Done & Done – The New CD is on it’s way

 Diary of a New CD  No Responses »
Feb 122012
 

Well in this part of Connecticut we have been stuck in a constant state of March. March the month, not the military exercise. It has been mild weather for the longest time with only a hint of snow. I have a friend who recently bought a new snowblower for this season and said to me – Watch it not snow now…- after he purchased it. Ah the best laid plans. 

Speaking of best laid plans – My third solo CD is done and ready for pre-order. “Big Texas Sky” will be available from me directly starting on March 1st, 2012. It will also be available as a digital download from www.darrylgregory.bandcamp.com on March 1st as well. If you are interested in pre-ordering, the cost for a physical CD will be $10 and the digital download price will be $7. Click here for an order form for the physical CD.

On Saturday, February 25 I will be performing at the Trinity Church Coffeehouse at 7PM. This will be my CD release gig and copies of “Big Texas Sky” will be available for purchase at the show. Click here for more info on Trinity Church Coffeehouse.

So what’s this new CD all about, you ask? 

Good question. In fact I’m planning on a series of blog posts that go into detail about each song. From concept to production, I will give you the story behind the song. 

But for now I can tell you that the album is a collection of 7 songs having to do with family, spirituality, getting older, life & death and of course, love. I had about 20 songs that I was considering and I whittled it down to 12 and then decided to be more concise and focused with the 7 songs that I chose. 

As in the past with my CDs I did the majority of instrumental performance, but there comes a time when you just have to call in other musicians to help. I was very fortunate to get local artist Jim Allyn (a.k.a Mr. Everything) to lay down piano, fiddle and mandolin on several tracks which really enhanced what I had already done (Jim has an amazing ear and musical sense). For the duet ‘What About Love’ I was able to snag the always busy Francine Wheeler to come into the studio and sing along with me. Her voice alone is worth the price of the CD. I also got great vocals from my friend Wayne Johnson, who is an ordained minister, on the track ‘Prayer & Hallelujah’ which breaks into a rollicking gospel celebration. 

 ”Big Texas Sky” is a country album at heart and pulls a lot of emotional strings, but it’s also a love letter to my Texas roots and the down to earth, real life feeling I got when I visited my kin in the Lone Star State.

The title of the CD comes from a line in the second track ‘Anywhere But Here’ when the protagonist asks why she was born under a Big Texas Sky. The image of a big sky overhead makes me think of God: the omnipresence, the spirit that is always there,  watching as we live our lives. We either acknowledge it or not, but the fact remains that it is there. Each of these songs are stories of the everyday life we all lead with the last song wrapping it all up with a prayer and a hallelujah.

Don’t you love the album art? The photo is from my buddy Renato Ghio who is an amazing videographer and photographer and the layout is by my good friend and co-hort David Wheeler. I hope you can purchase a copy and tell your friends where to get one as well!

May we all feel the light of a brilliant love,

 

 

CD Update – It’s in Good Hands…

 Diary of a New CD  No Responses »
Jan 312012
 

The CD is in other people’s hands now. There comes a time in this process when you let it go and let other people deal with it. I’ve done all I can do for now and there is just the waiting.

So what’s happening you ask?

Well at this point the tracks (songs) have been mixed by me. Mixing puts the instruments and the voices in the right spots and at the right levels so it sounds even. I pan the instruments to positions in the stereo field so that it sounds like you’re siting in an audience. I add and subtract tonal frequencies by using things called compressors and EQs – some of you may know what those are and some may not, but suffice it to say that they are tools that help the sound and using them wisely takes a good ear – an ear that I am constantly working on to improve.

Now the tracks have been sent to another guy with lots of computer gear and he is going to ‘master’ the tracks. In essence the mastering engineer (great title, huh?) will get the tracks to play nicely together as an album by making them all the same relative volume and adding some EQ and compression (there are those terms again). He will also do something that is a recent development – he will add meta-data to the tracks. What the? Meta-Data? Sounds like sci-fi Star Trek crap… well, actually all it is is my name, album name and track name embedded in the audio file. Did you ever wonder how your computer ‘knows’ what the title of your songs are? That’s right, META-DATA!

The other aspect of this project, that is now in someone else’s hands, is the artwork for the sleeve. This is something that an the songwriter should definitely hand over to someone else. Unless you are schooled in the finer points of graphic design, don’t even think that you can do this. Besides getting the photos to fit on the template, understanding all of the ways that the text font relates to the graphics and the colors, you also need to understand (deeply) how to use a graphics app like Photoshop. And we’re not talking getting ‘red-eye’ out of a photo. Who has time to do that? Not Darryl.

So I float around and wait for these guys to send me stuff to listen to and to look at and to approve or offer tweak suggestions. Part of me is relieved to be done with my portion of the CD and part of me is wanting these guys to hurry up an be done so I can sen it off to be duplicated. Then the real wok begins: getting YOU to listen.

CD Update

 Diary of a New CD  No Responses »
Jan 232012
 

I’ve been remiss in updating this blog – MY blog – the blog that is supposed to connect me with YOU. I last posted about my Christmas song and then I got distracted with recording and mixing my upcoming CD project, “Big Texas Sky”. Well this is just a little tid-bit that I wrote on my Facebook page the other day and after I wrote it I said to myself: Self (I said), you should write this on your BLOG! SO here’s what I wrote – If you’d like to, you can *LIKE* me on Facebook too so you can get a double dose!!!

Anyway… I’ve been working hard on getting these mixes done for the new CD. I just finished round 3 of mixing and listening. If you’ve ever seen the movie “Once” then you’ll recall the scene where they all pile in the car to listen to the results of the sessions. Well that’s where I am right now: listening to mixes in the car, on my iPhone, on my living room stereo, and anywhere else I can. I take notes and then go back to the studio. I am hoping that this is the last round (3 is usually the magic number for me…).

Stay tuned for more updates on “Big Texas Sky” due out in February (I’m stickin’ to it!!!)

CD Update ~ Writing Music

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Sep 112011
 

Writing Music (on paper)

I thought that I’d write a short post about writing music. Not composing or songwriting, but the act of writing it all down on paper using traditional notation. It’s not something that is talked about in the songwriter symposiums or in a songwriter’s circle, but being able to notate music and hand a lead sheet to a fellow musician can be an integral part of creating a good performance.

I’m thinking about this now because I am in the process of recording my CD and I am about to invite other musicians in to play on some songs. Having legible lead sheets that make sense just makes the whole process go so much more smoothly than having nothing or some cryptic doodling.

I’m a trained musician – meaning, I went to a music conservatory and learned music as a trade so I have no issue with transcribing my songs; I’m fluent. But there are so many singer-songwriters that do not read music and have not gone to conservatory which is quite fine. But, I often wonder how they communicate their intentions to other musicians. Do they stand there in the studio writing letters on a piece of paper? Do they orally walk the performers through it? Do they make the musician sit at home and do the transcribing themselves?

Writing a lead sheet is really no big thing. But, the writer needs to understand a few basics of music notation: time signature, chord symbols, repeat signs, slash or rhythmic notation and perhaps a few other things like drawing a treble clef and the occasional drawing of a whole, half, quarter or eighth note. These are things that I teach to my 6-7-8 grade students in my music classes. So an adult songwriter should know about it presuming they had a proper public school music class… right? (That’s another article all together…)

So here I am. I just finished lead sheet #4 of 7 and will dive into #5 later today. It takes me about 20 minutes to do a lead sheet and I lay it out on my computer using a software program called Finale. I am only going to do 6 lead sheets though. Why not 7? Well, on one of the songs, I am playing all of the instruments and I do not need a lead sheet since I know the song.

It sounds like I’m contradicting myself. Darryl, are you saying that you do not always have to transcribe your songs? Nope! If you’re playing solo and you have the lyrics written and just write the chords over the lyrics to help you remember, that’s cool. Or, what most people do these days: record it on their smart phone.

But, if you’re going to hire me or some other professional musician to come in and play for you, I expect a decent lead sheet. I don’t want to have to sit there trying to figure out your song from a description, your chicken scratchings of chords (assuming they are even the correct chords – did you transpose the key because you use a capo?) or the recording on your smart phone.

I guess a lead sheet is just common professional courtesy. Are you a professional?

The CD Project ~ an update

 Articles, Diary of a New CD  No Responses »
Aug 062011
 

It’s been a while since I’ve posted something about the new CD and I blame Congress. Well, everything is Congress’s fault these days, so why not blame them for this as well?

I look back on the posts that have been about this new CD project and the funny thing is that NONE of the songs I’ve mentioned in the the previous “Diary…” posts are on the CD line-up. This album has take a turn for the dark country ballad and will probably go down in history as marking my black and blue period of songwriting. I found myself wanting to tell stories about about the things that form our chains ~ the chains that bind ~ and the heaviness of this life. Since the last post, which was on June 6, I’ve written three new songs specifically for this CD and one of those songs was inspired by the working title of the CD: Big Texas Sky.

So, where do I stand as of now? I have the first draft of the songs recorded and on a demo CD that I am listening to and will use for musicians that will come in to record specialty parts. I need to fill out the instrumentation with a pedal steel, fiddle and some piano; all of which I do not play very well. Also, I think I would hate to produce an album that had only me playing ~ a kind of musical masturbation… ewww. The biggest hurdle that I’ve crossed thus far is deciding on the track list. I did a lot of internal wrangling about how many songs I wanted to place on the album an decided that I should limit the line up and release a shorter set. The track list stands now at 7 songs: a little more than an EP, but fewer than what constitutes a modern full length album. When one looks back at the album from the vinyl era, 7-9 songs was an album!

So as a sneak preview of the CD, I will let you look at my mock-ups of the cover and the back. I will hand these over to a professional graphic artist as a starting point and hopefully they will improve upon the ideas. In the mean time, let me know what you think so far.

 

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