How I did it: I thought about this album for a long time before I actually attempted to do it. I knew the musicians I wanted to work with, the standards I wanted to sing and I had an idea of how I wanted the entire album to flow. I also knew that I wanted to do it on 2 inch tape, that I wanted mostly original material and that I wanted the songs/arrangements and the vox to be more upfront than the musicianship.  After the preliminary recordings were done in January, I  reconfigured things and gave everything a lot more thought.

Which standards weren't too...pedestrian? What arrangement works best with this song? We have too many slow songs - we need to write something faster, something more upbeat. This needs to be rerecorded. I hate those lyrics, rewrite them! And on and on we went.

We nailed it shut in a day and spent the next two days mixing. Sweet!

Lessons & tips: All I can really say is that I do so love making records a LOT. i love writing songs, configuring the musicians, rehearsing, recording and making it happen. I can't think of anything else that i do creatively that is this impactful in such a limited amount of time.

Mainly, I love the autonomy and freedom making my own CDs gives me - and if you're doing it right, you're coughing up a lot of money to pay for that freedom. It's just the natural course of things.

Most musicians don't understand that for all the work and sacrifice that happens to make the CD sound the way you want, there's a whole other level of work and commitment that must come into play when you come down from the mountain with that master in  your hands, or it's all for naught.

So yeah, recording a CD is one thing - but self-releasing it, that's something else.

Sep 28, 05:47PM PDT | 0 comments | 1 cheer