Dave Anderson

A number of people have been surprised when I tell them what goes into making an album as an independent artist. I'll start this post with a bit of a summary and then try and elaborate on it over the next few weeks as I'm backed up with a hell of lot of promotion for my cd launch...

1) Writing, selecting and trialling songs!
Clearly the most important thing in being a songwriter is having enough songs to make an album. I've got two full books of songs, about 100 I reckon. I've been at it now for 5 years or so. I started by looking at the one's that I like the most. Then I considered what others thought when I play them live. I put them in an order, then I when I was ready to go into the studio and I sat down with Phil (engineer and producer) and we selected what we thought we liked. Some fast, some slow...but most about love...sorry can't help but write about emotion. I agonised over the songs, leaving out some of my favourite songs, but at least I can put them on a second album!

2) Recording in a studio vs at home
I've tried recording at home...I just don't know enough and I don't have the ear for it. I guess you could say i was too close. A friend of a friend introduced me to Phil who was fantastic to work with. We worked out what our vision for the EP was going to be, we discussed costs up front and the style of sound I wanted. Then we got to work. Studio costs can be expensive but if your working with someone you trust then it's all worth it. If your spending a year there you got to have fun. In retrospect I think I would have been better to have taken a few weeks off work and layed it all down.

I've heard of album's costing a hundred grand etc etc but as an independent you have to count your pennies. My album cost my around 10k, considering Phil and I spent at least 2 nights and a weekend day a week for a year, I think that's fine. I paid Phil every month so I could do it bit by bit. My credit card is full but at least I can soon start selling the album and recover some of my investment.

3) Recording
Once I had heard the quality of the first song we recorded, Love is Gone, I got so excited I said let's make a record! I played him through the songs I was considering and we put together a list of what we were going to work with. We recorded the acoustic guitar over a click track. I then did masking vocals over the basic guitar...funny enough for a number of the songs the first vocal take was the one we went with!

We then added the instruments on layer by layer. It's kind of like when you build a lego house as a kid...you have a bit of an idea of what you want, but then as you add you continue to be creative and you tweak things. We added viola, then we took it out in parts, then we added other guitars etc. We distorted guitars, we played with organs and synths. This is really what took so much time but it was fun at the same time. I was very serious about all this at the start but when I learnt to have fun with it became a bit addictive. I couldn't wait to get back in there!

Part 2, I'll go through creative, web stuff, gigs etc

Labels: Blog, Learnings, Making of a CD

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