Been some time since I have written on here, but life has gotten in the way a bit, trips out of town for business, all that. So where is the CD at?
To catch you up, its all recorded, mixed and mastered. What has been happening is getting the artwork to work for me.
Through my friend Jeff Rees, I met Dianne Foster, the maven of www.paisleyarts.com who does work for the Gypsy Caravan and we started down the long process of getting some artwork that would work for me.
Having never done this before I didn’t know what to expect, but Dianne gave a good start by having me bring over CDs that had cover art that I like. What I ended up gravitating to was very “cool” tones with very simple designs, and that is what she started working on.
After some time Dianne had something cooked up to show me, and as you might expect I liked part of it, and not so hot on other things. We spoke about that, and also about the logo for my stuff.
I had what I thought was a great idea for the logo, and Dianne did her best with it but upon reflection, it wasn’t such a great idea. It also helps that I am married to someone with an excellent sense of design and color (lets just say you don’t want me to pick the paint for your apartment, OK?). Barbara looked at what Dianne had come up with and said, this doesn’t seem right to me for what you are trying to present. Why don’t you just let Dianne do what she is good at, isn’t that why you contacted her in the first place?
Well…duh.
One other great idea Barbara had was to do our own little focus group to try and define what the music said to both of us. The idea is that you have a pencil and paper, play thru the songs and just write down words that come to you, off the top of you head, from listening to the sounds.
Can you imagine how difficult this is for me, after listening to this stuff hundreds of times, to get some sort of subjective distance from it? Still quite interesting what we came up with, and Barbara actually had such a great phrase that I used it for the title for the CD. How cool is that?!
Going back to what I was trying to present on this cover: if you are reading this, you probably have some idea of what I sound like, but if not I suppose the simplest idea of what I am trying to do: I want to bend and blend the things I like most in music: compelling rhythms, with lots of non-western tuned percussion, a vast palette of electronic sounds, all the wind instruments I play, the guitar (of course!) and the human voice. I want to have music that is challenging to the listener, but not so outside that you can’t hum the melodies and dance to it. Maybe a human face on electronica……..
So the idea was to blend a technical look with a human element, and once I let Dianne really let go and do what she does, man what a difference! It did help that I visited her studio and looked at some of the bazillion pieces of digital art that she has. Once I got out of the “cool” mode look, I was able to look at some work like fractals that quite appealed to me. It is quite a strange feeling to me to hire someone to do art for me – I know, you say, what’s weird about that? Ask me again when I am on my 20th album………..
Naturally I gave a copy of the CD to Dianne, so she might get some sorta inspiration from it, and as luck would have it she actually likes it, especially the contrast with my trumpet and all the electronic stew. Ha, my clever plan works!
A week passes, when Barbara and I are out of town, and when I come back I get to see the revised artwork. It is so vastly, massively cool! The “cool” look is gone on the cover, and it is a bright, eye catching mix of images that I think is not only a really good design but expresses something of what I am trying to do with the music. You know, I could describe it but soon it will be out for all the world to see, and you will be able to link to that.
Only a few things more to go now. I am having the CD pressed at CD Forge , a local company that impressed me with being able to do quality work at a low price, even for short run CDs like mine. The were also able to hook me up with a coupon for CDBbaby, a really great local distributor,where I will release my CD. A little money saved is good, eh? And CD Forge also gave me a bar-code for free, so my sales can be tracked.
One last thing is that I am joining ASCAP, so that if I am ever entitled to royalties of any sort, I will be able to actually receive them. Not anything I am counting on, but its free and its legit so why not?
Back again when its showtime…….