Rough to Release

 After last month's disappointing experiment with playlisting via SubmitHub, this month I've been looking at direct paid promotion. It's not something I know a lot about and none of my immediate muso buddies were able to make any recommendations so I ended up putting some money behind a company called Badenstock . They're a fairly typical label / promoter / distributor / collective - everyone wears multiple hats these days, not just the musicians - based in Finland. There were a couple of red flags on their website (that I'll come back to) but they seemed to be honest about certain genres not being in their wheelhouse, the fact that there were no guarantees, a commitment to not using bots, and - as a label themselves - they have an interest in making sure their playlists are effective for their own artists. And fundamentally they have a very cheap entry level - $20 gets you a seven day boost with your song being placed on their 'high-quality' playlists and s...

 As a follow on to Part 17 - Distribution Strategies I have started to experiment with some of the approaches. First on my list to throw money at was Playlisting, and to test this I put $50 into the pot with SubmitHub , which is I think the largest of the third party playlisters . Step 1 was researching playlisters and trying to find ones who had a good overlap with my music, then working out which songs to pitch to which lists. Step 2 was throwing that all in the bin because SubmitHub had a very different view of my genres than I did and very few of the playlisters I was interested in came up as options. Nevertheless, I persisted… Week 1 So I picked 4 songs as starters and sent them through to 4 playlisters . I initially picked a few with fairly high rejection rates because, 1) if you don't believe in your stuff then who will? And 2) start high then taper down is an easier way to navigate the system. Four rejections later… Two rejections were basically long winded ways of sayin...

Some video content for you to wrap up the series. In the video below I'll show you how I worked through the process we've talked about, and used a lot of the tools and techniques we've discussed, to create the song Some Things Break.  And that's it from me, but I'll leave you with one last thing. You'll remember back in Part 10 we talked about the recording hierarchy and how the material and the performance trumped everything further down the line? Well as proof I present to you The Mountain Goats, The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton . Now go finish your song.

Links to all the posts in sequence. Part 1 - the pitch: from ideas to completion Part 2 - Space and Permission Part 3 - Spark and Spice Part 4 - More Spark and Spice Part 5 - Beyond Verse and Chorus Part 6 - Story Arcs Intermission - Tackling Writer's Block Part 7 - More Tension and Release Part 8 - It's not all about you! (Co-writing) Part 9 - Define 'finished' - a summary so far Part 10 - Recording Basics - The Hierarchy Part 11 - Recording Basics - Making the most of what you've got Part 12 - Production Part 13 - Demo, Dub, Delete Part 14 - Arts and Crafts Part 15 - Beyond Self-Recording Part 16 - 'Finishing' or 'mastering for cheapskates' Part 17 - Distribution Strategies Part 18 - Problem Solving Part 19 - The End - and a worked example Part 20 - Appendix 1 - Experimenting with SubmitHub. Part 21 - Appendix 2 - Experimenting with paid promotion

Over the last four months(!) we've introduced a number of tools and techniques, but we need to use them to get something finished. Then we need to keep going. The sports scientists will tell you it takes 66 repetitions to build muscle memory and create a habit; I'm not saying you need to sit down and write 66 songs (though that's not a bad target) but you do need to go and flex those new metaphorical muscles. So here are a few suggestions, some of mine and some from my friends at the Sound On Sound forum, to help unblock the process and finish the job. Tackling preventative behaviours. The first step is recognising this as a problem. If you're not sure what I mean by a preventative behaviour, this cartoon by Asher Perlman should explain it adequately:  https://www.instagram.com/asherperlman/p/C0b7oCwuyMj/?hl=en Do you suddenly find yourself gripped by a compulsion to re-wire your studio? To write to your estranged aunt in Bogota? Do you convince yourself that you can...

So you've 'finished' your song up to a standard and loudness that you're happy with, now you just lob it up on your website and let it go viral right? Depending on your definition of 'finished' then potentially, yes. If our objective is to get something written, recorded and released then our job is done and we can give ourselves a pat on the back and move on. Seriously, that's a piece of art that is out in the world that didn't exist until you turned your hand to it. You created something from nothing, and that's a kind of magic.  But if we're hoping to attract a few more listeners, and we don't have the same levels of 'brand recognition' as Taylor Swift, then we're going to need to put in a bit of work. This work is 'marketing'. It's a dirty word, and a dirtier business, but at some point you're going to have to face into it.  Well, it's not really. Basically marketing is just letting potential customers (you...

Hang in there buddy, we're nearly at the end, but I have had to split this into two parts. We'll get to copyright and distribution next time. Mastering On the wider internet there is a fair bit of nonsense spoken about what mastering is and why it is, or isn't, important. Let's unpack some of that now (in a somewhat simplified way) so we can get to our goal of finishing and releasing our song. In the Good* Old Days (TM)  a mastering engineer's primary job was to take a recording and make sure it was in good shape to be transferred to the physical medium it was going to be distributed on. With vinyl this meant understanding a great deal about the physical limitations of the medium and how that affected things like low frequency extension, loudness and even where on the record certain songs needed to go because of the difference between the edge and centre of the record. They would also, therefore, need to understand how to work within these limitations without ruinin...

This episode was originally going to cover group recording, loudness, mastering and distribution but that would have been far too long so we're just looking at the recording side today. Recording more than just yourself. So far we've largely assumed that you're working for, by and with yourself; the key exception being Part 8 where we looked at co-writing . We're going to build on that now and briefly talk about recording / producing groups and remote collaborators. Broadly speaking, groups fall into two categories when it comes to recording. There are 'traditional' set-ups, where the group is self-balancing and arranging (perhaps with a conductor) and your job is to faithfully capture that sound. Classical music, brass band music, and a lot of folk music fall into this camp. The other set-up is the more modern approach, typically used in pop, rock, country, metal and similar productions, where each instrument tends to be captured separately with a view to much ...

 OK, so we've written the song, established the creative vision, recorded all the parts, and deleted half of them. Now we just need to mix it all together.  Easy right? Guess what, I've got another book recommendation for you... The companion to Recording Secrets is Mike Senior's Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio . Now I'm obviously not going to attempt to summarise an entire book / career into a blog post, but for the purposes of finishing our songs, here are a few suggestions about approaches. Lo Fidelity I'll start with a mistake I made when I first started to think about my recording and mixing in a more detailed way than 'stick a mic in front of it and plug it into the 4-track. The mistake I made was in chasing fidelity. I reasoned that if I wanted to create a recording that sounded like a bunch of real instruments then I should start by making each instrument sound as much like the real thing as possible. Then mixing should just be a case of setting the ...

In the previous chapter we looked at production and setting out the vision for the song. So now we have our spark and spice mixed together and our direction set, how do we go about turning that into a reality? If you're a proper composer or you're just really good at thinking about musical parts, it might be as simple as writing down everything you want to play, hitting record, and playing it all.  If you're anything like me then you might be quite a long, long way from that. So I have a 'Demo Dub Delete' cycle, and you might find it helpful too. Demo Firstly, and most importantly, capture the essence of the song as completely and accurately as you can. For me, this involves practicing to a metronome a few times and then recording to a click. As well as being a bit of good discipline, this also makes it easier to add midi parts later if the baseline is solid. It can get a bit awkward if you have a tempo or time-signature change, ideally work out where those things a...

 We interrupt this series for a brief word from our sponsor. (It's me, I'm the sponsor, no-one is paying me for this shit). I've got a new single coming out on Friday, and it's almost happy. https://ditto.fm/years-drew-stephenson Click the link for the music service of your choice. Normal service will resume tomorrow.

 I've gone back and forth about the order of these next two chapters several times, I'm still not sure they're in the practical order, but I think this is the right order for the finishing-your-song flow. What is 'production' when we're talking about music and home recording? In the 'good old days' the music producer was someone who would work with the band to help them establish and execute their vision. They would cover things like artist management (making sure everyone was happy and productive), label liaison (making sure everyone was getting paid and deadlines are hit), session management (making sure the engineer and artists were on the same page), but they also had a hand in the arrangement of the track, the composition of any supporting parts and that all important job of taking the vision out of the artists' head and getting it on tape. Sounds like a fascinating job, but how many people here can afford to pay a professional to do all that? Y...

Hello again. Last time we started talking about recording, the hierarchy, and intent. We left it with a promise to talk one of the easiest ways to get your recordings sounding better-than-average: sound-treatment of your room. Now some people might be nodding along at this point, but not really believing. I mean, it's just the room right? It's not what's making the noise, and it's not what's capturing the noise, so how much difference could it make? Well, fortunately I have some pertinent examples: Untreated, unfurnished room:  https://www.youtube.com/shorts/pJnGeDsly6M Same room, treated, singing into the 'live' end:  https://www.youtube.com/shorts/t2iIhiyjm6A Same room, treated, singing into the 'dead' end:  https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7c4hKBWk6Ac So we're starting with this because it will apply to all of the subsequent options and it's cheap and easy. Sound treatment is about controlling how sound bounces around your room, and we need...

  Welcome back. Last time we summarised the various tools and tricks we'd covered so far and largely wrapped up the initial 'writing' side of the 'rough to release' process. And if all you require is a finished set of lyrics, a chord structure, and / or a melody line scribbled on a stave then your work may be done. But my memory doesn't work like and I don't read music, so firstly, I require a recording of the complete piece so that there's a permanent record. Pun very much intended. Secondly, during the writing process I will often get ideas for how I want the final piece to sound; and that's rarely as simple as a single guitar and vocal part. My songs tend to be musically very simple and I rely on production and arrangement to keep the interest going. Blame it on my lack of music theory... So I need to be able record my parts, add elements to them, remove other bits and generally screw around with things. And for that I will need some 'stuff...