[theblue1]

Originally Posted by Johnny Favorite

composed, arranged, played, mixed and mastered all by yourself?

Care to share any tips or thoughts about the process?

And, most important, was it worth it?

Yeah, sure. (I did not do a thousand run stamping, though.) I played everything myself (or had robots play them, in the case of drums and some other MIDI parts) and I had a pal come in to do some sax and lifted some conga tracks from an album I recorded for one of my clients -- with his permission, of course -- and did everything else.

I sold a relatively small number of copies via on demand pressing (through the old Mp3.com), scores, maybe in the very low hundreds, and had over 50,000 track listens/downloads there. (And probably at least 5 or 10 of them actually listened all the way through. ) I've had another 40-50K downloads at other sites from that material and some other stuff. [In fact the current first track on page in my 'mutant roots pop' link in my sig line is the lead track from that album, which first came out in late '99 or early 2000.]

Did I make any money? A little. Not that I ever much expected to.

I went through a commercial music/recording program in the early 80s and the first thing I learned was that, by and large, if you don't tour, you aren't going to sell many records (particularly if you don't do straight commercial pop/rock, and I most certainly don't). So, by that measure, I guess I really got more out of it than I ever dreamed.

And that and four bucks will buy me a cup of coffee.



With regard to skills, etc, I had already worked in commercial studios (and had a little 4 track reel rig in the 80s and a 16 track ADAT project studio in the 90s) so when I moved to DAW in '97, there was certainly a learning curve, but I already knew how to mix and what the finished product should sound like.

Mastering, you should pardon the expression, wasn't a sweetening/fix-it processes back when I started -- it was all about preparing the masters for vinyl stamping plates [although some sweetening or fixes were typically available] -- so the whole competitive loudness thing, while I'd read about the 45 RPM single loudness wars [and well-remembered the horrid sound that those loudness wars produced on 50s-60s singles] was a little new to me in practical terms. But it wasn't long after I burned my first CD-R in '96 and put it in the changer that I realized my stuff wasn't as squeezed as even the pro releases of that day -- and they had buckets of dynamic range, compared to the squashed stuff that passes for "mastered" recordings today.

In those days I 'mastered' by bringing the mix files into Sound Forge. I wasn't crazy about the built-in compression, though, by a stretch. After I got some plugs I really liked, I simply switched over to 'mastering' the mix file in Sonar. Then, I thought, gee, I'm mixing in the box -- why not just put my favorite EQ and my favorite compressor and throw them in a buss and 'master' right in the project? That way, if I have to 'go back to the mix' -- I'm already there.


Possibly the most important lesson I had to learn -- coming from commercial studios where time is money and there's never enough of either to really drill things in, seems like -- is that you have to have discipline about calling a track finished and learn to move on. Nothing will ever be perfect. But when you have 'endless time' and the freedom to tweak out over it -- you can make a project last forever.

Happily I had the (rather unfortunate) example of a local "genius" (a wunderkind, classically trained prodigy who worshipped Zappa) who took over a decade recording his first album -- by the time I heard it, it was amazingly dated, and he was still not quite finished. I don't know if he ever actually put it out. If he did, I never heard about it... So I vowed not to make that mistake. And no one listening to my stuff would ever accuse me of being overly slick, I'm pretty sure.

[EDIT: I crack me up. A couple years before that album I recorded an album of [shhh] rock songs [my last fling, I considered it a nostalgia trip] but it never made it past copies made on my cassette stack. Really, by the time I was finished withe short album [10 songs] I really was sick of rock, or at least the way I was approaching it (still, a couple of tracks I was kinda proud of and they held up ok in a nostalgic kind of way). Since the album above, I've released not quite another couple albums of material but have simply released them on the web as mp3 singles. But swear I'm gonna buckle down and package a bunch up and throw them on iTunes/etc via TuneCore -- if only so's I can hear myself on Rhapsody. ]