One Piece of a Larger Album Puzzle
The beginning to a year-long live recording project in Central Oregon
I dropped off the final cut of “Big Story Friday Night” off to both where I recorded it, at Big Story Bookstore off Greenwood in Bend, and at our downtown record store named Smith Rock Records (formerly Ranch Records). Both businesses were very happy to get the promotional piece and told me that they were going to spin it for people to listen to while shopping for books and records. The record store wants to purchase a couple copies so they can sell them to shoppers.
It felt good to go from A to Z of that process of recording, editing, mastering and then publishing a vinyl record. I’m really happy with Side A but there are a couple songs on Side B that have a couple musical flubs. I decided to keep it as is with the idea of staying pure to the concept of live music - where hiccups, flubs and train wrecks are a part of it - for some more than others.
The entire project was a shoot-from-the-hip idea. I was loaded with media - a full SD card with video of me playing the songs - almost 3 gigabites of left and right channel high quality audio - I had to do something with it all.
My first thought was to get a good quality video recording over to the NPR Tiny Desk Contest. After completing the submission I started piecing together some of the songs that sounded great and with the power of Google found a vinyl album shop that promoted their services of doing as little as one album. I think their business is more for DJ and rappers who scratch samples during their performance - not acoustic musicians; but I figured what the heck I go ahead and go through the process anyway.
When it was all submitted the shop quickly produced the vinyls and shipped them off to me. It was really exciting to get the copies and feel the real deal of a vinyl cover, dust cover and disk. It was a lot heavier than my other pro vinyls that we have from Wilco, War on Drugs and Radiohead.
I gave it a spin and was delighted by the sounds - not HQ and the pops from the needle but it felt and sounded like a real vinyl. The only thing, production wise, that I did not like was I submitted the cap amount of music for 44 minutes (22 for each side) and the track went to the point where my player automatically stops - an abrupt WWWWWHHHPT.
With this knowledge I probably will get it recut and remove the two songs I’m not that happy with and make it a 6-song LP. What I really enjoy about this labor intensive and somewhat expensive method of recording a live album is experiencing the music as the final product and then make judgment on what stays and what goes, leading me to the next part of a journey that I’m now considering trekking.
I’ve started booking my spring, summer and early fall shows in and around Bend and I’m considering recording all of them, doing the same thing as I did with Big Story Friday Night. The theory is in fall I will have 4 or 5 live albums with 160 to 200 minutes to work with to produce a real album to sell everywhere, only using the tracks that make the cut to a 40 minute production that I can be proud of and saving up the cash to have the album pressed - not cut. The rest of the music I’m going to try to sell as NFTs
So… that’t the idea. I guess. Why all this work? Because this is what I do.