Month: November 2010

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Happy Holidays

psycliq

For the past few years, I’ve had a bit of a Christmas tradition: I put together a special Christmas song and release it for free on the net. It’s that time of year, so once again, Light the Tree for Some Holiday Cheer is now available for immediate download!

I try to add a new song to this each year, and for 2010 I’ve recorded a mellow electronic arrangement of “In The Bleak Midwinter”. Sure the song is vastly inaccurate from a historical perspective, but it’s still a great song in my book. My arrangement here is based off of the one by Kevin Max on the fantastic various-artists Christmas album named Noel, which I like much more than the classical arrangement of the song.

And did I mention that it’s free? Think of it as a little Christmas present. And speaking of Christmas presents, don’t forget that you can do all kinds of great holiday shopping right here. Really, I think it’s a safe bet that Psycliq music will be this year’s Snuggie, so get yours now!

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We Are in the Amazon Now

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I’m very happy to say that Results Not Typical is finally available from Amazon.com as a physical CD! I didn’t think this was going to happen after CDBaby’s snafu with it. But in the end, this has been a good thing as it’s made me re-evaluate how I handle CD building and distribution entirely.

One of the biggest problems in being a smalltime independent artist is the upfront cost of the production of physical media. This is especially a pain to me because I really like physical media, and I really want to make it available to people who also like it. For both The Mathemagician’s Riddle and halt, I did absolutely everything from my home. I burned the CDs, printed the labels using lightscribe, printed the insert cards, packaged them all up into cases, and sent them off to CDBaby for sale. For Results Not Typical, I tried something a bit different: instead of printing my own cards, I got a small batch printed by a poster/cd printing place. I still printed the CDs on my own and packaged it all up by myself, but I was overall pretty happy with the quality.

CDBaby, it turns out, wasn’t quite so happy. They claimed that their distributor wouldn’t distribute a CDr, which was odd to me since my first two albums were also CDrs and went through fine, but who’s counting. Upon further pushing and digging with the aid of a very cool and friendly customer service rep from them, I found out that if I bought duplicated CDrs from CDBaby’s parent company, they’d be happy to sell them. Handy, that. 🙂

After moping and despairing for a bit, I set out to find a real solution to the problem and came across CreateSpace. These guys are a little print-on-demand service that has the added benefit of being owned by Amazon.com directly, so anything that you produce through them is made available through that storefront without further hassle. I also tried another print-on-demand service, which had decent results as well, but I liked the interface, packaging options, and integration with Amazon available through CreateSpace a bit better.

Roll this all up to say that as of right now, you can buy all three Psycliq albums almost anywhere you’d want to. And you know, it’s never too early to start your Christmas shopping…

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New Results

psycliq

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Just got an express package in the mail: a new printing of Results Not Typical. This one comes from createspace. Same music, bit different packaging, and these are print on demand and should be available through Amazon. I think I’ll be using these guys for the forseeable future.

Production

Incoming Christmas Music

psycliq

I know, I know — it’s still much too early to be thinking about the Christmas season for most people. But the truth is, if I don’t get to recording a Christmas song early, it just won’t happen before the holidays are upon us. Thus, I’ve been fighting with ProTools and Renoise today to begin tracking this year’s song, “In The Bleak Midwinter”. I’ve even got the sheet music printed out on my desk in front of me, both as a reference for when I’m recording and to remind me to finish the blasted thing. I’ve got a basic arrangement mapped out, with basic chords and drum beats, but I still have a very long way to go here. I’m hoping to be able to throw some time at it over the weekend.

Unfortunately, as implied above, my studio software has been giving me headaches over this, not wanting to sync up and throwing all kinds of cranky errors at me. I’m trying to update and patch everything that I can find, but so far I’ve only been able to get it to run in fits and starts. Funny how all of this starts happening just after the new version of Pro Tools is announced. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks that there’s got to be some kind of out-of-warranty timer going on here, plotting against me.

My goal is to have it all wrapped up by December, at which point I’ll put the Christmas album back up on the music site for download. Members of the Electric Goodies Newsletter will be getting sneak peeks and will be the first to know when the album is available again, so if you want to be in on the latest word, that’s the place to be.