I know, it’s been almost two months. What can I say? I get distracted. Life keeps coming at you. Sometimes, my family life seems to spill into just about every opportunity to work. This isn’t even close to true, honestly. The real problem is that the work that I gravitate towards tends to suck me in and leaves little room for other things when I am being productive. Or even when I am not being productive. Yeah, that happens too, but I think with art and invention, the net result justifies any dead ends you may have to explore. It’s all part of the process.
But productive I have been, and I think the net results are encouraging so far. It’s show and tell time. I have spent the last two months sharpening both my music production and graphic design skills.
The time I spent making music was about work flow. I already had most of the skills in that area that I required, but I really needed to convert processes that I had historically stumbled through into something more automated and streamlined.
Ride is an older song that I decided to re-record with fresh ears and way better hardware and software than I had available in the early 2000’s when the song was originally recorded. I tracked the instrumental parts of the current iteration sometime in the spring (2017) and went back for a listen about the time of my last post (mid-July). I messed about with the original mix, but the vocals I put down made me queasy. I don’t usually like my voice anyway, so that is no surprise. I just muted the tracks and hummed along with the instruments as I played with elements such as instrument levels, automation and effects. Interestingly as I did, I came up with another vocal melody – an alternate to the song’s original.
When I un-muted the original vocal and sang the new part with it, I knew I had something that was going to change this old song forever, hopefully for the better. I re-recorded all of the vocal parts and didn’t hate the result. What’s more, I got a very streamlined workflow going by the time I had finished tracking the vocals, and what I ended up with sounded pretty polished, and dare I say it – commercial. That result is SylverWyrm Productions first official Pre-release:
Yes, because you are special, you get to hear it first, here, for free. I hope you liked it. Heck, I just hoped you listened to it.
Because we are now such good friends (and yeah, we probably are if you are still reading along), I am going to give you a Twofer. Yes a SECOND Pre-release, right on top of the first. This is more the direction I am writing these days. It’s an Electronic Dance Music (EDM) number featuring no one in particular. This song came together pretty quickly and I tried to be efficient and organized as I worked. I wanted this song to be organic and original, so I didn’t use any presets – choosing instead to build almost all of the sounds from the ground up. The vocal samples that I used are from Apple’s loop library and they just caught my ear as I was browsing for sounds. I suppose you would put it in the House or Deep House or perhaps Dubhouse (I may have just made that up. Nope. Thank you, Google for ruining my delusions once again) category:
I hope you enjoyed that as well. Please feel free to let me know what you think of either or both songs, even if my singing makes you queasy.
So, you may be wondering what releasing means and why I’m doing it. Well, it’s basically self-publishing. I am going to be paying a fee to have a company distribute my music to iTunes, Spotify and a bunch other music services. Every time my music gets downloaded or even played, I’ll get some money. What’s more, once a song is in the wild, all sorts of good things can happen. Examples of this are getting a movie, TV or commercial placement, or getting a song sampled.
As far as these two songs being PRE-releases … they are still under the distribution radar for now, BUT, Soundcloud (the current host) only has lower quality MP3s and they make you download an app if you want to stream to a device … Meh. And, I won’t get paid. After the official release you will be able to add these songs to your iTunes or Spotify (Or Amazon, etc …) playlists and when my song gets played, I get paid. You don’t even have to buy it. Neat. I am still deciding on distribution services, so stay tuned.
As a THIRD bonus, I am adding a bit of a puzzle. The second song’s title O7O has a hidden meaning. The first blog subscriber to decode it and get back to me with the right answer will score a highly stylish and soon-to-be sought after SylverWyrm Productions T-Shirt!
Oh. You didn’t know about the t-shirts and SylverWyrm Designs? Okay, well, if you want to know about them, I’ll be debuting them in the next post.You have been so nice to read and listen so far, I don’t want to overwhelm you, so I decided to make the SylverWyrm Designs post separate. Besides (spoilers!) that post is pretty much a sales pitch for selling t-shirts. Don’t worry, you can read it right away if you like.
Back to music. These are just the first two songs, released as singles. I am seriously considering releasing an entire album of undistributed material in the very near future while I work on new projects. I will most likely continue to just release singles after that as they come off the grill.
Look for Part 2 here
Jack Mathers 