I can breathe and reflect back on all of it now, but I had never considered all that really has to happen between a record’s conceptualization and release until I went through the process myself. Especially when you do it all by yourself - not that I didn’t get help from some truly awesome friends, but I’m not part of a major record label, so you get the idea.
Here’s the flow, using my album Purge Corruption as an example:
- Tom Becker, pianist and sweet studio owner in St. Pete Beach, gives me a call and says “hey man, you wanna come do a record at my house?” Not being a complete idiot, I say yes.
- Decide on the musicians. I choose Kenny Drew Jr. on piano, Bruce Wallace on bass, and three different drummers, Rich MacDonald, Chuck Parr, and my brother John, as well as my good friend Mike Valasek to harmonize with me on When Lights Are Low.
- Decide on the tunes you’re gonna do. Think long and hard! You can’t do them all. Originals, covers, or both? Will the album have a concept or will you just wing it in the studio?
- Write the tunes. Compose them yourself, or arrange others’ songs, but above all else, the music should express “you.” It should have your own creative imprint on it. Interestingly enough, the creative aspect can be one of the quickest parts of the songwriting process; for instance, I wrote the title track “Purge Corruption” in about five minutes. It’s formatting those damn things using your notation software that takes so long. A chart for each instrument…
- Print the tunes and spend a billion dollars on ink and paper.
- Round the guys up at the studio, rehearse your road maps and tunes to get them sounding halfway decent…
- RECORD THE MUSIC! Keep in mind, this was not a multitrack recording; in other words, we didn’t record all the parts isolated and separately. We were live in a room together, meaning if one person messes something up, you gotta start over and do the whole thing all over again. In a way, this gave us adrenaline that made us want to sound great for each take, especially on our solos. It’s not like we can go overdub them in later. Many of those songs were actually done in one take. In fact, all of them were, except for “Human Nature” and “Grace.”
- Think we’re done? Hardly. You’ve only got raw audio at this point. I had to work extensively with Paul Richardson, the recording engineer for the project, to master everything. Lots of e-mails back and forth, mainly with him sending audio and me sending requests for acoustic improvements (compression here, EQ there, etc etc, but for the most part I deferred to his wisdom). This also included several trips to Paul’s studio in Brandon.
- At this point, I took a long break. Why? It was mainly because I wasn’t happy with the sound of the title track. This was very difficult to get into a perfect state, because it’s an intense, dark track with a lot of ferocity going on, mainly between Kenny Drew’s piano playing and my brother’s drumming. This is by far my favorite track on the album, so my perfectionism wasn’t helping things. I wanted to get the balance JUST RIGHT. Paul is an excellent engineer and I think he’s great, but I still thought “Purge” was too conservative with the intensity of its sound. So I sent the audio over to my good buddy from grad school Aaron Urbanski, also a digital audio wizard, and asked him to come up with something. What he gave me is what’s on the album. It was Goldilocks and just right!
- As an additional side note, I had to come up with an album cover. Yet another layer to the creative process! Being such a fan of Blue Note Records and all of their incredible covers from Reid Miles/Francis Wolff, I knew there was no way I could come up with something like that, my Photoshop skills be damned. So I decided to instead aim for simplicity. My long tenure at Ringling College of Art & Design connected me to some super talented artists, in this case none other than photographer and graphic designer extraordinaire Nancy Nassiff. I headed over to her photo studio at the school, where she took some great shots (many of which are in my gallery!), chose the best one, and graciously came up with the very slick and stark design that you see on the cover.
- Now, I’ve got all my audio. How do I get it out there? This is when I had to hook up with CD Baby, and I had no idea what I was doing. They have a very long, arduous process for filling out your album details, including a terrible and clumsy audio upload page which took nearly 45 minutes for each track. I had to choose what the 30 second track samples were. I had to creatively describe the entire album in a way that would make people want to listen to it, but also without sounding like I was trying too hard to sell it (self-promotion is very difficult…). I also had to purchase the rights to record all of the cover songs on my album (the Michael Jackson tune in particular hurts the pockets…). In the process, I assigned my album a UPC and created my very own record label, Nikki & Heidi records, named after the two canines nearest and dearest in world history to me.
- Finally, after completing their application process, the ball was in their court. After seemingly eternity (ok, really just a few business days), they put the record on their store and then sent it over to all the major digital distro’s - iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, etc. - but it didn’t show up on those sites until 2-3 weeks later. Did I mention this was a long and drawn out process?
- Wow, congratulations, your album is out! But we’re still not done. Why? I have to create my website!
- That’s right, the website you’re currently reading this on. I launched it the day my album came out. I worked really hard to do whole thing from scratch because my old site was hot Google Sites garbage. And, because I’m both a perfectionist and a web/software developer by day, I knew I had to get it just right. Code. Design. Format. Come up with content. Server and DNS. So, the album release process and web development process were really happening side by side, and they were both completed on the same day.
- Then, of course, once both the album and site are finished, you gotta get them out there. I mainly whore my music out on Facebook, but I’ve got to start thinking of other ways to promote this record. If nothing else, simply for Kenny, because I really do think the man was saving his best for last, and people really need to hear him on Purge Corruption.
And there you have it! A 15-step process. Is it all really worth it? That depends on what you’re looking for. It’s not about breaking even, and I doubt I even will when balancing record sales and how much I put into it.
The much more rewarding aspect is having a collection of music, my foremost passion in life, that represents what I want to play and how I want to play it. Unsurprisingly, the process is probably the hardest when you do it the first time. Once you’ve got a handle on it, I can only hope it gets easier in the future, because I’ve got a hell of a lot more things to say and play!
After all that work, I think it’s time for a vacation. Good thing the summer’s here.
This one’s for you, Kenny.
See Purge Corruption's page on CDBaby