24 hrs to irrelevance...

That might be a bit extreme, but it sure feels like this to me.

The unfortunate thing though is - the campaign didn't gather enough interest to cause people to invest and back the effort. Does this mean the music or the artist is irrelevant? Or both?

I'll let you know - if you would like to contribute I would most certainly appreciate that.

Anyways, as the clock ticks down I'm left to wonder about this - is this the time where I simply
look to help others in the projects or am I still able to go forward with my compositions
knowing there's virtually no audience for them?

http://kck.st/1KQagB2

In the meantime - I'll be playing with my friend Mike Tiano next friday the 12th at the Starbucks on Gilman in Issaquah.

And here's a picture of the artwork from the CD - keep working those guilt things I guess...

Hey everyone - if you're not aware of it, please review and help support the Kickstarter campaign for "a fine line between..."

This is a short post, primarily because I've been spinning a lot of cycles on the remix/remaster and "revisiting" efforts so my bandwidth is really challenged.

I have 11 days left for my Kickstarter campaign - raising $2000 to fund recording female vocals for "Temple of Lost Souls", and once that's done to remaster, put together a gold master disk, and then manufacture full package CDs - a total of 1000 - to be able to start working out distribution deals with Prog record labels in the US, Canada, Europe, UK and around the world.

With respect to the campaign, why do I think $2000 is enough to achieve what I'm proposing? The artwork is complete - Ed Unitsky put together an amazing cover and booklet notes/tray liner, and there's no point in changing this except to put in notations that this is a 2015 release. The songs are complete with only some rework and remixing needed - the female vocals were supposed to be there in the 2009 version but it was very hard to find anyone to commit to doing this given the budget. Since 2009, I've made more connections to other musicians; the credibility is better for the material, and we have increased the budget for the recording. Finally, I've been spending a lot of time (and money) on upgrading my studio equipment, and learning the new software/hardware. Here's an example of one of the songs and what is being output as a WORKING track today - in the shadows - and for anyone who heard the original songs (you can still do this by going to ReverbNation page) there is no doubt of the improvements. Supporting the campaign gets you a truly finished CD or digital download that not only rivals other prog releases, but is actually sounding better than them.

Today, artists seem to need to bear the expense of manufacture of CDs for record labels. Even distributing on Amazon around the world requires CDs to be shipped to them, and the same with CDBaby.com - which is one I've had experience with and had the most success with to date. My discomfort with what we released in 2009 - even though it sounded quite good at the time - it really didn't meet up to what I expected of myself in terms of a great final mix, and missing the female vocals was horrifying to me. Singing the part myself was only intended to be a placeholder, and it being in the final version has never sat well. Doing this work, improving the sounds in particular the drums, eliminating the piezo acoustic guitar parts, and some heinous vocals will turn this into the top quality CD project I hold as a standard for myself. This works towards proper distribution and promotions - getting it into the hands of prog/symphonic and rock fans everywhere.

I'm asking all my friends and connections here to take a look and consider backing the project even for the minimum $10. The digital distributions will get full artwork in a pdf package as part of the zip file containing the material, plus some bonus material including a few revisited songs from future releases. We are $255 of the way to the final $2000 - please help out with this wherever you can.

Three months and what do we have here?

Hello all!

It's been three months since my last post here - it's been really busy with day job stuff and family stuff. But I've also done some work including repainting and arranging my office, hanging my monitors on the wall, repositioning the Mackie near field monitors, but especially on the remixes - getting sounds down to a really fine art now as I've spent time with songs such as "Mirror Mirror" from "a fine line between..." concentrating on drum sounds, reducing profoundly the amount of reverb and delay on instruments and the mix overall, and getting better instrument and vocal sounds. "Mirror Mirror" is an important step - it provided me with the chance to clean things up very quickly and establish baseline settings for Zsolt's drum tracks. I am able to save off the settings for each of the pieces (kick, snare, toms, OH, etc...) and the drums/cymbals buss and then load them in the other 3 tracks Zsolt played on. Feedback has been very good on the test mixes so far - last set of tweaks and we'll be ready to declare MM done.

You can hear all the test mixes here - https://soundcloud.com/robert-svilpa - with new test mixes going up at least 2x/week. Surf on over, enjoy the music for the next month or so...


Now that I'm getting close to a real final remix/remastered product in "a fine line between..." - here's the Kickstarter campaign I have set up to try to finance the CD manufacture.

Rob's Kickstarter Campaign

This isn't a campaign where you are simply donating money to a fund - this is more like a pre-purchase, with some special extras thrown in for those who back the project. Demos and outtake sessions, discrete tracks from the other two CDs being worked on, Press Pass and Press Kit items, and more that you can get depending on the level of support. The lowest priced pledge packages are digital download of full lossless audio in high res format starting at $10, moving up through to the $25 price point where you get a shrink wrapped CD with full artwork and the album in digital format, with a personal signed thank you note from me.

So that's about it for me right now - please help get this album a proper release, and any monies raised will only make the packaging that much better. As per usual, comments, critiques and complaints are taken at the Comments link below.

Steady acceleration with the remixes

It's been a crazy time here - wife is back at school since early January, the in-laws are here helping with the kids, and we have more dogs than usual in the house as a result as well. But I've still found some time to get recording and remixing in on the songs - 5 of them in particular.

Lady in a Cage, In the shadows, That Day, Undertow/Listen to my plan, and Summer Jam are getting time spent on them, as well as further auditioning of songs to be added to the Onion project to take the place of those which were on there and then got redone for "a fine line between". "I have this wicked headache..." and "Summer Jam" are being added in to take the place of "In the shadows", "Mirror Mirror" and "The Only One" - all of which were redone for "a fine line between". "Summer Jam" was the working title for the music backing a tv commercial I did in 1993 and was extended somewhat in 1994/95 when I worked at CHRW-FM - it has a lot of potential to be extended further but it's still a nice solid major chord progression a la Rush or The Who without sounding really wimpy or derivative.

At this point, I think we're at the 66% complete metric - some vocal tracks need to be done, but I will have "Sound of Thoughts" and "a fine line between" cds remixed/remastered by end of March in time for a Kickstarter campaign to help fund the manufacture of the CDs.

Onion is significantly less complete with only 3 of the 9 songs being actively worked on right now. This project will end up taking as much time as writing an entirely new CD except that we have the demo stems done and it will be doing the final products that take place. As mentioned the projects for 3 of the 9 songs are in flight - guitars, keyboards and bass are getting done, and JohnH will graciously play drums on the material to fill out the live feel of them. Paul is coming over this Sunday to record the piano parts for That Day, and we'll be discussing what other material he will participate on.

So that's the update for now - I'll be trying to keep everyone informed, and watch for the Kickstarter campaign to appear sometime in the next 4 weeks. Cheers!