Is It Ready Yet?

Back in March (2011), I wrote an article all about my new CD, Shades of Grey, even though it was not quite ready to be put out there.  I was pretty sure that it would be released within a couple of weeks at that point.  But no.

I was kind of waylaid when I was given the opportunity to compose music for a local television news program. It would be a good chance to earn some real money and I jumped at it.  So I spent the better part of four months working on it in collaboration with a couple of people from the station.  Well, up until a couple of weeks ago I thought I was just putting the finishing touches on it.  Then I found out that they had actually enlisted another composer to submit music.

One thing I am not is competitive.  Actually, the truth is that I am TOO competitive, and a very sore loser.  So that’s why I don’t like to be pitted up against anyone else in any situation under any circumstances.  Had I known that someone else was also submitting music, I would not have participated.  You might consider that an imperfection, but there you go.  And of course, once I realized that someone else was submitting music, I gave up all hope.  Which proved to be correct.  So I pretty much wasted four months.  They did give me something called a “kill fee”, a term I’ve never heard before.  I guess the idea is to pay you for your efforts, which is fair, but of course it comes nowhere near the time and effort spent.   Most of all, it’s just discouraging.

So I decided to throw myself back into my own music right away just to give myself a sense of accomplishment, and today I finally finished mastering “Grey Shades”.

Warning:  the next part of this article is rather technical!

I have never mastered my own work before, but I discovered a program called Izotope Ozone which has all kinds of lovely pre-sets (a MUST for me!) so that I could just hit a pre-set and see what it did to my mix.  I lost objectivity several times…to the point where my daughter came downstairs one day and say “It sounds TERRIBLE!!”  I threw her out of the room, but realized she was right and so I started all over again.  Mastering is a mysterious process.  You mix everything down and then you take the stereo mix and master it…some will tell you that mastering really only has to do with making all of the songs of equal volume and give each one a clean beginning and end.  But it’s what mastering does to the mix itself that is the biggest mystery.  It changes the overall sound and gives it that “Oomph!” that the original mix doesn’t have.  A lot of people like the idea of the mix being really “loud”, on par with professional recordings out there.  Loud is okay as long as it doesn’t take out the dynamics…the soft spots should still be soft, not harsh, and the “loud” parts should not kill your ears.  I will never be a mastering master.  But it’s been interesting.

My daughter and I more or less designed the cover together.  I had the idea of featuring my convertible somehow and wouldn’t it be funny to have my feet sticking out and everything grey except my painted toenails?  So I took some photos and Gracie did the design from there.  The picture was taken in my driveway, so she superimposed an ocean scene in the background and then she made it into a Polaroid picture look.  We fooled around with different things, and what you see is the result.

And now it’s done.  (I originally put the songs up on Soundclick, a website I was with for many years but I no longer have the songs online.)

The difficulty is in letting go.  I tweaked and re-mixed and re-mastered many times and the temptation is to do more.  But it’s time to let it go.

Now what?

IJ 

99 Cents or Nuthin’

It has been a rather strange summer.  First of all, it (summer) didn’t show up until about August.  Before that, it was cool, grey and sometimes rainy all the way through the spring and into July.  And although I took the month of August off from teaching, I worked all the way through it trying to come up with a new music theme for CHEK Television.  I’m very happy to have the work, but it certainly kept summer at a distance for me.  My studio is in the basement of my home, and it is dark and kind of secluded, so although I took breaks by going out into the backyard and going for walks, I was locked up in there working for hours at a time.  Next week, many of my students are returning and that’s the end of that “break”!

I consider myself very fortunate to do what I love to do for a living, but the truth of it is that it often isn’t enough of an actual living and if I was on my own without a spouse who supports me, I’d probably not be able to do what I love as much as I have.  Young people who are just starting out as musicians or in bands and who want to make a living at it, have a long road ahead of them.  The simple truth is that the general public does not want to pay for music.  Every time you see artists out there performing, 90% of the time they are either making very little in terms what the venue pays them, or they are making nothing at all!  If they have a CD to sell, they’d be lucky to sell a handful at any one performance.  It’s almost impossible to get on traditional radio unless you’re either Lady Gaga or an oldies band from the 50’s to the 70’s, and if you try to sell your music through iTunes or other digital services, you have to pay for your songs to be there and normally see very little return on actual sales.

I lost a lot of money as a performer.  I spent thousands on the recording and manufacturing of my CDs and traveled quite a bit to the mainland and here on the island to try to sell them, but not nearly enough to break even.  I could have worked harder at it, I could have joined other groups or had longer road trips but I would have been a female on my own out there and that didn’t appeal to me, especially with a young family at home at the time.  But that’s just my own story.

As a whole, the music “business” has struggled terribly in the last few years.  A lot of record labels and publishers went under in the past 10 years for many reasons, including the fact that many of them had lived high off the hog for many years on the backs of their artists, and suddenly traditional CD sales tumbled.  They didn’t figure out how to embrace new technology (ie, internet downloading) before it overcame them.  If you give people the opportunity to have something for free, or to pay for it, what do you think most people will do?  Instead of using the technology to their benefit, record labels and conglomerates were reactionary, simply suing people like single parents with teenagers who did a lot of downloading, for millions of dollars, hoping to discourage the activity.  This made them out to be bullies and didn’t scare anybody.  Not great publicity.

There is now a whole generation of people, my adult children included, who know how to download music on their iPods and other devices, and who have not paid a cent for any of it.   Most of them believe that all music should be free, not because they hold a grudge against the business of it, but because for their generation it has always been that way.  All of this leaves bands and artists at a huge disadvantage.

While we all thought that the internet was going to provide an even playing field for artists and bands, in that anyone in the world could find us and become a fan of our music, instead we have become lost in our sheer numbers.  We got sucked into the idea that “millions of people” would hear our music, which wasn’t anywhere near the truth.  Millions of people were overwhelmed at the amount of music on the web and had no idea how to find something that they liked.  This is what record labels used to be good at (other than just make big money off their artists);  they were a kind of conduit for good music, giving the cream of the crop an opportunity to rise.  Radio stations are also to blame for abandoning the original intent of “just playing good music”;  a lot of them became a part of a huge conglomerate (think Clear Channel in the US), where some executive far away decided what music would be played instead of it being the decision of the local radio station’s music director.  This made it nearly impossible for artists or bands in a community to be heard on their local radio stations.  Besides that, instead of radio stations playing a variety of music, their playlists became narrower and narrower as they hired consultants to tell them what kind of music would bring in the big bucks from their advertisers.

Some social media websites have tried to become “the place” to find new music, and iTunes and Pandora have come up with technology that takes your choice in music and tries to find other artists or bands that might appeal to you.  But those artists and bands have to pay money to be there and many of them simply can’t afford it, or have no idea where to start.  YouTube is a place to freely share your music in the hopes of getting some attention and even some sales, but the majority of these viral musical acts are 10-year-old phenoms who can sing like Rhianna or Justin Bieber, himself a result of millions of YouTube hits, and again, the artist or band gets lost in the cacophony.

I don’t think the future is so bleak that music will disappear, of course.  People LOVE music and they love all kinds of it!  We just haven’t found a model yet that will make it feasible for more new artists to earn a decent living at it.  I admit, I downloaded a lot of music in the “free” way until I finally realized that I was really just defeating my own purpose.  Now I pay the 99 cents or, more often these days, $1.29 for every song that I desire to own.  And even though I know most of that money is only going to iTunes, at least I know I am morally supporting the artist or band who wrote and recorded that song and spent money out of their own pockets to do so.  In these difficult economic times, the arts are the first to have any kind of government funding pulled, so it’s even more important to support artists on an individual basis.

And that’s my appeal to any of you out there reading this blog…do your favourite artists a favour and pay for their music so they can continue to produce it!

Off the soapbox now :-)….and back to the studio for me…

IJ