19th Century Notion

Burnt all of the CDs yesterday.  The track names are coming up on Gracenote, which is great.  I got my printer this morning, along with paper for the photo and track listing that I'm putting on the inside of the CDs.  The image quality is pretty bad so I'm going to see if I can get the original image instead of the jpg I got from facebook.  The text looks fine, though.  I finished six copies, with white ribbon, to give to the band.   Once I get the photo thing sorted out I'll do the rest.

So there they are, waiting for the others to join them.

PJ Autoharpy

I went out and got some fixative this morning and stamped, then smudge-proofed the CDs.

There's most of them.  While waiting for them to dry I attempted to master the disk, mixing down each file and adding compression and eq and...quickly gave up.  I'd already done this on the 1-2 bus in the mixing stage, and doing it again seemed redundant.  Not to mention that I couldn't hear any difference.  So I just made sure they were normalized and started and stopped at the right places, then burnt a disk.

 I imported it into iTunes, added the relevant information, then submitted it to Gracenote's CDDB, the database that most media programs use to get artist and track names for albums (that info's not usually on the disk itself).  Apparently it'll take at least a couple days to show up when other computers query the database, but then nobody with an internet connection will have to type in track names.

iTunes needed album artwork, so I just took a shot of a copy of the album with the ribbon on (the rest don't have ribbon yet).

Finally, I listened to the disk.  Turns out I didn't check carefully enough: on "Spagett!" the guitar solo didn't get shifted over when I cut out the silence at the beginning.  Ditto the sax on "Life of Fridays."  Fixing these problems changed the length of the songs, which I anticipated would be no good for Gracenote to correctly recognize the album (I can only assume they go by number and length of tracks).  I carefully made the track lengths match the old ones, and succeeded in fooling my computer into thinking it was the old version.  So hopefully it should be okay.

MAKE 'EM!

The next step was decorating the sleeves.  On the inside, I wanted a band photo on the left and a track listing with info on the right, printed on white cards.  I could do that later, so the outside was what I had to work with.  I got a couple of sets of alphabet stamps and mounted them on a pair of acrylic blocks; one block has "THE" and "ARGYLES" on adjacent sides, the other has "rage and" [and] "chill".  That wasn't exciting enough for a cover, though, so I looked for something else.  I found a stamp that was just a dimpled grid, and cut  a bunch of them off until I was left with an argyle pattern.  Then I bought a big multi-coloured inkpad and experimented with different placements of these elements for the front and the back cover.

Finally I settled on a design I liked, then churned them out.

One drawback to my design is that the CD could fall out if you held it wrong, so I bought some ribbon and a glue gun to put it around the middle of the disk.

There's one done, without the info or pic on the inside as of yet.  I got some printable CDs, and used the same stamps on them.

Unfortunately the ink continues to smudge even after it dries, so I'm either going to have to find some sort of fixative or a new way of decorating the CDs.  I like the way it looks, though, so I hope I can sort it out.

GOLFWANG

While I was finishing the mixing process, I started thinking about making physical copies album.  I wanted to make a short run of nice copies,  not just CDs in blank sleeves.  Or even Argyle-patterned sleeves.  So I turned to my own (limited) record collection, and found that I liked the Old Canes' rather artisanal package design for their second album, Feral Harmonic.  I remembered that I'd seen a video of the people at Saddle Creek assembling them and somehow managed to forget the pain and exhaustion in their faces, deciding that I would try to make something similar.

The first step was figuring out a layout for the sleeve itself.  I found a way to get a 5" x 5 5/8" sleeve out of a piece of 12x12 cardstock, so that's what I ended up doing.  60 sheets, so I figured on an edition of 50 copies.

I forgot all about my camera during the first, uninteresting part.  Just know that I measured out the shape I needed on the sheets of black cardstock, cut them out, folded them, then glued them together with rubber cement.

So there's one finished.  The CD slides into the right side, the cover is just one sheet folded over and glued.

There are 58 of them in a row.  The spine was tricky, in retrospect I think if I had scored the inside with a box cutter, they would have folded better.  As they are, there's no way that I could write the band name on the side.  Ah well.

Day-old Bread

Alright, I admit it.  I have been remiss in both my blogging and album-producing duties.  In my defence, it's very hard to update when all you're doing is adding reverb to the guitar, normalizing the lead vocal, or trying (and failing) to auto-tune the saxophone.  In short, editing is boring, and you didn't miss much.

Over the last couple months, we played every second Monday at Gerts, and in the process contributed to the slow and agonizing death of their PA system.  We also played a show last Friday at Trois Minots at the behest of the McGill Outdoors Club, which turned out to be a lot of fun.  After much deliberation, we chose not to play Mott's incendiary anthem, "M.O.C.I.A.", due to cross cultural sensitivity (and the fact that we've never actually practised it).

Somewhere in that big gap between posts I also put three mixes up on our myspace, which were kind of rushed in order to get a demo CD together for someone at Gerts.  Nothing came of that, other than I was forced to bash some of the songs into shape.  The remaining tracks followed reluctantly over the next few weeks.

On Tuesday, Mott, Justin, Jack, and Spencer came over to listen to what I had and made some helpful criticisms, as did Stephen and Natalia the next day.  As a result, I made some big changes to the mixes and recorded the last remaining pieces - backing vocals, guitar solos, etc.  I also worked on the song order for the album, which proved difficult since the collection of songs that we ended up recording is extremely eclectic.

Here's an impromptu band photo that Connie took at Chantale's.  I'm hoping we can get it to look good enough to put on the inside cover of the album.