Thingawowzer.

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Bounte: Two will be a slow album release. The tracks are out for mastering right now. Once mastered, I’ll finalize the artwork and officially release the digital album on Bandcamp. We’ve all waited long enough for the music, and I see no need to wait on any record labels for it. At that point, the product is all yours! Then starts the next phases of release, with hopes of wider distribution and promotion.

I’ll send the tracks to all the licensing outlets I know, and continue to talk to record labels to see if there is any interest from them. And I’ll be writing to anyone I know to check out the music. Alan has also convinced me to work on videos for the tracks, so hopefully I can get some youtube buzz going.

In anticipation of Two‘s release, I’ve given bounte.com a bit of a facelift, which is so easy to do with WordPress and some webskillz.

All songs are mixed and the unmasters are ready to go. I’m very happy with how they’ve turned out, and I think people will enjoy them a lot. In case you missed the preview track I posted on Facebook, I’ve included it at the end of this post.

I’m close to deciding on a release method. I’ve submitted to a bunch of labels, but unless I hear of serious interest, I’ll get it mastered on my own, and release through bandcamp. If I can generate enough sales on my own, that would definitely interest a label more. I’m still deciding whether to print discs. I probably will, in one form or another, just because I want a physical product to add to my pride collection and to hand people.

Enjoy Unborn, featuring Lauren Cheatham:

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I’ve been working recently on a new pack for Beatserv, called Vintage. We’ve released it for free, for a couple reasons. First, it’s a collection of vintage drum machines, and most of our target customer base likely already has emulations of these instruments somewhere in their virtual instrument collection, or actually owns the original hardware units. And second, it’s our first fullscale implementation of an Ableton Live Pack, involving use of Live features that don’t translate to our other usual formats, like NI Battery. Our future packs will likely have Live implementations closer to this new format than our previous “megakit” layouts, which work in Battery, but are not as elegant in Live.

If you’re an audio producer, go download the FREE Live Pack (the pack also contains some exclusive beat loops and WAV samples of all the hits), and also partake in our 20% off sale!

I’m still deciding what to do about releasing this album. I’ve been submitting demos and talking to record labels to see if there is any interest, and also to learn what a record label does these days. I gather there is a huge difference between large labels and indie labels, and what a label does for any particular artist can vary greatly. But I can do a lot myself. I can make the music, get it mixed, get it mastered, do the artwork, get CDs made, put it online myself, put it in online stores myself, sell it myself, tell people about it myself, collect royalties myself. What’s left for a label to do for the artist?

From my experience with Positron, a label has greater distribution, promotion, and licensing systems, knows different people than I do, and has a wealth of knowledge about the music industry. And many of those things I specified above that I can do myself, I learned from working with a label. I’m thankful for that, and wonder what else there is to learn. But is it essential for an artist to enter into a legal agreement over all these things? I get the impression that a label doesn’t generate sales for an artist, but handles accounting and organization that are beyond what an artist can handle on their own. In that sense I suppose an artist really “knows” when they need a label, rather than having all these questions like I do.

The flipside is, how does a label benefit from an artist, and what do they rely on the artist to do/provide? Not really a question I can answer, but I’m curious.

…from digital. I bit the bullet and ripped my entire CD collection to iTunes. Most of my new music purchases in the last few years have been digital downloads, and my listening habits have been geared now towards iTunes on my computer. I only listen to CDs in the car (especially since my iPod was stolen), or occasionally on the big stereo.

It took a few weeks of swapping CDs in and out of the computer, but it’s done, and kind of like being rescued from a desert island. Yeah, I had my one or two desert-island albums, but I’m suddenly reunited with all the musical bounty society contains. It’s like restoring a lost part of my identity.

Another part of the ultimate goal is to start DJing again. It’s fun, I like going out, I like sharing music, seeing other people have fun with the music. I just have to finish prepping clips for my laptop software.

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I listened to One all the way through for the first time in about 3 years. And right at the end was a little something that made me feel a bit better about taking forever to finish Two. It’s a little song about how it can take forever to finish writing a song. Three Minute Miracle:

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Sitting on the corner in front of Sears. Plains, trains, and automobiles! You can hear the el, the O’Hare flightpath, some cars of course, a walker, and you can just hear a fly land on the microphone at about 58sec (or -0:12 if it’s counting down).

View Chicago Audio Map in a larger map

In an effort to start injecting myself into the music scene again, I visited the Kinetic Playground last night. I’ve been there before, but I have to reiterate that it’s a weird place. I previewed the myspaces for the bands that were playing and expected lo-fi crap rock. But to my surprise what took the stage was blazing acid jazz. The first band was even playing jazz standards, from Freedom Jazz Dance, to John Scofield’s Hottentot. A pleasant surprise.

The crowd at KP was all over the place, not surprising considering the location in Uptown. There was a large group that probably wandered down from Little Vietnam, one of whom was hitting on my wife and asked my permission to dance with her (say what?!). There were hell’s angels types, hipsters, metalheads, slick old italians, panhandlers, some girl dancing with a hula-hoop all night, and a sprinkle of plain old boring people. All good, all good, but please, PLEASE, get rid of the attendant in the men’s room. Putting up with that scam really takes the place down a huge notch.

I took a week’s vacation to see the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas. Here are some of my observations:

1. You can’t appreciate the immense size of the Grand Canyon until it kicks your ass with a 10-hour hike.
2. The VAST majority of hikers in the Grand Canyon are European. The Americans are more evenly represented in the cafeteria.
3. Too much salt makes your fingers fat.
4. A dry heat IS better than a humid heat. No dispute. The difference is that at say, 80 degrees in Chicago, you can stand still and end up with sweaty, slimy, grimy underwear. Even at 110 degrees in Las Vegas, you end up crispy clean and fresh.
5. A cover band can probably make a good living in Las Vegas.
6. If you don’t gamble, Las Vegas holds about 6 hours of interest, which are filled with shows, kitsch, looking at  beautiful people, and some general “wtf?”.