to create and print sheet music for the string session.
The string session I recorded in my living room
Okay, so let’s compromise on the mastering for now: When a higher-end mastering job is a real option on the second run of discs, I can offer free downloads of the entire mastered version of the disk plus extras to those who supported me by buying a disc on the first run.
Thanks in advance for that by-the-way!
I have added a username and password on the back cover for the first run disc for accessing those downloads.
There, I feel much better now. How about you?
No comments:
Post a Comment