Recording Heat Stroke, Pt. 8

Welcome to another installment of Recording Heat Stroke! Surprise! This one isn’t actually going to be about recording though. Well, maybe a little bit, but mostly it’s going to be about what’s going to happen after it gets recorded. I’ve never been one to talk about any of my albums, or even any of my songs. One of the reasons for that is because I feel like any song that I feel particularly proud of, no one else that I know thinks anything of it…but that’s another topic. Today I’m going to talk about…releasing Heat Stroke!

So there’s a lot of funny things about releasing Heat Stroke to the world. Forget about the fact that by the time it’s ready to be heard by anyone, it won’t be summer anymore. That’s actually something I didn’t think about until very recently. But besides that, there are a few things to consider about this whole thing.

One, I’ve never really “released” an album before. The closest thing I’ve done to that is making more than one copy of a CD with the songs on it and let someone else listen to it. And the people who would listen to the CD would oftentimes would have usually heard some kind of preview of the album in advance, ruining any kind of surprise. It wasn’t unheard for there to be multiple versions of the album with different song orders or hidden tracks or mixes. So it’s going to be hard for me to settle on a tracklisting and all that before I distribute this thing. I used to love burning my albums to CD because it was fun to put in hidden tracks and designing LightScribe labels and sometimes even actual front and back cover artwork. I think Bandcamp would be an appropriate place to start. I can’t say the smart phone app is perfect, but the Bandcamp ecosystem makes it simple to play the songs you acquired basically anywhere: whether it’s on your computer or your phone, you can listen to it. It’s going to be digital (obviously?), so that eases some of the work doing all that, but yeah…the rest…

Getting the word out is another issue. I hover in the 85 mark of Twitter followers. I bet maybe 5 of them even read what I tweet. And maybe 2 would have the tiniest bit of interest in any music I’m doing. Most of the people I follow on Twitter, and most of the people who follow me, are in the video game crowd. I don’t think there’s much overlap in interest of the music I do and video games. On that note, what kind of music do I even make? That sure does make it difficult to market it. I mean, you can call it rock or metal or industrial…but…I don’t know. And the weird thing is, I very, very, very rarely record a song that is meant to be weird and unlabelable. Heat Stroke specifically has some pretty broad influences. “Hotter Than a Mothereffer” may appeal to a fan of Ministry, and “Countdown to a Breakdown” may appeal to a Nashville Pussy fan. “Burn It Down” could be entertaining to someone who listens to…yeah, I have no idea. It’s not even a crazy song. In fact, its chorus is probably the wussiest radio rock sounding thing I’ve ever done. But then there’s these other parts that keep it from being a standard rock song. I’ll revisit advertising the album later. Maybe when I get 2 or 3 more songs done, I’ll be able to describe the overall sound better.

Pricing is another can of worms. I definitely wouldn’t feel right about making it a forced payment to listen to it. Something Bandcamp allows you to do is to set a minimum price, but then you can allow a fan to pay anything above that. At this point, I’m not sure how many songs are going to be on the album, so that’s obviously going to figure into the cost. Let’s just say there are 6 tracks. $1 a song is too high. So maybe $5 would be okay…no, that still seems a little high. I did toy with the idea of having it be $4.32 or even $3.21 to coincide with “Countdown to a Breakdown.” That would be kind of gimmicky and cool I guess.

Going along with that, charging for my crappy music, I feel like if I’m going to do that, maybe I should crank out a couple more songs than I really want to just to pad it out. In some definition of the word, I believe I’m an artist and like to maintain a certain amount of integrity, so I wouldn’t just throw something together. But just because I don’t put 100% into something doesn’t mean it’s not worth listening to. Take the intro track for example. It’s bound to change a little bit by the time Heat Stroke is released, but in a nutshell, that piece of audio is made up of a weird little synth line with a bunch of sounds underneath it. Granted, those sounds were taken from various personal sources and they genuinely mean something, but at the end of the day, to an average person, that song sounds like noise. So the intro serves its purpose, a proposed sonic glance into my head, but ultimately it’s a silly little track to introduce the album. I’ll talk more about the intro another time, because it was a lot of fun to put it together, and it does symbolize a lot of things.

But yeah, back to songs that could serve as fillers. I could do another song that is similar to “Countdown to a Breakdown” in a short amount of time. It’s just drums, guitar, and slightly tweaked vocals. So I could apply all of those sounds to a different song, and it might sound even better to someone else, but personally, I don’t think I would get as much satisfaction from it just because I would know how stale it was, musically. No matter how cool it sounded, I would think of it as the song that I made just because.

Alright. That’s enough for now. I could vent about this stuff for hours. Like I stated previously, I’ll revisit some of these ideas in a couple weeks, after I’ve hopefully completed another song or two. Also, I want to include some more behind-the-scenes stuff in these blog posts, so…here. This is a taste of a mostly live version of “Countdown to a Breakdown.” If you’re curious, the vocals and distorted guitar are live, and the rest are playback. I just set my iPhone to record in the middle of the room, and I didn’t think the recording sounds too bad all things considered. What do you think?