A Shout Out to the UK; Release Date Announcement; More on the Way

Just a couple of quick items to announce. First, the "official" digital retail release of "The Gilded Age" has now been set for 9/8/2009. That's when you can expect to start seeing it offered in all the major digital download stores, like iTunes and eMusic.

In what some might consider a blatant disregard for our own commercial interests (and what others are just as likely to interpret as a cynical self-promotional gimmick), we're now planning to extend the availability of the free download version of "The Gilded Age" through the end of this month.

Why? Because one of our readers/listeners was recently generous enough to create properly tagged versions of the MP3 files for us (I'll admit it--I was the lazy one who only posted untagged files), and we think it'd be a shame to let the effort go to waste. Now the new tagged MP3s are available when you download the full album through this blog.

So we offer a grateful shout out to Phil in the UK who created the new and improved, meticulously tagged MP3 files for us, and we invite you to keep helping yourself to our hearty all-you-can-eat musical buffet until the end of June.

Tell your friends about the free downloads and your enemies about the digital release.

Finally, I hope to find time to start posting a series of articles on the technical and non-technical aspects of producing and releasing a DIY album like "The Gilded Age" soon, with a particular focus on how the entire production process can be carried out from end-to-end with only a few relatively inexpensive tools. It's also been suggested I discuss some of the tools and techniques available to independent artists hoping to use the internet to promote their music, so that topic should eventually get some coverage here as well.

All this and more to come soon.

Lori and Steev in New Photos

Steev, Lori and the Uke.
Originally uploaded by Cloud 13 Records

We recently shot a number of promotional photos. Here are a handful of them. The ukulele was my idea.

Lori's expression seems to be signaling a sort of rye amusement. Possibly, she thinks my idea to pose with the uke was silly.

In any event, click on the photo to view more photos from the Tangemeenie photostream on Flickr.

Orders for the new CD are still coming in steadily, so thanks again for all the support.

Low-Flying Airplane Carrying a Banner that Says "Buy Now"

So we're a few days in now, and orders have started coming in at a steady pace. I mailed out the first batch of CDs this morning, so if you ordered one, it should be arriving in the next few days (probably a week at the latest). We've also had some donations for downloads.

Thanks to everyone for helping get us off to a good start! We've already got orders spanning four states, NY, CA, MS, and FL.

We'll keep you posted with more news, photos and other goodies soon.

"The Gilded Age" -- Available Here, Now

"The Gilded Age" is now available for a limited time only through this blog. You can order or download it using the options on the right sidebar of this page.

The final track-listing, for those of you downloading the album, is below.

NOTE: If sequencing whole album for use in a play list or burned CD, tracks marked with an asterisk should be preceded by at least a 2 second pause. All other tracks should not be preceded by a pause.

01 - The Memory Hole
02 - 1,000 Tiny Knives
03 - Flesh & Bone
04 - Underwater Silent Film
05 - Secret Book
06 - King Flesh & Bone*
07 - Left Hand/Right Hand
08 - The Gilded Cage*

Late for a Very Important Date

Well, as the more astute readers out there have probably noticed, the date I'd originally been hoping to start offering our first limited release of "The Gilded Age" has come and gone. Illness in the Tangemeenie household, along with a delay in the shipment of our CD packaging and other factors, are forcing me to push the date back a few more weeks.

But never fear--it's still coming soon. The new planned release date (and this one can be considered firm) is April 21st.

We don't plan to do much beyond word-of-mouth promotion for this initial release, so please, tell anybody you know who might be interested to drop by and check out the blog and download the free MP3 version of the album, which we'll be offering here for a few weeks when the limited physical CD release first goes on sale.

Sometime after that, we'll do a full digital retail release and release "The Gided Age" through the Cloud 13 Records' online store.

Viva el Progreso!

For the longest time now, I've been meaning to post photos of the project studio and short-run CD production set up that I'm using to produce "The Gilded Age." It only seems reasonable to give you a look at the specific tools I'm using, since the point of this blog is to document the process of making "The Gilded Age," and since such a major part of what makes the whole project unique is the particular tools involved.

Tonight I finally got around to taking a couple of quick pics of the workspace and figured I would share them along with the latest updates on where the project stands right now.

This first image is the view of my desktop workspace. As you can see, really the only conspicuous piece of music production gear here is that condenser mic standing there. That and big jumbles of instrument cables in all the drawers are really all that distinguish my audio production workspace from an ordinary home office setup, to the naked eye, when I'm not actively laying down new tracks (then the only difference is there are instruments scattered everywhere, too).

I use ordinary computer speakers and a pair of $100 studio headphones for monitoring. I don't use a DAW control surface or anything like that; I just use software mixers (which means my working method entails lots of clicking around the screen with my mouse to tweak virtual faders and knobs--it's a nuisance, sure, but worth it to save a grand or two). That squat purple and gray device on the far left of the frame is my thermal CD printer, which I'm also including another, closer shot of below.

This next photo (sorry it came out a bit blurry) is just a shot of the space below my desk, where the computer tower and digital audio interface sit on the left, and the CD duplicator tower sits on the right.

I built my PC out of spare parts and the cheapest, most feature-rich new components I could find over the years. It's actually got pretty modest technical specs, with a 1.70 GHz Pentium 4 processor (overclocked to run closer to 1.9 GHz) and only 512 MB of RAM.

My external audio interface--that cigar shaped device with the orange light on it--connects to a PCI sound card that can mix and process audio internally at ridiculously high bit-rates. The interface itself only provides two direct inputs for tracking (not including the digital I/O pipes, which I rarely use), but both are clean, phantom-powered mic pres, so they're all I really need for overdubbing.

The duplicator tower burns and verifies 4 CD-Rs at a time at high speeds. I have to manually feed and unload blank CD-Rs into it, which can be tedious, but at least it's four times less tedious than it might otherwise be.

Finally, this is a close shot of my thermal CD printer. It's a smaller desktop version of the industry standard short-run printing technology--if I'd had another $5,000 or so to sink into it, I could have gotten one with an auto-loader and a receiving bin for running as many as 1,000 discs at a time without lifting a finger.

This model produces a finished product that's just as polished, but it requires each disc to be fed in by hand. It prints in high-gloss, full-color directly onto a special grade of printable CD-R, using a three-panel thermal print process, so the quality is indistinguishable from most commercial retail CD products.

We invested in this printer and the duplicator tower about four years ago (at a combined cost of right around five grand), and have printed somewhere between four to five thousand CDs since, both for the artists on Cloud 13 Records (the CDs we advance bands to sell at live shows), and for various other paying clients, musicians and non-musicians alike.

So that's a quick tour of the audio production studio, graphics design shop, and CD production facility that made "The Gilded Age" a reality.

Now for those updates I promised. The CD insert artwork has been sent off to the printers. I'm waiting for the prepress proofs to arrive any day now. Assuming the proofs look good, it should be another week or two before the inserts and jewel cases arrive. And once they do, I'll be able to start burning and printing CDs, and assembling the packaging.

My previous experience has been that I can turn around a batch of about 50 copies of fully packaged CDs in a single evening without having to stress too much. So it shouldn't take more than a week to produce the 150 copies that will be sold here through the blog.

If everything goes as planned, I'm now aiming for a release date of March 24th. Tentatively, that's the date we'll first start offering the limited issue handmade CDs for sale here. We'll also start offering the whole album for download in MP3 format here in return for an optional donation on that date.

That's all for now. It's late. I'm going to bed.