New PledgeMusic Project ready for sponsorship

Hi All,

Rob's CD Remasters Project

As mentioned before, I've been working on plans to redo and release past CDs/material in preparation for writing and recording new material. I've since decided to take the past works & utilize crowdsourcing to fund the manufacture portion of the process - pressing those pesky CDs are a pain in the ass & can cost some significant $$$ before they can be made available for anyone to purchase (and thus recoup investment). With the decline of the music industry and artists now needing to be responsible for their own inventory (namely - I buy the CDs from the pressing plant and then sell/ship them myself), I need to find a way to make this happen.

This is how the crowdsourcing thing works. You (the crowd) pledge some amount of money towards the project, and I then go off and work on the stuff and at the end, you get the package that you pledged money towards. Capice?

So in the spirit of this, I thought I'd make it worthwhile for you all - a box set of music covering off the time period from 1986 thru today.

1. "Onion & other rarities" - this is the entire 2000 release "Onion" which included several early versions of instrumentals and full songs released in very limited quantities. Also includes songs from one of my first recorded efforts - "Babble & Rhetoric" (my band with Marc Koenen & Juris Vinters), and some commercial & jazz rock instrumentals that to date were released only on compilation projects. All songs will be completely redone with 2013 technology and instrumentation/vocals - this is also the opportunity I have to make them relevant to a modern audience as well since the stuff from 1986 was recorded on a Tascam 4 track cassette portastudio (thx to Trevor Sadler for the millionth time!) I'll be enlisting my friends John Hernandez and possibly original drummer Juris Vinters to put together drum tracks, and as always I'll be trying to enlist my great friend Paul Harrington on keyboards for these new recordings. This specific item in the box set will be exclusively available only in this package - no plans exist to release as a stand alone product.
2. "The Sound of Thoughts" - this 2005 release will be completely remixed & remastered, with new vocal & instrumental performances on many songs including the 19 minute magnum opus “Lady in a Cage”. New CD packaging will include liner notes highlighting revisions to the original - musicians past and present who participate will be fully credited for their efforts.
3.  “a fine line between…” release will enjoy the same kind of end to end remix/remaster treatment as “The Sound of Thoughts” – Rob & Paul (keyboardist) are revisioning the final product, which in some cases will bring added clarity & expose details of the arrangements that are at times buried by the denseness of the original mix. Again, vocal & instrumental performances will be updated in some cases, improving the final CD and refreshing it in the eyes of the world.

As with all crowdsourcing efforts, the target is a modest value ($2000) with the promise of 10 cents of every dollar pledged above the target going to The Fender Music Foundation - which provides funding to schools all across America to help keep their music education programs on the right track. This charity has helped countless children learn about instruments and the arts, and they work with other charities to make the most out of all of their funding. 100% of the money sent into the organization goes right back into music education.

The money that is over and above the target goes into funding the remaining quantities of both box set and individual release zero carbon footprint CD Digipaks. After we achieve a 1000 count of CD inventory for each of the box, "Sound of Thoughts" and "a fine line" - remaining money will go into production funding for the new project - expected for early to mid 2014 release.

Please go to the project site and take a peek at the package offerings. Some really cool stuff exists - including t-shirts and posters imprinted with Ed Unitsky's wonderfully stunning artwork signed by the band (and I will be asking Ed to sign his work for the tees and posters as well).

Friday afternoon - getting ready for the weekend and a kickstart of writing

As per normal, wife is already planning our activities w.r.t. work around the house. I have a few things though that I need to take care of - day job work stuff that I'm having a hard time getting into at work, so I need to have a change of scenery to kickstart getting completed before the deadline in just over a week.

That said though, I also need to get my head back into some music stuff - I think part of my issue with getting on my work stuff and lack of motivation for the home stuff honey-do list is that I haven't had any "me" time in a very long time. I have a long list of things I want to hammer out just finishing up my studio setup, plus I have a long standing commitment to my friend Dave Kerzner from Sonic Reality to record a cover song using bed tracks he supplied to me almost 2 years ago. Can't mention the name or band, but it'll be a bangin' tune when I'm done.

But even apart from that, I need to do some woodshedding to reclaim my chops and knock the rust off. It's been a long long time since I've done any serious playing - since the end of May 2011 and my show at the Mars Bar in Seattle, WA - and picking up the guitar a few times this week just showed me how sloppy and lazy my playing is now. This kind of layoff though allows me the opportunity to learn a ton more scales and shapes - try to really advance beyond the habitual stuff I had been doing for a while and stretch out in a technical sense while breaking free the seized up muscles of my hands/fingers. In the past, I've made tremendous advances doing this - hopefully the same will happen again despite my age.

Then finally - I've set up something on Pledge Music to help crowd-fund the production and manufacture of my three past CDs (Onion, The Sound of Thoughts, a fine line between...) after I accomplish retracking/remixing/remastering all three. The final products I hope to have done by April or May, and as mentioned in earlier posts use that experience to grease the wheels to write and record new material. Lyric writing is a bit tough right now - again, very rusty chops there, but slowly improving. I have ~10 songs worth of lyrics already from past efforts, but need to generate more to find the best stuff to form music around...

Ok, this last blog post is brought to you by our sponsors - IK Multimedia, who produce the amazing Amplitube 3 product that I use both to demo new material as well as appears on final product, indistinguishable from the real amps that it models.



IK Multimedia's Amplitube 3 for Mac/PC