The last month has been very productive. While we had hoped to have everything squared away and done by the end of February, we are spilling into March — but there’s enough wiggle room in the schedule that it’s not terrible.
We have eight tracks fully complete now, with the ninth in final mix, on the bubble of being approved for release. That leaves four songs. Two of those are complete except for relatively minor instrumental additions/changes; we have some digital instruments that can be improved or replaced or both, so that needs to happen. The remaining two songs were pretty bare as of last weekend, but now have content all the way through to confirm structure, whether it be bass or guide vocal or piano or some mix of the above. Now it’s a question of “decorating the tree” (or “hanging meat on the skeleton” if you prefer a different holiday). We are each adopting one of those tracks as we build them out, then we’ll swap and finish each other’s work. That will probably take us a few more weeks, but with so many songs done — the first six sequentially, and now very close to the first eight in order — we’re in good shape as the video pitches get underway.
We have a friend representing our biz dev interests, approaching online content producers and distributors about making videos for some of the songs we’ve recorded. While that’s happening, Kat is working on album art (which is pretty darned close to done) as well as a few other visual surprises, including new promotional photos. And weirdly, we are working on getting this very website — which is as clean as a whistle — removed from some internet malware blacklists. Guess there were old issues with WordPress that got us flagged, but after the site was fixed, the flags were never removed. We’re now going to the individual watchdog sites and asking for new evaluations. That’s what we get for running our own website.
While we considered working with outside musicians, we did wind up doing everything ourselves — drums, esoteric instruments, you name it — and we are still working all weekend every weekend, plus some time after work during the week when energy and responsibilities allow — at the expense of our gaming, for sure. But we’re definitely at the point where we listen to the tracks and no longer say “What the hell are we doing?” but “Wow, we did that?” Hopefully you will, too.