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Old 11-25-2019, 12:17 PM
FrankHudson FrankHudson is offline
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Location: Minneapolis, MN
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Quote:
Originally Posted by pf400 View Post
Good Day all. I'm thinking hard about recording an album of 6 Christmas songs, all fingerstyle. Mainly traditional music, all solo guitar. Open to having other instruments added virtually by an Engineer. Any tips on how to approach this would be appreciated. I'd love to have other real musicians contribute but that would cost me too much, I think. I would give the final product to family and try to sell some to recover some of the costs. I'm an intermediate-advanced player. I'm just not good with technology so I don't want to do anything except sit in a studio and play, but I do alot of looping so I am able to 'overdub' many layers. There are a handful of persons here who advertise that they can do a great job, but I don't know any of them and I don't know any other guitarist who has done this....thanks.
I went back to your original post just now, and I think there's an over-riding issue that we haven't adequately dealt with.

It is highly unlikely that you can recover the costs of a more elaborate and professionally aided production by sales of a CD or other recording distribution method. Setting aside your musical skills and inherent listenability (because even if they are high, they are immaterial to this issue) unless you have a significant fan base or publicity budget and focus, the professional production will not in anyway repay your investment in a cold, hard, accounting way. Are you Canadian? I get the impression that there are some Canadian practices that might mitigate this statement from a USA resident just a bit.

I'm not a music industry professional. Anyone here who is and wants to dispute this can join in with their valuable experience.

This may be a dream project for you. You may want to hear what you'd sound like with better production. If you have the money and that desire, you may still want to proceed with your goal.

An alternative is just to work on recording with a low-ish budget. Everything from a straight-off home recording to renting some studio and engineer time to record the guitar tracks and adding any sweetening later outside of a studio with line-in "DI" electric bass and "virtual instruments" that yourself or any friends who you can ask to contribute to your project. The advantage of using VI keyboards, electric drums and or DI bass is that they can sound reasonably good without studio space, microphones and other costs. You could also return to the studio/engineer to mix your outside the studio VI/DI tracks with the solo acoustic tracks you recorded there first.

If learning how to do even a bit of that is to big a commitment for your desired timeline, then I'd suggest just solo acoustic guitar. The studio and engineer time if you have your arrangements and playing down should not be that high, and the production time also low.

You can pay someone to master it, or use something like Ozone to help guide you to do it yourself. You could look at "all in one" services that will produce CDs and serve as middle-men to streaming services or just burn them on CDR disks for your friends and work out whatever digital distribution options yourself. Even something as informal as setting up a free YouTube channel may get you a few hundred listens for no upfront cost.

I haven't looked at this myself for sometime, but I seem to recall that CD Baby is one of those all-in-one services for offering distribution packages at a cost. Not an endorsement. I haven't used them or "shopped for services" myself recently.

If any of the distribution options get you some additional listeners and maybe even a little bit of payments, it may be worth it to you on an ego or artistic basis, but I would not expect any appreciable revenue. I don't know that quality or elaborateness of production will change that much, thus the ideas for minimizing those costs.

Or course I may be wrong on some of this, and I believe me I don't want to blunt your desires for your art and project. I just sincerely believe this issue is important to address.
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