Songwriter Forum > The Bar

The making of an album

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Wicked Deeds:
By the way, the artwork is so good!

Paul

Bill Saunders:
Thanks for the sentiments Paul, and yeah, I love the artwork too.

MichaelA:
Another thumbs up for the artwork! Great result.

Plus the back-story to your final product Bill is really worth the read.

Who did the physical copies of your CD by the way? And biggest question, as from one who would love to do something similar, how did you get consistency in production. I've got many songs from which I could select an album, but as they have been recorded over time, well the production is all over the place.

Congratulations anyway on your finished album and wonderful story, thanks for sharing!

CaliaMoko:
It adds so much to have the story behind the album. I'd like to buy a digital copy but Amazon keeps telling me it's unable to, um, something about my payment method. I forget now. Anyway, I'll have to try again later. Maybe do some research on why it isn't working.

Meanwhile, I think it's great and I look forward to getting my own copy.

Vick

Bill Saunders:
Hi Michael @MichaelA

Thanks for taking the time to read!

The CDs copies were made by these guys:

https://www.duplicationcentre.co.uk/  Their rates are very reasonable and they’ve done a great job.

As a few people have now commented on the artwork, here is the link to Neil Ruddiforth who designed and produced it – I can’t rate Neil highly enough:

https://www.rocketfive.design/

I also had a few older songs that made it onto the album. As you know, Paul Boyd mixed and mastered the album, and one of the first things we discussed was getting all the songs to sound consistent from a production viewpoint. So, the first thing to say is that every song was remixed specifically for the album. In practical terms, as Paul and I were working remotely, this meant uploading the individual tracks  - vocals, guitar, bass, keys, drums etc - for each song to Google Drive, which Paul could then access, load into his DAW and start the mixing process from scratch. In some cases, if I wasn’t entirely happy with a vocal performance or guitar part for example, and I rerecorded these before uploading the files.

In terms of consistent loudness, each track had the same ceiling of -3bD for the CD masters. There was lower level set for the streaming masters as the streaming services all do their own form of loudness optimisation anyway.

I know it was Paul’s aim to have every song stand up on its own merits if played in isolation – but also to get that consistent feel when the album is listened to, just like in the old days, from start to finish! On that point, I spent some time working out the best running order, where, as well as trying to ensure that no two “similar” sounding songs were adjacent, I also tried to ensure no two in the same key were in juxtaposition. The casual listener might not know about keys, but subliminally, I think it breaks things up nicely.

Vicky @CaliaMoko

Thank you so much! CD Baby also have it for download if you lose patience with Amazon  :)

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