So the original plan was get an album finished and uploaded by the time I hit 40, preceded by the uploading of a digital single to act as a sort of preview. 40 has come and gone and I'm still no nearer finished. So it will be ready when it's ready which, bearing in mind I now have a new job and no longer based at home, means that I have even less time and energy to tend to the plants in my musical nursery. So now every ten or twenty minutes I get to attend to the tracks, I see as a little step further.
All the parts for all tracks are now recorded and assembled into files ready for mixing, I started this process recently but it hasn't been the most satisfying part of the whole long winded venture. I've tried various approaches in starting the mixing of each track and haven't yet felt successful.
To further hinder this, I managed to lose a few musical parts which I had to re-record. So after slowly climbing a few ladder rungs, I seem to have now stepped on a snake and slid down to a square two rows down.
But I've had the same trackisting laid out for quite a long time and I'm quite determined to 'release' the álbum' to somewhere that sits outside my head and my computer. Which leads me to think over how the definitions of 'release' and 'album' have changed over the years when it comes to home-recording.
In the early days, it would be a cassette that I would view as an album, and after filling it up with a sequence of recordings, packaged with a sleeve put together using the latest in photocopying technology courtesy of the local library, I would pass it on to a few friends, as well as dubbing selected recordings to cassettes, placing into jiffy bags to be posted, or handed, to record labels, publishers, producers and so on. Though in reality it was most likely the dustbin. A selection of tracks would be put together to be performed live at whatever gig opportunity I could get.
By the end of the nineties I owned a computer and a CD burner where the "albums" were now in the form of compact discs. Wider jiffy bags were required. I did put together a collection of CDs compiling recordings I had made under the name 'S-cape' and distributed these, and edited versions to various people in various places.
By the time I had moved to London, I had found a website called mp3.com which allowed you to upload your tracks and artwork, and then customers could buy the CD from there and it would be printed, packaged and posted from their US address. I recorded and released an album under my electropop guise, 'Production', and spent a bit of time attending to my "profile page" where you could promote songs as "digital singles". This was quite a new thing at the time. However, while I sold a handful of CDs to various people, it was short lived and mp3.com closed down sending me a cheque for $8, after it had taken a questionable cut from the sales, and as at that time it was going to cost me £10 to cash it, it was worthless.
Over the next few years I returned to pressing up CDs with a range of albums of music composed for dance education that became a more successful venture. But I shall go into that in a future blog.
Nowadays, digital releases have become more commonplace as a cost effective way of packaging a bunch of recordings to send out into the world. That is the plan for the current batch of tracks I've been trying to mix, after which they will be edited, remixed and reworked for various musical outlets. Work on them has been interrupted over the years with other projects and tasks shifting into focus but every now and then I've tried to chip away at them a little more with each opportunity.
Years gone by there was more time to do such things, and I managed to work quickly though that was more down to having limited sequencer and recording tracks, and a smaller sound palette. The overall quality no doubt left a lot to be desired, but each recording and mixing task was always an exciting time. The current batch is proving to be quite a different beast with my enthusiasm lifting and waning at quite a high frequency. I occasionally go from having some sense of excitment on hearing some rough instrumental mixes, to feeling a little disheartened when it comes to the mixing stage and recording overdubs. I seem to be reaching the stage where I'd be happy to get the whole thing out of the way and let it loose in cyberspace.
This time round though, there won't be any jiffy bags involved, or promotional activities such as live performances. These days all musical ambitions for the project have been reduced to just clicking the "upload" button when I've considered them finished. I've got a stack of other musical ventures I want to tackle next.
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