Finally, the new album is all sent off the the pressing plant, being lovingly turned from a bunch of computer files into delicious CDs.
And with that comes advance ordering – at the moment, via Paypal, Gemm.com and mailorder. see the main site for more on that, this isn’t so much about the commercial side as the bit you don’t usually see…
So the last couple of weeks have involved a lot of listening – burning the tracks from the album onto CDRs and playing them on as many CD players as possible. I’ve got some rather nice studio monitors in what passes for my studio, so I get a good ‘flat’ reference, but you still need to hear how an album works on the crappy player in the kitchen, or the CD player with the speakers up near the ceiling upstairs, or in the car… And it passed all the tests, which is nice, so that bit was finished.
Then the artwork – finding good photos of theo and I was one job – theo had some great live shots taken, which were ideal, and I did what I always do – took a load of lame photos with my digital camera, and then made them look proper in Photoshop :o) the one for the album came out very well indeed.
Then we were looking into barcodes, but registering to be a company that can put lots of barcodes on things was way too expensive, and by then, it took too long to get someone else to generate one, so we went without, and we’ll just get them stickered as and when we need to…
So artwork finished, text proof-read, quotes in from icc duplication, time to send it off. The artwork was all uploaded to the icc ftp site, the cd popped in an envelope with the mcps application for licence to press, the actual tunes themselves were registered with the mcps, and we’re away. I might be heading over to icc this afternoon to check the chromalin – the final version of the artwork printed out… we’ll see…
so now it’s all about letting people know the album is there, hopefully persuading them to order it before it comes out so we can cover as many of our costs as possible before it’s even released! The usual incentive is employed – a whole other disc of exclusive limited edition signed lovely music – this time it’s an album called ‘It’s Not Gonna Happen’ which is great…
So, please head over to the site and order the CD… :o)
…oops, I said this wasn’t going to be the commercial side… too late
Soundtrack – right now, Steuart Liebig, ‘Quartetto Stig’, Metheny/Haden, ‘Beyond The Missouri Sky’.