I've never been much of a studio hound. I much prefer the "leave the mistakes on the table" aspect of playing live and it suits my personality more. I'm not one to obsess over details and - I just find the repetition boring.
That being said, it feels like having some recordings to promote myself with is something that's missing. Not to mention, I do have some ideas for fun ways to promote and sell some of these songs. So I've decided to got ultra DIY and go record myself doing a handful of songs.
If I had the budget and my way, I'd go head into a good sound studio with an engineer and maybe even a producer and put out a couple of great songs. But I don't have that. I could do some recordings at home but my gear is pretty ramshackle and since studio recording isn't a passion, I don't really feel like dropping the money on a bunch of expensive stuff.
So, keeping on the theme of my blog post a few weeks ago, I'm headed to the library sound studio to do some recordings in a couple of weeks.
I've spent the last week or so strategizing on what I want to achieve in the studio time I have (3 hours). Mostly, I just want to use their setup to record myself - I don't have their mics or quiet space. As far as mixing and post-production, I'll probably do that here at home.
I've got four songs in mind for the recording:
- Beef Dylan
- American Kazoo
- Guitar Picks and Pocketknives, and
- Fucking Fridge
Picks and Pocketknives is going to be last recorded since it's my least favourite of the quad and it's very short. So if I run out of time or steam, I can do without it. Fucking Fridge is important for my release plan on this. I hope to publish the other songs for free or near free on Soundcloud and similar places. But Fucking Fridge will be behind a paywall on Bandcamp. I figure I'll do a "pay what you want" scheme for it and kind of market it as a "forbidden track". Theres some chance to put some lore behind the song that I think people will really like.
I'm planning on recording everything "live" off the floor. Just set up a vocal mic and a guitar mic and go at it a bunch of times. It takes me less than 10 minutes to play all four songs so I should be more than able to track each song a half dozen times in the three hours. Says Mr. Clueless and Optimistic. I know how these things work, I'll be lucky to get out of there with one song. But hey, there are classic albums that have been recorded under that kind of a crunch so who knows?!
I also settled on Reaper as my DAW of choice for the project. It's a piece of software I should have bought 10 years ago, and I'm finally going to pull off the band-aid. I don't need Abbey Road studios for what I'm doing - and frankly Reaper has everything Abbey Road had in the 60's so I'm more than covered. Unfortunately, I don't have George Martin to guide me. But hey, this is a first step.
I'm doing ok in getting prepared. Clearly, I've chosen the songs, I've fine tuned the lyrics and have them ready to go for the day. I'm working on some of the other detail work like figuring out the click tracks and stuff. But it's gonna be a busy couple of weeks. I've got a couple of gigs to play in the next two days, maybe a third on Saturday and I'm headed off for holiday with the family next week. Luckily, it's camping and I'll be bringing the acoustic so I'll keep my chops up. I can probably even practice playig to a click.
So, that's the next thing up for me! The timeline to release this is still a bit foggy for me but I'm thinking late August or early September makes sense - I suppose it's all up to how well the recording goes and how successful I am in the mixing stage. Plus, I'm working on my first real merch idea at the same time here and I hope to have something ready for that around the same time. It could be a very interesting fall!
So stay tuned kind reader. There's tonnes of fun stuff coming up and I'll try to keep you posted here as I go along!
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