Ever wondered what’s involved in making a CD of original music? I just recorded and self-produced my first “official” release, Online Dating Blues, and here’s a glimpse inside the process.

Part Four: Support from Unexpected Corners, and Finally In the Studio!

I’d done my homework: thanks to suggestions from friends I’d met at Music Strategies, the email I sent to my fan base included links to a web page tricked out with PayPal buttons for donations and pre-orders. I have a modicum of html skills, and thankfully PayPal makes it super-easy to make a “buy now” button, even for a non-techie. I also offered people the option of sending a check, calling me up with a credit card, or giving cash if they preferred (which turned out to be very wise), but I wanted to make it as easy as possible for people to donate on impulse!

Would people contribute? My guitar teacher, Carol McComb, had raised an unbelievable amount for her CD 10 or so years back, but I think her list of (incredibly loyal) students was a lot bigger than my list of fans (about 500 strong), and being a performer with an erratic (to put it mildly) gig schedule, rather than a performer and teacher with multiple ongoing weekly classes, meant that I didn’t have quite the loyal following that she did. (But then again, with a budget of about one-twentieth of her last CD’s, I didn’t need to raise as much either.) Still, there was a fair amount of fingernail biting. $2,000-2,500 isn’t enough to bankrupt anyone, but without outside contributions it would certainly be going to debt…

And then there’s The Economy… I knew I wasn’t the only one with a lot less disposable income to play around with these days.. Was my whole idea just completely crazy?

Then lo-and-behold, 52 minutes after sending my email my first contribution rolled in, for 100$! Talk about validation. Especially validating, and surprising, was that it was from a friend from the calligraphy and book arts world, Carol, who has never seen me perform, and whom I hadn’t seen in more years than I can count.

!

Within 24 hours, I received eight donations and pledges, to the tune of $285. Not a bad start!

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Now that money was actually coming in, the pressure was on. This CD project was becoming more real! I was going to have to deliver a CD, and one that would, I hoped, satisfy all of my contributors! My first recording session was scheduled for December 21, and as the date drew nearer and friends left and right were catching colds, I felt as if I were holding my breath, praying that I would stay healthy. I recorded myself singing my songs and playing my guitar and uploaded these “scratch tracks” to a page on my website and sent the link to the guys in the band so they could get a (rough!) idea of what we’d be recording. I

The morning of the 21st I packed up charts of all my songs and drove an hour to my drummer John’s garage studio, Idea Room, in Concord. John spent the next hour setting up mikes and plugging in cables until the tiny space was a tangle of black cable. With a drum kit, an upright bass, an electric keyboard, music stands, mikes and various large boxes of sound equipment, I had about a 2-foot square space to stand in. The four of us were in a for a long day of very intense work, in very close quarters. And honestly, I can’t imagine much that would be more fun!

After much fussing with cables and computers on John’s part, we all had big (tight!) earphones on, through which we could hear everyone: John’s drums, Doug’s bass, Jake’s keys, and my voice. We spent a few minutes on sound checks, trying to get the mix right in the earphones, so everyone could hear themselves and each other. After all the sound checks were done I pulled out my charts and we started practicing.

We hadn’t met to rehearse, so this was the first time the guys were playing my songs. Being the consummate professionals that they are, however, they took my ideas and ran with them. Until that moment my songs had mostly lived as ideas in my head. I played them in my living room, but (inexpertly played) acoustic guitar and voice give a completely different feel than a full jazz trio! I can’t tell you what a delight it was to hear a band bring my music to life!

And the guys had fantastic ideas! It was like being in a creative stew pot, with ideas popping up like dried corn kernals in a hot pan. Over the course of our two studio sessions we worked out intros and endings, where breaks would come in the music, and what kind of groove each song should have. Doug started playing a “Killer Joe” intro to Online Dating Blues and we all said “let’s use it!”; Jake suggested a straight-8s feel for I Need A Vacation (brilliant); John used brushes to create a mystical, dreamy intro to Geary Street; Jake pumped out a Gospel feel on the keys for Married Men (a hilarious contrast to the content of the song) while Doug created a “overweight marred men in Dockers” solo.

Here’s how the day went:

• Rehearse a song, work out feel, intros, endings, solos
• Record the song
• Assess our performance, make notes of what to change, and record the song again
• Repeat as needed, until everyone was ready to move on to the next song
• Start process over with another song

I have to confess that there was no point during our 11+ hours of recording over two Saturdays when everyone was 100% happy with his or her performance! If we’d had unlimited time I suspect we’d still be working on it today (or at least until we all got completely sick of it! A certain amount of perfectionism is the curse of being an artist and wanting your work to be the best it can be). However, I did not have the budget for unlimited studio time, so (thankfully) we didn’t have that luxury. Instead, we moved on whenever we felt like the song we were working on was “good enough” for the CD. Understand that with four professional musicians, “good enough” is a difficult determination at best, and a little distance can turn something “awful” into “not bad” or even “pretty damn good – hunh!” Jake was convinced he needed to re-do his solo on one of the songs, but when we reconvened the following week and listened again, he decided it wasn’t as bad as he’d thought.

Musicians’ memories of our own performances are rarely reliable… This truism came back to haunt me in the mixing studio, but more on that next time…

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Next: Mixing and More

Finally, after much slitting of shrink wrap (note to self: next time, have replicators leave 200 CDs UNshrinkwrapped…), and signing and packaging of CDs, all pre-orders have been shipped off to my wonderful supporters and “Executive Producers”!

All that mailing costs money, but I recently discovered a cache (read: a messy, uncleaned drawer) of old stamps, so my “actual” CD mailing costs are effectively just for the bubble wrap packaging. Sweet!

The downside: since the stamps ranged in value from 1 cent to 87 cents, with a lot of 37, 34, 33 and 32 cents in there (and the actual postage costs are $1.56, $1.90, $2.24 or $2.75 for one, two, three or four CDs respectively), I had to spend a lot of time with a calculator. I can add, but a math savant I am not.

The upside: assembling the aforementioned wide-variety-of-values stamps to create the appropriate value turned out to be kinda fun, and resulted in some rather pretty stamp collages. Here a few of my favorites:

I’ve got lots of stamps left, so until they run out, if you order any CDs from me, you can be the proud owner of a lovely stamp collage, in addition to the fabulous CD. Just click here to place your order.

Ever wondered what’s involved in making a CD of original music? I just recorded and self-produced my first “official” release, Online Dating Blues, and here’s a glimpse inside the process.

Part Three: Scheduling the Sessions and Raising the Money

Once again I was faced with the question of how to produce the CD. I toyed for awhile with doing a live CD recording concert, reasoning that I perform best for an audience. Plus my radio show was live, and I got a handful of acceptable tracks from that, so surely I could do the same again. Also I could ask for donations in advance and at the door to help cover production costs. Finding a venue I was happy with, and actually making it happen, though, proved harder than one would think. I was blocked again, though I couldn’t say exactly why.

Weeks went by…

Margo, my voice teacher thought I should “do it right” and hire a professional producer. She’d been working with this guy for months, was impressed with the performances he was getting out of her, and I figured why not at least meet him? Though I expected working with him would be pricey. And would I encounter the same issues I had with the first producer?

All my concerns ended up moot, because somehow, although the producer in question was apparently interested in meeting me, and Margo was willing to make the hour-long drive with me to facilitate an introduction, nothing happened. Weeks went by, I didn’t follow through, and suddenly I realized holiday shopping season was right around the corner, and damnit, I wanted to get a CD made NOW! No more waiting! It didn’t have to be professionally produced (no matter what Margo said) – my home-burned radio show CD had proven that! Hell, if it was better than my radio show CD it would be a clear win, and for that all I really needed was a way to record me and my band.

A Cheaper Way to Record…

A year before I’d gotten together with a trio in my drummer’s garage studio (John Lazarus – Idea Room) to rehearse and record “just for fun.” My big goal at the time was to get a recording of my first song, He’s Just Not That Into You, to use as a soundtrack for a video I wanted to make. Now it suddenly occurred to me – DOH! – perhaps the most expedient and cost-effective way to go about this would be to record in John’s studio again. I shot off an email asking if he and his band, The Big Beat Trio, would be interested and available, and how much they’d charge.

Within a couple of days I had two five-hour recording sessions scheduled (at $30o a pop; $100 for each musician per session), and two mixing/mastering sessions with an engineer John recommended, Nick at Earhythmic Studio, who only charged $50 per song for both mixing and mastering. (To give you an idea of what a deal this was, $100-200 per song is not uncommon for mastering alone, and mixing is way more involved…) Great! It may not be Capitol Records, but given my time and budget constraints (did I mention I was broke?), I managed to let my inner perfectionist take a breather and remember my goal to just make this CD better than the last one. Not an impossible task, which also had the added benefit of making a future CD that’s even better than this one seem achievable as well. Baby steps…

Paying For It All…

Wow! Blocks busted! No more paralysis! I was moving forward! Now, how to pay for this thing.. Although I was doing this on a shoestring ($150 per song is a helluva lot better than $1,000 – see Part 1: Background – but that didn’t include the costs to replicate the actual discs), it was still going to cost more than I had on hand, especially given that this was December, the deepest, darkest depths of cash-flow darkness for my mostly wedding-related art and design business. My estimates were at least $2,000-2,500.

I had met artists at Music Strategies who had raised CD production money from their fan base, and knew of still others who’d done the same. Earlier this year I randomly sat next to my guitar teacher, Carol McComb, on a flight. I spent the entire time picking her brain about her phenomenally successful fundraising campaign, which brought in something like $40,000 from students, friends and fans. !!!

Carol sent me a copy of her fundraising letter, from the days before everyone used email and paypal. Ah, technology! No stamp-sticking for me: as soon as I’d scheduled the recording sessions I composed an email to my fanbase, using Carol’s letter as a skeleton, asking for their support and offering certain “premiums” for different levels of support. (I had a lot of fun with this: since my songs are mostly themed around the trials and tribulations of dating, I offered different kinds of  [totally platonic!] dates with me for each of the $100-and-above levels. I wasn’t sure how this would come across, but the comments were all positive – as I’d hoped, people got a good chuckle out of it.) I accepted pre-orders for $10, and here are the “Executive Producer” contribution levels I offered:

Executive Producer Levels:

$25 – Web Executive Producer
Your name on my website and 2 copies of the CD

$50 – Web&Print Executive Producer
Your name on my website AND in the liner notes, and 3 copies of the CD

$100 – “Coffee Date” Executive Producer
Your name on my website AND in the liner notes, 4 copies of the CD, and a coffee date with me!

$250 – “Lunch Date” Executive Producer
Your name on my website AND in the liner notes, 6 copies of the CD, and a lunch date with me!

$500 – “Drinks Date” Executive Producer
Your name on my website AND in the liner notes, 8 copies of the CD, and a date for drinks with me!

$1000 – “Dinner Date” Executive Producer
Your name on my website AND in the liner notes, 10 copies of the CD, and a date for dinner with me!

I sent the email off and waited to see what would happen…

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Next: Support from Unexpected Corners, and Finally In the Studio!

Ever wondered what’s involved in making a CD of original music? I just recorded and self-produced my first “official” release, Online Dating Blues, and here’s a glimpse inside the process.

Part Two: A Free CD, and Busting Perfectionist Blocks

After my disappointing appointment with the cigarette-smoking producer, suddenly I was saved from researching expensive CD production ideas, at least temporarily, when a promoter I knew hooked me up with a live concert gig on KZSU Stanford radio. It was college radio, with old equipment and somewhat limited production values, but hey, there was a sound engineer, and the gig would be recorded, so voilá, I’d have a CD of me and my band! Nothing fancy, no after-the-session mixing and mastering because it would be recorded as one track, but hell, it would be something.

The fact that the gig was LIVE on air (with a radio audience of maybe two people for all I knew [in addition to the four or five in the studio audience], but still…) led to a serious case of nerves (can you say “shaky breath support”? can you say “pitchiness”?), but when all was said and done I came home with twelve tracks, five of which made me cringe minimally enough that I felt not too uncomfortable about turning them into CDs to at least have as samplers. (Can you say “perfectionist”?) When, on a whim, I offered them for sale at a gig, and - gasp! – people started buying them, and liking them, something clicked for me.

A Realization All Perfectionist Artists Might Benefit From

I realized (and this may seem obvious) that being “perfect,” or at least better than I am right now, or “as good as [insert successful music artist]” is not what it’s about. People liked those CDs because they are authentic expression of who I was in that particular moment. Who knows, maybe the moments that make me cringe (when my pitch wavers, or my voice blips or wobbles) make some listeners actually like my singing better, because it’s so clearly not canned. No auto-tuning here, baby! This is the real thing!

Time for a New Addition to the Catalogue

For two years this home-burned disc (which I titled “Melissa Dinwiddie Live from KZSU“), packaged simply in a paper sleeve, was the only CD I had. My voice was evolving, I was beginning to write my own songs, rather than just singing standards, and it was becoming more and more bothersome that my only CD, much as I liked it (especially after several weeks’ distance!) was no longer representative of who I was now as an artist. It really hit home when I started singing my first song, He’s Just Not That Into You, at gigs. Inevitably, people would come up afterwards asking to buy the CD… and I had to tell them there wasn’t one. Ouch! I could hear the lost sale, the “kaching” that never was. Oh, the pain! I added another original song, and another, which led to more “can I buy the CD?” responses, and pretty soon it was clear I needed to get these songs recorded and catch those listeners before they got away!

Music Strategies

Let me take a moment to rave about a music marketing seminar I’ve attended (twice), because it played a great part in my getting this CD made. Music Strategies is put on by independent music marketing guru, Tim Sweeney, to give independent music artists the tools to make a living from their music without being dependent on a label, or anyone else for that matter. In addition to giving the lowdown on the industry and how it works, Tim teaches you to think outside the box, to be creative about how you market yourself, and to work together with other artists. (In my other business, as a ketubah artist selling art and stationery for weddings, competition is fierce because couples, after all, only buy one ketubah and one set of wedding stationery. One of Tim’s signature speeches is that as music artists, we have no competition; nobody buys one CD, or listens to only one artist, in their lifetime!) I have learned a ton at Music Strategies and from Tim, though I haven’t been diligent about putting it all into practice yet (can you say “overwhelm”?)

Among other things, Music Strategies freed me from the idea that a CD had to have ten or twelve tracks. Tim is a big proponent of artists producing a new CD every six months, with just four, five or six tracks, if that’s what you’ve got. Get your fans used to buying from you regularly is Tim’s thinking. (Smart guy, that Tim!) With that in mind I decided to include only original material on my CD (written by me and/or the talented Angus Stocking), six tracks in total.

Now I was back to how to get the dang thing made…

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Next: Scheduling the Sessions and Raising the Money

Ever wondered what’s involved in making a CD of original music? I just recorded and self-produced my first “official” release, Online Dating Blues, and here’s a glimpse inside the process.

Part 1: Background

I’ve been singing jazz since 2005, gigging since 2006, and everyone knows the currency of the music world is recorded songs. Having a CD – and ultimately a catalogue of CDs – along with the downloadable mp3s thereof, is essential to develop an audience. Although CDs are becoming less important in the world of downloads, ipods and music-by-subscription (Rhapsody, et al), it’s still useful to have physical “product” to sell at gigs, give out to potential venues, etc. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future CDs will go the way of the woolly mammoth, but for now they still have their place in the indie music artist’s patchwork quilt of income streams.

Naturally, I’ve been wanting a CD since I started singing seriously. What music artist doesn’t have one?? Even just a demo of a few songs is a big step up from nothing – potential venues and private clients need to hear a band before determining if they want to hire them, and they’re unlikely to come to a gig. Plus the days of the homemade cassette tape are long gone. The advent of high quality home-studio recording equipment and software means that it’s now possible for indie artists to achieve professional results without the help of a major label or a rich producer. The catch is you still have to invest money (and if you’re doing it all yourself, significant amounts of time) to acquire and learn how to use the equipment! Still, small recording studios, engineers and home-based producers abound, so one doesn’t have to do it all oneself.

You do, however, have to pick from what feels like an endless array of choices…

On Blocks of the Emotional, Decision-overload, and Financial Variety

Perhaps it is this plenitude of possibilities that had me blocked for so long around making a CD. Certainly the fear of taking a permanent snapshot of my still-developing singing skills had no small part in the blockage. When improvement is clearly evident (to me, at least!) over a period of weeks or months, there’s a strong impulse to wait “until I’m better” to capture oneself for the world (I wish) to  hear. But of course, presumably, if one is working on one’s craft, one is continually improving and getting better, so at some point one has to just dive in and accept that any recording is “a snapshot of where I am at this particular moment.” It helps to assume that any given snapshot will only be one of many… but you’ve got to start with one.

Hurdling this emotional block was just the start. Once I’d decided that I had the psychic strength to intentionally create a permanent record of my imperfect self, I still had to figure out how to make it happen. I read an article recently which argued that too many choices is actually a hindrance to happiness. I’m inclined to agree. Not that I would want to live in a restricted world, but an overabundance of choices can lead to overwhelm. Which one is best? If I go with A, will I later regret not going with B? Everyone has an opinion, too, a studio “you really must use,” a producer “who’s the best,” a sound engineer… I tend to be of the “research everything to death before making a decision” variety, so the plethora of possible solutions only added to my paralysis.

The Producer Track

On the suggestion of my voice teacher I did finally make an appointment with a producer, but he wanted to use his musicians, rather than the guys I’d worked with and was comfortable playing with; wanted me to record over canned tracks, rather than live with the band (which, granted, allows for significantly greater editing control, since I could re-do my vocals as many times as necessary to get a good take without also having to get good takes from piano, bass and drums at the same time, but eliminates the in-the-moment interaction among musicians that, as a jazz singer, is part and parcel of what I endeavor to present on stage); was going to charge $1,000 per song (ouch); and (the nail in the coffin) smoked like a chimney, IN the studio, so the place reeked and I simply didn’t think I could tolerate even one hour in there, let alone the seven or eight that a recording session might require.

Plus the sample track he played for me of another vocalist he’d recently recorded did not impress. I now wonder if perhaps it hadn’t been mixed (had he said as much? I didn’t really understand the function of mixing at the time, so I don’t honestly remember, but I hope that was the case, because the whole track sounded like a karaoke session, with the vocalist in an entirely separate room from the band.. which of course, he had been, having recorded his vocals over the band’s already-recorded tracks, but the point is that it sounded that way. Not cool.)

So there went that idea. Back I was at square one.

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Next: A Free CD, and Busting Perfectionist Blocks