As you may have noticed, I’ve been avoiding any real blogging of late because I didn’t feel I had that much of value to say.
As it happens, this weekend I have begun to realise more and more what it is I need to do to get my music happening again. I just need to get back to basics, and oddly enough, back to my trusty old Yamaha keyboard.
My plan is this:
I have a very loyal friend in my musicing world by the name of James Mercer. No, not the guy from The Shins… the *real* James Mercer – my friend James from university. I asked him if he’d help me with critiquing my songs, really getting into them and finding out what needs to be done.
So, I’m going to practice on my keyboard, get some good one-instrument tracks down, sing over them, burn ’em to disc and post it off to Southport for him to have a listen. That way my album will be forming from the off, and won’t be just a series of disjointed recordings that don’t sound like they have any confidence in them (because they really didn’t!).
As part of this new approach, I’m deleting most of my old Audacity projects from my PC. Partly because they’re taking up loaaads of room, and also because I don’t need them now. That was the way I used to do things when I was still a teenager, for goodness sake… Now, I’m doing in the grown up way – the old-fashioned way. Don’t worry, I’ve bounced everything down to MP3 files that I thought was worth saving, so it’s not like I won’t be able to listen to it any more, but it means I won’t be tempted to try and rescue something that wasn’t working from the off. I’m sure my PC is very thankful too.
Another consideration is the album artwork. I’m becoming less and less happy with the great big make-up covered straightening-iron-curls face I’ve got on it at the moment. What I might do is get a friend to take a few pics using my own camera (using that clever little focus thing it’s got going on to give a bit of depth), and make up a booklet from them. I’m a dab hand with that sort of thing, so it shouldn’t be a problem. At the end of the day, if the album is going to be called ‘Honesty’, it has to respresent visually how I am in real life, not what I look like for one day after an hour being pampered and with specialist lighting and professional photographers. It’s just not ‘honest’, is it?
Well, that’s the plan now! Hope you’re enjoying what I’ve been up to on YouTube lately. Don’t forget to subscribe, or comment, or something, while you’re on my channel. Your feedback is welcomed!
Tarrah!
Caryl