Home straight

It has been some considerable time since I last gave an update within these pages on the progress of my musical collaboration with The Chanteuse; the which goes by the soubriquet of Anam Danu. In fact, looking back (with some trepidation) at the archives of this blog, I can see that it is longer than I thought since I made any serious reference to such matters. Apart from a brief mention at the turn of the year the last time that I turned in a proper report was back in August of last year – when I celebrated our return to the studio.

High time that I brought things up to date.

Last August I wrote that we had made a good start on putting together a new collection of songs, aiming to record a third ‘album’ to follow on from ‘Winds of Change‘ and ‘Winter Blue and Evergreen‘. Whereas we had indeed made a good start – having at that point penned half a dozen new songs – it has subsequently taken longer than perhaps expected to complete the collection.

It seems that I am currently able to write and produce tracks at a rate of about one a month. For an album we like to have a good ten tracks but in this case I wrote rather more – around fifteen – before we felt that we had the best combination for the new release. We are both quite picky customers and are keen to make this as good as it can be. This should give you some idea as to why these things can take a fair bit of time.

Anyway – we now have our ten tracks and we are currently recording the vocals for the final one.

So – what happens next? Well – this does:

• We carry out the musical equivalent of snagging – going through everything with a fine tooth-comb and fixing anything with which we are not completely satisfied
• We instigate the process of getting album artwork designed
• We do the final mixes for each song – which can involve a number of iterations
• We solicit feedback from a number of trusted souls – this with the particular aim of:
• Finalising the running order – which, once done, can lead to the process of:
• Mastering the album

Once we get to that point we have a ‘finished’ product and we can start work on all the other essential tasks, such as deciding our release strategy. Right now – however – that is looking a little too far ahead.

Our aim is to have our new creation ready to go for the summer!