It's a Buy!
So let it be mastered, so let it be done. And done it is...at least the audio part of it. Yesterday, Erik Wolf at Wolf Mastering midwifed a compact disc containing the finished, mastered tracks for the first Donna Beasley album, "Good Samaritan".
Long-time readers and short-time grazers of this blog may have seen mention of this phantom project for the past 18 months or so. Finally, after many delays, setbacks, sabbaticals, work, vacations, working vacations, laryngitis, nasal surgeries, outside experts, inside soul-searchings, hard-earned money, soft-earned money, prayers and curses...it is done.
Well, as done as it is going to get. They say you never really finish a mix (or an album)...you just give up on it. And so I did. There are things I really like and things that will always bug me, but the time had run out. I know the contents of every track on every song. I can never listen to it with an un-biased ear. I can never enjoy it like I hope all of you (and everyone you know!) will enjoy it. I suppose that is the same for any creator of music, painting, novels, etc. Underneath the beautiful exterior are flesh and bone and blood. Not necessarily unsightly things, being the very substance of the whole, but things that are not meant to be observed or noticed.
The next phase is getting all of the artwork and packaging tidied up. Donna has been working on all of that with Heather Dryden of Studio Plush, an excellent graphics design firm in Nashville. It's a tricky business making the package fit the product. Not that any artifices are being employed to make darkness light or fluff be substantial. It's just difficult balancing reality with what passes for commercially acceptable.
Does the cover photo show the artist smiling? Does that give the true representation of the music inside? Frowning? Somewhere in between? Does using a photo taken in the Fall look weird to shoppers in the middle of June? Does it color their first impression of what they are buying?
I don't know the answers to those questions, and the many others that must be answered or ignored when it comes to marketing the album. I set out to make a solid representation of the music that Donna wrote, in the time that she wrote it. I am a different person than the one who started this project. I have learned what to do and even more what not to do. My skills and abilities have grown, my experience in using a digital audio workstation has increased to the point where I almost wish we could start all over again. But we will not, because an album is a record - a snapshot of a certain time and place, and cannot be the same ever again. It would be a different record no matter how expert I get. The best thing to do is send this one out into the world, let it make friends and fans, and get picked on by critics and bullies. It speaks for itself, I hope, and it certainly speaks for me.
Funny how "bedroom recording" has come full circle. Les Paul started multi-tracking in his garage, studios grew and became giant industries, advancing technology made those "Temples of Sound" available directly to the artist again, and now we have our first effort heading to the duplication factory, and soon 1000 clones will arrive at our door when the stork/FedEx guy drops a few boxes on the porch.
Pop the champagne and light me a fine cigar.
Long-time readers and short-time grazers of this blog may have seen mention of this phantom project for the past 18 months or so. Finally, after many delays, setbacks, sabbaticals, work, vacations, working vacations, laryngitis, nasal surgeries, outside experts, inside soul-searchings, hard-earned money, soft-earned money, prayers and curses...it is done.
Well, as done as it is going to get. They say you never really finish a mix (or an album)...you just give up on it. And so I did. There are things I really like and things that will always bug me, but the time had run out. I know the contents of every track on every song. I can never listen to it with an un-biased ear. I can never enjoy it like I hope all of you (and everyone you know!) will enjoy it. I suppose that is the same for any creator of music, painting, novels, etc. Underneath the beautiful exterior are flesh and bone and blood. Not necessarily unsightly things, being the very substance of the whole, but things that are not meant to be observed or noticed.
The next phase is getting all of the artwork and packaging tidied up. Donna has been working on all of that with Heather Dryden of Studio Plush, an excellent graphics design firm in Nashville. It's a tricky business making the package fit the product. Not that any artifices are being employed to make darkness light or fluff be substantial. It's just difficult balancing reality with what passes for commercially acceptable.
Does the cover photo show the artist smiling? Does that give the true representation of the music inside? Frowning? Somewhere in between? Does using a photo taken in the Fall look weird to shoppers in the middle of June? Does it color their first impression of what they are buying?
I don't know the answers to those questions, and the many others that must be answered or ignored when it comes to marketing the album. I set out to make a solid representation of the music that Donna wrote, in the time that she wrote it. I am a different person than the one who started this project. I have learned what to do and even more what not to do. My skills and abilities have grown, my experience in using a digital audio workstation has increased to the point where I almost wish we could start all over again. But we will not, because an album is a record - a snapshot of a certain time and place, and cannot be the same ever again. It would be a different record no matter how expert I get. The best thing to do is send this one out into the world, let it make friends and fans, and get picked on by critics and bullies. It speaks for itself, I hope, and it certainly speaks for me.
Funny how "bedroom recording" has come full circle. Les Paul started multi-tracking in his garage, studios grew and became giant industries, advancing technology made those "Temples of Sound" available directly to the artist again, and now we have our first effort heading to the duplication factory, and soon 1000 clones will arrive at our door when the stork/FedEx guy drops a few boxes on the porch.
Pop the champagne and light me a fine cigar.
posted by Tom Spaulding at 10:26 AM
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