It Often Takes Longer Than Planned

That title could apply to anything, but right now I’m thinking about both the album I’ve been working on for several months and the video project I started with Kris Williams (see previous post) a couple weeks ago.

We’re still pressing forward with a video about the tornado victims in the South and Kris got a nice group of reality tv stars to provide spots. Her fans also sent in an impressive set of photos. I’ve made a draft for folks to approve…and now we wait for everyone to sign off on it, or not. Yes, modern video technology and the interwebs are great for speedily assembling multimedia content. But not all aspects of our society have caught up. The legal system, for one, can especially slow things down. Some day, there will be a system for rapid approval of video content that respects everyone’s image and intellectual property. That day is not yet upon us.

Then there’s my album, which is taking longer for entirely different reasons. The main reason being that all the technology in the world cannot replace the need to put in a lot of time to make a song worthy of publication. It’s all about attention to detail, and there’s only one of me here to apply that attention. But I’m almost there! I just saved 6 of the 11 songs in their final form prior to being mastered. It sounds and feels like I’m nearly done, but once I save the remaining 5 songs I still need to check them against each other to be sure that they all sound like they belong together.

DD's laptop at Mobtown Studios

Then, the final final step for the album is taking the songs into the studio for mastering. Last time I did this part by myself and it nearly killed me. They say nobody should master what they have mixed, let alone what they have composed and recorded themselves. I do it all the time, but mainly for one-off tracks. Mastering a whole album is a different animal and I’m happy to have the fine folks at Mobtown Studios take care of that part for me. Doing it myself took me several weeks because I was inexperienced at it and lacked anything remotely like objectivity required to do it. I was unable to truly hear the music anymore. And I was getting incredibly sick of it. I’m not yet tired of the current set of songs and I’m hoping to keep things that way.

And then there’s the artwork, which we’ll also need to get cranking on soon.

Both these projects are requiring more time and perseverance than I initially anticipated. But that seems to be the case with most things worth doing.

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