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The following article was published in the January '99 issue of Musician Magazine.
How to Produce Your Own CD
by Sam Shaber
Everyone and their mother seems to have a CD out these days - everybody but you. Certainly you've got the talent, the songs, the whole package, but still it's the process of putting it all together in one handsomely-illustrated package that's a mystery. Just how do you do it?
The first question you need to ask yourself isn't how - it's why. Before you pour buckets of time, money, and sweat into a CD project, make sure that you're not doing it only because everyone and their mother has done it already. Having the clearest possible vision of the project as a whole before you start is very important. The process of CD production is long and grueling, and it's better to go through it all without losing sight of why you're doing it. Too many bands go through all the hassle, only to end up stashing ten boxes of one hundred CDs each under the old bed at the drummer's mother's house and, shortly after that, breaking up.
Me? I decided to record my own CD because I was going on tour for the first time, and I hoped to promote gigs in towns I'd never visited through airplay on local radio. I also wanted to have something to sell as a way to increase my take at each show. But the reasons for cutting a CD are as varied as the artists who are doing it. For example . . .
Some reasons just don't stack up. If your main interest is in shopping your music to major labels, you might do better putting your time and money into an EP of four or five songs, with the strongest material first. But if you're trying to create a product to sell, a full-length album is better - in that case you might agree with me that the last song should perhaps be the strongest, since it functions as the grand finale and determines what impression the album as a whole will leave.
In any event, if you're clear about what you're doing, the process of producing your own CD can be savored rather than suffered. You are, after all, in control of everything, and many of your decisions can be very personal.
Cost
As with almost every human endeavor, cost is the first concern. The decisions can be complicated: Do you want the best you can get within a strict price range, or simply the best you can get? It's like buying an instrument: Should you spend $200 on a guitar that will never be completely in tune, or should you invest $1,300 in one that will work with you as you develop over time? Or should you go for broke and get a Martin custom before you know how to do it justice?
Whatever you do, making a CD isn't cheap. It will cost you at least $4,000, with duplication and packaging alone likely to start at around $1,500 for a thousand CDs in shrink wrap. (The good news is that these prices are getting lower.)
All in all, from the earliest tracking session up to delivery day for ten boxes of CDs, my album, In the Bunker, cost me about $10,000. Some of this was donated by extremely kind relatives, some was earned through the day job, some was pulled from savings, and the spillover was dumped to the credit cards - which, I'll admit, I'm still paying off a year later. But to pay for a project like this at $40 a month for a while isn't such a tragedy.
There are other ways to trawl for the funds you'll need to get started on your CD:
If you're part of a band, you have the advantage of having bandmates who can help you share the expense. As a solo artist, I held the creative baton, but I also held all of the bills in my other fist.
Costs can be brought down by cutting corners. If you don't have a home studio, then be as rehearsed and ready as possible when you go into the commercial studio. In fact, before you go anywhere near the studio, make sure your chops are down. Play the tunes out as much as possible. Tour first. Do all you can to avoid rehearsing in the studio. Nerves will always slow things down on occasion, whether it's your first or your five hundredth time in the studio, but the more you've performed and worked through the songs, the less you'll spend cutting tracks. Ideally, you'll be able to lay the instrumental parts down live in just a couple of takes.
Craig Dreyer and Fiends played out regularly for more than a year and a half before they went into the studio. When the time came to record, they chose a jingle house in New York because, as Dreyer explains, "Their middle name is speed. They got the drum sound down in half an hour, and we just went in and banged out twelve tunes live." The budget for What Are Fiends For? came to less than $3,000, largely because the band was so prepared.
Unfortunately, when I did the first sessions for my album, the band I put together was unfamiliar with much of the material and had played out very little. My expenses increased because certain parts had to be played over and over again in an effort to get it right.
Another benefit of playing tunes out before recording them is that songs always evolve as you break them in through performance, and if you have an obsolete version of a song on your new CD you'll probably dread having to play it that way at your gigs. The idea is to keep the material on the CD as current and alive as possible, so that you can continue to distribute it proudly to fans, labels, and radio stations.
Choosing a Studio
The nature of your project will determine which studio you select for your sessions. That's why Danya Kurtz and her co-producer, Rich Tozzoli, chose a live setting - the Wintertide Coffeehouse in Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts - to create the feeling of an intimate club performance.
As you consider where to do your recording, consider that the most important "piece of equipment" in each studio is probably the engineer. This is the person you'll be working with for hours, days, maybe months, in very close quarters on very intricate details. The engineer will definitely affect your sound, so having a good instinct about him or her can be even more important than the number of mics the studio has or that beautiful mural on the studio wall. You may find a killer studio with a million dollars' worth of gear and walls covered with shiny CDs by famous people who tracked there, and they may decide to charge you only $30 an hour, but if talking with the engineer makes you feel intimidated or awkward, don't go there. And if you find a $100-an-hour studio with a bright, creative, open-minded engineer who will build you a tree house if that's what it takes to get the vocal sound you crave, then, as Stewart Lewis advises, "do whatever possible to get your music out there."
When I began work on In the Bunker, I checked out a bunch of studios in Manhattan, even recording tracks in some of them. Eventually I met Tony Viscardo, engineer and owner of No Comment Studios, a 32-track digital facility. His space is in the basement of his family house, and the atmosphere instantly appealed to me. We would be very focused and isolated for long periods of time, but then we would take a break, sit out in the backyard, and eat takeout. His daughter would come down every now and then, which relaxed me as I lay down vocals on the other side of the glass.
I chose to mix at No Comment as well. We used not only the three sets of speakers in the control and live rooms for playback, but also the stereo systems in his living room and dining room. This was a great way to hear what we were doing in the "real" world.
Which brings up another important factor in the process of selecting a studio: your ears. Once you've narrowed it down to a few studios, try to get your hands on some albums that were recorded there. This is tricky, because some artists track, mix, and master in three different places - a good idea, if you can swing it, since every studio comes with a fresh set of ears. Still, listening helps.
Basically, everything helps: word of mouth, instinct, technical knowledge that either you or your friends have, other people's opinions about the amount of technical knowledge that your friends claim to have. Keep your mind as open as your ears: Chris Black recorded his first album, A Mind is a Terrible Thing, in a friend's basement, using buckets for a drum set on a few tracks. On the other hand, with In the Bunker I had an eye toward AAA radio and possibly a mass market, so I wanted a professional studio. These are all personal decisions - decisions you may not be so free to make once you're with the "majors."
Don't forget that the more expensive studios aren't necessarily the best ones for you. Even if you're filthy rich and can afford to cut your debut at the Hit Factory, be careful: The engineer may not place your project at the same level of priority as the one he or she is working on with Mariah Carey.
In the same way, free studio time can be dangerous. We'd all love to find a friend with a professional studio who's looking to get some experience with the equipment or do your project as a stepping stone to higher-profile work. But when you're not paying someone it can be tricky to get what you want out of them, especially if he or she is a friend. Someone might be very excited about your project in theory and in planning, but when deadlines are looming you'd better be sure that their offer of service is genuine.
On a technical note, it's a plus to record on Alesis ADATs. Despite occasional sync problems, ADAT digital tape is portable, cheap, easy to deal with, and very common, so it's easy to bring your "reels" from one studio to another if you want to work on different stages of the project in different facilities.
Musicians
For many solo artists, the issue of finding musicians is critical. If you don't have a regular band, you might want to start by investigating the live music scene in your area. Go out and catch as many performances as you can. More than that, play with as many people as you can. For two of the tracks on my album, I hired a local musician I'd never met or heard but who came very well recommended. He did a fine job, but he had no connection to me or my music; while this isn't discernible to the naked ear, I will never feel as attached to the parts he played as to the other parts of the album.
This brings up another point: Part of what makes someone right for your project is their investment in you. If you could shell out enough money to raise Jaco from the dead and bring him in on a session for your album, but you were never able to rehearse or even have a conversation with him before the date, then he's probably the wrong guy for the job.
Another question involves paying the players on your album. If they belong to the union, you'll have to follow strict guidelines. But in most cases, the "salaries" are up to you. Many friends may even agree to play for free.
I decided to pay each musician on my record $100, regardless of how much time they put into it. My personal belief is that it's unfair to measure an artist's input in dollar amounts, so it's better to establish a flat rate. Many players in New York City make around $100 per gig, so this was comparable. In the end, though, I came out ahead because the work they did on my project is forever.
What if you want to play all the instruments on your album yourself? This can cut down on expenses for other players, but these savings will almost certainly be wiped out by the time it takes to lay down each separate track.
Mixing and Mastering
Once you've wrapped up your recording, the real work begins. Mixing is a very hands-on process, one that often requires a few "rehearsals" before you're actually ready to try putting the mix onto DAT. Creating the right mix involves shaping each sound: You can pick different "rooms" for the vocals and instruments, set the virtual distances and locations of everything for the listener, and much more. The basic tracks are like a sketch that gets colored in through the mixing process: You may decide you want the piano in part of a tune instead of having it play from start to finish. Some instruments may only need effects at certain points. The decisions are as endless as you want them to be.
In working on In the Bunker, Tony and I would put down a few different mixes of each song (vocal up, guitar down, etc.), then listen back and vote. For this reason, it's important to label everything well; you need to be able to see which mix is which and where it is on the DAT. Believe me, it's very easy to get lost. And before you make decisions, test the mixes on everything from car stereos to Walkmans. The idea is to hear the music through every type of speaker a listener is likely to use in everyday life.
Mastering is best described as the final "sweetening." You may discover that three tracks are louder than the rest in your collection of CDs, or you may find that everything on your album is quieter than the industry standard. Through mastering you can edit tunes, run them together, fix some overall EQ problems, and generally polish. The musical information will be loaded from your mixed DAT into a program such as Digidesign Pro Tools, in which you can see visual depictions of the tracks you laid down. I cut a guitar solo in half during my mastering process by visually cutting and pasting.
This is also the stage at which you have to decide on the order of the songs and the pauses (if any) between them. If possible, it's best to do this in a completely different space than the one where you did the tracking and mixing. Try to take at least a few days' break after the end of the mixing and the start of the mastering in order to clear your head.
When you think you're done, burn the album onto a CDR, take it home - and don't listen to it for a day or two. Then, really listen to it. If you have a multi-CD changer on your stereo, try out your album with a variety of other discs. Along with the original mastered version of In the Bunker, I threw in Prince, Pink Floyd, Shawn Colvin, Clapton, Seal, Miles, even Aerosmith. None of these people sound particularly like me or like each other, so I was able to concentrate on the production, rather than the material, of my album. (It's also a good idea to keep a few albums in the studio with you for moments when you may need to clean out your ears.) After the first mastering session, I realized a few changes still needed to be made. Once the final CDR was ready, I put it together with the artwork to be sent for duplication - oops, almost forgot . . .
Artwork
Designing the artwork for your CD can be just as much fun as the time spent in the studio. If you're dealing with a deadline, of course, you'll want to get the artwork and design for your CD well underway while you're still working on the music side of things. And unless you're visually inclined, the first step is to find the right "sidemen" - or maybe "sightman" is the better term.
Actually, the first step is to come up with a name for your project. This is one of the coolest parts of doing your own CD, since the title can be as personal as you want it to be. My instinct was to name my album after its first track, "In the Bunker," a song written straight from a dream I once had. I was afraid, though, that this was perhaps too cryptic and wouldn't be catchy enough, so I made up a list of 25 possible titles, some from song lyrics, others as irrelevant as Live in Vegas or the close runner-up, Hey. I ran these titles past a bunch of friends, took votes, drew fake covers with different choices - and in the end wound up going with my original idea. In the Bunker simply meant the most to me.
Even after settling on the title, I had no idea how I wanted my CD to look, so I started by asking friends of mine how they did theirs. I found out about a show of work by students who were graduating from the Pratt School of Design in Brooklyn, and there I went in search of someone to recruit for Bunker. Most of the work at the show was oriented toward commercial packaging and design; there were even a few examples of actual CD covers. Nothing struck me, though, until I came to a flat adorned with some darkly whimsical paintings by Christopher Barrett. The work was not at all related to packaging or design, but the illustrations appealed to me so directly that I took the artist's name and contacted him about doing an illustration for my album. Barrett explained that he had done some layout work in the past and would be interested in doing both the design and the artwork for my CD. After two more meetings we had a definite concept for the cover and the booklet, including additional illustrations to give each song on the album its own little cartoon icon, so the following sessions could be devoted to revising and proofreading.
This is a very big point: Proofread your text as many times as you can stand. Have other people proofread it. Then proof it again. Make sure the text on the spine of your CD will read rightside-up when the album is on a shelf. Make sure everything is the right color - some work gets darker when printed. Barrett actually took a CD of his and "dressed it up" into being the art for In the Bunker, a job that included cutting out the design for the disc itself and gluing it to the surface of an old disc so that I could see how it would look. By doing this, we discovered that the overall art was initially too dark, the credits too small, and some of the icons weren't quite there yet. Then came the painstaking process of checking and re-checking that all of the lyrics, the spellings of people's names, the thank-you's, and so on, were correct. (You don't want to offend anyone by leaving out or misspelling their name!)
Remember, this is your project. You're not dealing with a record label formula; if you want to put embarrassing pictures of your Aunt Barbara on the cover, go ahead. If you want to do your own artwork, do it. Chris Moore drew the illustration for his CD Outa State Plates himself. It's a simple black-and-white line drawing of a car moving across an intersection, with the titles floating to the side. The cover for In the Bunker was more intricate; it cost me about $2,000 - yet it also depicts a car moving across an intersection with titles floating to the side. You just never know . . .
Whether your album art is DIY or commissioned, this is the stage of the game where you settle just how professional your project will look. Is your name large and legible? How about the title? Did you remember to put track numbers and times on the back? (This is very important for radio airplay; a DJ who knows at a glance the number and length of his or her favorite track is a happy DJ.) Once we had taken care of these details, Barrett scanned the illustrations into a computer, combined titles and text through Quark, then saved it all to a Zip disk, and we were ready to go.
Duplication
As with every stage of this project, I started looking into duplication by asking around. I sought separate vendors for the artwork and the music duplication because I thought it would be cheaper to eliminate the broker. But in the end, through a recommendation, I went with ADA (Artist Development Associates, www.artistdevelopment.com), based in Framingham, Massachusetts. They dealt with the back-and-forthing from the printer and duping house, as well as checking through everything themselves to avoid costly glitches - an important step that would have been skipped if I had done it alone. After I sent them the artwork, they printed it from the Zip disk onto film for me to check. Their fee for this was actually less than if I had gone to a lab myself. Once I checked and okayed the proofs, they turned the whole thing around in about a week - very good time in this business.
There are hundreds of companies that do what ADA did for me; your connections may lead to the right one for you. Again, the personal relationship is everything. Rather than check their work via mail, I went to the ADA offices and did it in person, which put faces to the voices I had been speaking with over the phone. This connection eventually led the folks at ADA to start a website for CD distribution (www.cdfreedom.com), with which I quickly got involved. They even helped me get a gig or two in the Boston area.
I decided to go with a thousand CDs for the first pressing. Factories are reluctant to press fewer than that because it's not worth their time, so it gets expensive to do smaller orders. Plus, you'd be surprised at how fast a thousand CDs can go - not only through sales, but for promotion, booking, networking, and so on. Once you've released a CD, it does become hard to consider sending out a cassette with your press kit.
So now that you have your thousand CDs under the bed at your drummer's mother's house, what's next? Ah, that may be the hardest part of all. . . .
Contributors: Sam Shaber performs solo and with her Shaberband at the Bitter End, CB's Gallery, the Fast Folk Café, and other clubs in New York. She has opened at concerts for Patty Larkin, Disappear Fear, Buckethead, and other artists.
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