GeminiTourist

How did we get here?

Back in May, I started dusting off some old music and asking myself a question I'd asked plenty of times before: Should I actually release any of this?

I've written more than 500 songs over the past few decades. I've played and worked with different bands, managed one, done sound production, built custom electrical hardware, and accumulated a ridiculous archive of recordings along the way.

The problem was never writing music. It was getting around to releasing it. Work happens. Life happens. You tell yourself, I'll get to that. Then another song gets written and another recording gets added to the pile.

Meanwhile, the tools kept changing. I've worked in Pro Tools, Cakewalk, PreSonus Studio One and plenty of other software over the years. New DAWs, plugins, processors and strange little tools keep appearing. I'll try something, discover that I like it for one particular job, and suddenly it's part of the process.

Eventually I started wondering whether those tools could help me excavate some of the archive rather than simply add more things to it.

I spent a couple of months in the studio and started narrowing things down. Then I played random songs for different people without much explanation. I watched what stuck, what somebody mentioned later, and what melodies people found themselves humming. Eventually, twelve remained.

Those became MCN-01: Exhibits Along the Road.

Then I had to figure out how to actually release the thing.

I settled on LANDR for distribution and final mastering, and then discovered ElasticStage for the physical editions. August 14 wasn't selected through some brilliant marketing strategy — it was basically reverse-engineered from how much time I needed to get the CDs and records manufactured, shipped, listened to, stared at suspiciously, and approved.

And I'm extremely happy with the physical editions. ElasticStage did a top-notch job with both the vinyl and CD. Physical audio was important to me from the beginning. Streaming is incredibly convenient — especially in the car, at restaurants, or anywhere you simply want music available — but a good physical recording played through a great home audio system is still a different experience.

I care about the space between frequencies. I don't like unnatural gaps, piercing highs or a low end that disappears when the music gets complicated. Getting the recordings into a form that worked properly on physical media became an important part of this whole experiment.

LANDR fit nicely into the other side of the process. Once I had done the work in the DAW, it gave me a straightforward final mastering and distribution path, including high-definition WAV masters for the streaming release.

Then I had another idea: Maybe I should make a music video.

That turned into another two or three weeks. I sketched the story, created shot cards, built the individual video components, stitched everything together, watched it, changed it, watched it again, changed it again, and eventually ended up with The Fallen. I bounced through several video tools along the way before finding a workflow I liked, and YouTube Studio made the final captioning and scheduled release surprisingly painless.

And somewhere in the middle of all of this, I built this website — including a few technological throwbacks that absolutely nobody asked for.

And apparently I'm not done excavating yet.