Planning a full album, or how to inject excel into every part of life

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Sober
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Planning a full album, or how to inject excel into every part of life

Post by Sober »

I shared my project tracker in the Discord and got some cool responses. I'm very interested in what kind of planning you folks have done ahead of full album releases.

Image

I don't have an order or deadlines for accomplishing any of this, though I could go full on GANTT chart on this 😆

I figure I'll get the recording and mix to 90%, then I'll ship project files to actual professionals for final mix and mastering. Then what? I have good leads into management/booking/publishing. Is there anything else I should be considering big picture-wise right now? Yeah, I'll change a few song titles, so I don't have three that start with "Don't." Seven of these are Songfight titles! I plan on getting the tracklist up to 20, and then culling down to 12. I probably need to start considering album flow and variety, as I have a lot of four-on-the-floor train beat tunes.

What lessons have y'all learned from your album releases?
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Re: Planning a full album, or how to inject excel into every part of life

Post by Niveous »

So much wonderful excel.
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Re: Planning a full album, or how to inject excel into every part of life

Post by owl »

I’d decide on your track listing and order as soon as you can, so you can focus your energy on the tracks you’ll actually use. Maybe plan on one or two more you could have as backups if something goes awry with one of the other tracks.

What are your release plans? If you think you might want to release vinyl, you have to be pretty conscious of how you group and order the songs (length of each side, loudness of the earlier tracks vs later ones) because of the limitations of the medium. For this album we put a lot of effort into figuring that out, but never did release vinyl because it’s really expensive, and we didn’t have any immediate plans to tour in support of it.

Sounds like you’re already thinking about flow and variety, thinking about the energy and smooth transitions, not putting too many similar-sounding songs together, maybe you don’t want five songs in a row in the same key or at the same tempo, etc.

Some of those track order decisions might need to be revisited later if your recording doesn’t come out great for a certain song, although if you’re recording everything yourself at home, you’re less constrained by that, I guess. For every album I’ve been a part of, we’ve tried to get the drums tracked in one session for consistency (and since mic’ing drums sucks) so if we realized later they weren’t fantastic we wouldn’t go back and redo, we’d just live with it, but might not lead off the album with that.

This might be more detail than you want, but the project manager in me can’t help it :) —I’d also think about what you really need to track in your Excel tracker—is every cell there really serving you, or are you spending unnecessary overhead updating the chart for stuff like “automate dobros” when broader categories like “fix levels” will do? Is there a reason you want to have everything on one sheet and not broken into one tab per song?

Is it worth the effort to do any of the mix yourself if you plan to give it to someone else to finish the mix? You might save yourself a lot of time and effort by just throwing things over the fence as soon as you have your raw comps together. I’d think the person doing the mixing, if they’re a professional (which I assume they are or you’d just do it all yourself anyway) would not really want to receive EQ’d/compressed/etc tracks to work with.

Do you know who you want to work with for mixing/mastering? What are their lead times like, how far are they booked out? Do you know what they’ll need from you on a technical level in terms of file types, levels, alternate takes, etc? What’s the process for approvals and revisions? You may not like what they come back with—then what? Do you have to pay for more than a round or two of edits?

How about album art? How are you releasing the album? How are you publicizing it? I have little to no experience working with labels, agents, publicists, tour managers, etc so I can only offer advice from the DIY side of things but it doesn’t sound like that’s the way you’re leaning.
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Re: Planning a full album, or how to inject excel into every part of life

Post by Pigfarmer Jr »

That is way more organized than I was/am. I did everything myself (and it shows.)

I put a list of songs together (also around 20 give or take, although for the first album it started closer to 50 or more before whittling it down.) I also like having an extra song or two recorded and ready to release for last minute "this song isn't working" replacement possibilities or, maybe someday, to have as the "outtakes" or special additions to packages. Yes, I'm dreaming big. No, I'll never get there.

Then I had a track sheet for each song. On paper. A little less developed than yours on the overview, but more detailed on the details. Literally track names and takes and instruments and settings as well as notes both before recording, during recording and after recording. If I could find the damn things it'd be cool to see how many songs my arrangement notes pre recording held true through the mixing phase.

I had a separate sheet, an overview, for process. Where I was at on each song in the recording and mixing phase. And the key and bpm. By the end of the recording process I had changed keys on a few songs just so I wouldn't have like 4 or 5 songs in G or whatever. (Can we say capo?) Since I don't record roots instruments that often it wasn't a big deal. I'd put more thought into it if I were playing mando and banjo etc.,

Then I used both paper and a media player to take my rough mixes, and eventually the final mixes, into a play list. For the solo album I ended up scratching a song and going back and taking an older song to put on the album. That was kind of a mistake. Sort of. (Hence the extra songs idea.)

I'm sure I'm forgetting things and it took longer than it should have. But that's the essential plan.
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Re: Planning a full album, or how to inject excel into every part of life

Post by Lunkhead »

I've been working on a BSS album all year. Probably won't get it out in 2020 sadly. But soon! I was not that organized. For the late stage stuff I've been reading a lot of checklist type sites like this one:

http://howtoreleasearecord.com/
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Re: Planning a full album, or how to inject excel into every part of life

Post by fluffy »

My basic process:

1. Decide on which songs will be the framework of the album
2. Record them, then go through my scraps to find more songs to finish up and record for it
3. Chart out a chord and emotional progression for the album, usually using another album as a reference for the emotional cadence (Phish's "The Story of the Ghost" was my go-to for a long time, but OK Computer is a pretty good one too)
4. Listen to the whole album in order and then tweak the order until it makes sense
5. Polish! That! Turd!
6. After much deliberation, hemming, and hawing, finally release it
7. Notice an egregious problem two days after it hits iTunes
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Sober
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Re: Planning a full album, or how to inject excel into every part of life

Post by Sober »

Lunkhead wrote:
Sat Dec 05, 2020 5:34 pm
I've been working on a BSS album all year. Probably won't get it out in 2020 sadly. But soon! I was not that organized. For the late stage stuff I've been reading a lot of checklist type sites like this one:

http://howtoreleasearecord.com/
Some great resources at that link. Thanks for that!
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Re: Planning a full album, or how to inject excel into every part of life

Post by Geech »

Everything serves you as the artist and your vision. Can you explain what this is?

Like others have said, it's a project and and all projects are are constrained by the iron triangle of budget, time and scope. And scope isn't limited to the audio - there's marketing, promo, distro, publishing, performing, manufacturing (for physical media - CD, vinyl), etc. And there are many flavors of all of those things (social media, radio, reviews, ads, stores, etc.).

What do you plan to do next after this thing? An idiosyncrasy of the streaming era is the dissolution of the album itself. Spotify and the socials really encourage releasing stuff at a steady clip and not every couple (or more) of years. Ie, the whole point of acquiring followers in Bandcamp, Spotify, etc. is to pique their interest in the next thing. If you haven't released anything before, do you want to release a more easily consumed single or an EP first to get your name out there? Bands used to tour to promote the album. Or consider the album a document of the live band. Now things are different.

You can take your last N SongFight entries and throw them up on Bandcamp with some hastily drawn artwork and be done with it, you can find/hire people to write/collaborate/perform/record/engineer/produce/mix/master/promote/market/design art/distribute/advertise/book/etc. or do some/none/all of that stuff yourself. If you have endless budget, maybe hire lots of people. If you have endless time, do it all yourself from your laptop. Etc. If you work with others it requires planning and lead times.

Being in a band is great because you have collaborators and contributors to your process. It also sucks for the same reason. I will say that one of the things that I've been thinking about lately is where collaboration is important to me. Some of the coolest things on recordings I've done in the past have been tweaks or ideas that others have brought to the process. I want to be good at everything, I want to have every idea, but the reality is that I’m not good at everything and I don’t have every idea. I am a mediocre drummer. Is it important to me to drum on my own stuff or should I have someone more skilled do it? If you’ve decided you’ll have a pro mix, for example, don’t spend much time on mixing. You don’t need to do more than rough mixes to give them a feel and some reference tracks you want them to hear to give them perspective. Etc.

If you are going to do an album of 12 songs, do you need to finish 20? Why? Cut what you can as soon as you can. If you have trouble finishing things, like I do, what can you do to expedite? The stuff that’s hard to finish should just probably just be cut or handed off to someone else.

…A vision, a budget, a plan and a schedule….
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Re: Planning a full album, or how to inject excel into every part of life

Post by ken »

I thought Geech was going to end his post with this classic palindrome: A Man, A Plan, A Canal – Panama!

Which turns out to be a music promotion and marketing firm in LA if you need one: https://amanaplanacanal.com/
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