Its all over but the shouting, I turned 52 yesterday, and I have a wee bit of a hangover……proves conclusively that you don’t get smarter as you get older. But I did do one smart thing, at least one, in my life and that was to finally marry the right woman. Barbara made this a great birthday weekend, even if I did indulge a bit too much....but I digress.........
So I might as well admit it, I didn’t reach my goal of having my CD done by my birthday. There are just not enough hours in the day or days in the week. In fact in the last week, I managed to have just two hours total that I could work on the mixes.
Not that the two hours weren’t productive – in fact, I found that I did get a lot done, working on the rough mixes and making them sound a bit better. Its interesting that I now can bounce off the general sounds of a newly mixed song against an old one that I am happy with. I think I have a much better idea of what I am going for now, and getting a better handle on the tools.
What is developing with my method is I am sure familiar to everyone: I find a few good plugins that I use constantly, and only if I can’t get the sound I want will I stray to some of the others in my collection. It really speeds thing up not to have to invent the wheel every time. For instance, I am finding it most excellent to record my vocals in mono and then copy the track in Sonar, sometimes with different effects on each channel. I find that I like the sound of “dual-mono” quite a bit.
Last year, I spent a bit of reflective time looking back at what I did musically for the year. I wasn’t going to do that again, but what the hell.
As seems usual for me, I took up yet another instrument, the flute, that I don’t have time to play as much as I should to get some sort of mastery. Still, when I look at the songs for the CD, I find that I am playing it more than any of the other winds I play. It must fit something inside my head. I am going to be very curious to see if other people actually will buy into me being a flutist.
The big thing this year was deciding at some point that I was going to finish my CD first before I got ready to play out live. Lots of reasons for this: for one, I need a calling card if I am supposed to try and get gigs, and the days of a three song demo tape are long gone for me. Its much better to have a real CD to give to someone that they can listen to once and toss, right?
A big part of this decision was to abandon my first plan on how to play out live. Initially I wanted to incorporate my ER1, EA1 and the DX200 along with the XL7, triggering midi patterns with the XL7 on the other synths. The XL is supposed to be able to do this, and after a HUGE amount of work, I got it to work maybe 80%, but never exactly what I wanted.
Finally I came to the conclusion that I was spending more time on tech stuff than writing music, so I just stopped working on that model. What I realized is that I could write the parts on any of the synths, record that using the best sound from any of the synths and then transfer these parts to the XL for playing live. After all, no one but me will know the difference, and with the XL having such a vast range of sounds, I can get something passable. In any event, many of the synths sounds come direct from the XL7, no problem there at all.
This liberated my writing to some extent, since I could simply write on the instrument I wanted and not worry about things like having enough voices on the XL, or if I was able to trigger the other boxes correctly, or have any mid problems, since all the synths are on their own midi connections.
Another big milestone was saying that these were the songs for the CD. Its really hard to stop, hard to say, this is enough. In my case, the job was made easier with my upcoming collaboration with Jeff, a good kick in the ass. I am still looking forward to playing live, but the idea of having someone else to write with again is most cool indeed.
So where is the CD now? I think I have finalized maybe four out of the ten songs, and maybe in a week or two I will have the other six. I am beginning to enjoy this mixing thing a bit, or at least I am now before I plunge into it again!
I have been investigating having the CD duplicated and getting all the prices together and all. I still don’t have the artwork, or what I am going to say for the liner notes, but at least I have a name for my record company now: Obcentric, which is a word I made up that is a combination of obscure and eccentric, which certainly fits me, don’t ya think?
I have to decide if its worth the money to join ASCAP, I mean, do I really dream that I will get some sort of mechanical royalties on this thing? I have to realistic at some point, and I tell you if I manage to sell 100 CDs my expectations will all have been surpassed.
Still…..you never know, do you? The only thing I can say with any certainty, here at the ancient age of 52, is that nothing will ever happen if I don’t make the effort to make it happen. Like the old song says, you cannot win if you do not play.