Today is the last day of the Dick Tracy Must Duplicate Kickstarter project, so if you want to be a backer and aren’t, it’s today or… well, I’ll probably have some other project later. But it’s today! Or today.

Also today I have donned the Green-Brimmed Sorting Hat for the annual Great Tax Sorting. This is not only not an exaggeration, this is only part of the Great Sorting Field:

I’ll be buried a while, so see you… when I see you.

Or more likely, when I get bored and take a break. One of those. XD

…have a live recording of me doing the traditional song of “Danny Boy,” as an instrumental, live midway through the first set of the Leannan Sidhe show this past Valentine’s Day, wherein I was a guest musician. This is a free download, tho’ of course you can choose to throw money at if it you’d like. Such things are always appreciated!

There’s a bit of compressor-pumping on the recording. I pulled some of it out by ducking down the lower frequencies and throwing on a limiter and a couple of other things, but it’s still there. If you have specific experience with fixing that kind of problem, please let me know – Leannen Sidhe would like to use some of these recordings!

Session Two with Mark Guenther at Seattle Disc Mastering went well. We fixed the short list of problems I’d discovered, added track IDs, and also made a couple of small adjustments in equalisation for tracks two (Hide From Me) and twelve (Shout at the Desert), all in about 45 minutes.

And now I have Release Candidate 1 in my grubby little mitts! Once I’ve played it a couple more dozen times, and ripped it a couple of ways to see how it behaves, then, well, I’ll either find something I think needs to be fixed and get it fixed, or I won’t, and we’ll print the two golden masters. I went to Best Buy and played it on about a dozen CD players, and I’m pretty happy.

I’ve had a couple of people bring up pre-orders! Yay! Obviously, you can pre-order by being a $30 Kickstarter backer, and that’s super-awesome! But also more expensive than regular pre-orders. Those will start once the Kickstarter project closes. We have a booklet to print (and for that matter, to finish laying out – aheh, better get on that!) as well as actual physical duplicates to make and all that.

It’s amazing how many little decisions go into making a CD. We’re looking at a new type of CD case – easier to assemble, less fragile, more likely to be undamaged by shipping, cool things like that. I’m told they’re common in Asia and Australia, and am checking with people I know on the ground there to find out. I saw things that match their description in Japan, but used for games, rather than music. I’m hoping they’re available for CDs and look good, because they’d be a hell of a lot easier to assemble.

photo framegrab courtesy Leannan Sidhe

I’ve got a monophonic but I think pretty decent recording of my guest appearance with Leannan Sidhe, by the way. So I may have a free download for you guys in a few days. Watch for it!

My (Solarbird’s) guest appearance with Leannan Sidhe at the benefit today went well; thanks to the El Dorado for having us, and Shanti for inviting me to play! We may have some audio from it to share at some point, which would be fun. It’s not the sort of music I usually play but I enjoyed the gig.

I forgot to link last week to Paul’s webcomic, but anyone with a fondness for supervillainy should find last week’s Tuesday and Thursday strips to be relevant to their interests.

Sleep now. Better posts tomorrow. ^_^

I got the Trash-O-Matic 68000 built and working! Bonus points: I was working on noise reduction circuitry and accidentally came up with an entirely new effect. XD This video shows the six basic voices plus the new effect (which I’m calling BERTHOLD RAYS) but doesn’t show the adjustments you can also make with the knob on the side. Supervillains must have our devices, and this is one of ours. XD

Enjoy:

Previous Trash-O-Match 68000 post | < a href="https://crimeandtheforcesofevil.com/blog/2016/06/20/another-weekend-of-noodling-with-electrics/">Version 1.2 update post

Good night Gracie, that was a surprise! Apparently the way to get funding is to say that none of the curves show you making funding! XD Thanks so much to everyone who decided to back the project in either money or rebroadcasting – I’d still hoped we’d make it, but I didn’t think we’d close the final 23% overnight. XD Thanks to you all!

The project stays open through the end of the 30-day backing period. If you came to back the project, you still can – we’ll have plenty of expenses beyond basic duplication. Any overage will go towards printing the CD booklet, buying jewel cases and the UPC barcodes you need to be listed on Amazon and played on Pandora – things like that. All the backer rewards are available until the end of the project period.

But mostly this is about thank you! Once the project closes and confirms, we’ll go ahead and place the orders. Payout is delayed a couple of weeks, but that’s what credit cards are for. XD Thanks again!

ps: OH! I almost forgot: the guest appearance I’m making with Leannan Sidhe on Valentine’s Day is actually open to the public! I’d thought it was private. It’s a Humane Society fundraiser in Burien, Washington. $3 minimum donation required. Click over to the shows page for details!

We have our final mastering session on Tuesday! Shortly after that, we’ll have what should be the final disc master. Hopefully on the following Friday, we’ll have the funding to get duplicates made! Anna was listening to the current test master last night, and is really impressed with what a good mastering studio can do, so that’s pretty exciting!

Of course, I have to listen to it another zillion times before Tuesday, and honestly, that’s not exciting, because it’s like reading your own novel into the ground – most of what you hear are the things you’d like to do better. So I took a few days away from it and listened to the test master again, earlier this week, and I gotta tell you – I’m proud of this thing. I may suck at PR and I may not be good at talking people into caring, but this is a fucking good first album.

As I type, we’re at about 77% of duplicator funding on Kickstarter, with a week to go. (It says eight days, but it’s seven and a half, and counting down as I type.) If we don’t make 100% of target, then we actually end up with 0% of funding, and I admit I’m getting pretty nervous. If you’re already a backer, thank you so much – and I hate to ask more of you, but could you post about the project? One word from you is worth a hundred times any number of words from me, because you’re not the ones with the vested interest.

If you’re not because things are just too tight right now – well, for various reasons reasons, this whole last decade has been pretty hard on us, too, long before the Great Recession started. I understand. But you can still back us informally, if you want, by reposting about the album and the project to get it made.

Because, honestly? We won’t make funding on the strength of my talking about it. There isn’t one curve projection that shows us making funding that way. But you guys talking – that changes it. Here are the URLs:

Kickstarter URL:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/solarbird/dick-tracy-must-duplicate-launch-our-cd

Band website:
http://crimeandtheforcesofevil.com

Thanks.

So Tom Smith linked to this incredibly relevant to our interests article today, featuring this graph:

Plays Share and Growth

So! My agenda is clear and obvious!

1. GET THE FUCK ONTO YOUTUBE. Okay! Have to shoot a video! That’s fun. And:

2. GET THE FUCK ONTO PANDORA. Can do, sport! This one’s much easier to at least attempt. But I need to go ahead and get something I was going to get anyway:

A UPC barcode or several. One right away for Dick Tracy Must Die, more later. I know CD Baby is a decent place to get them but I’ve also heard they’ve kinda started sucking lately. Is there a better place or are they still okay?

Paraphrased:

Venue manager: Yes, absolutely, we can provide sound.

Bandleader: Okay, great! What’ve you got?

Venue manager: Oh, it’ll do everything – it’s a karaoke machine!

…I’ll be bringing in my own PA.

A week and a half left, and we’re 75% towards fundraising goal – become a backer! Dick! Tracy! Must! Duplicate!

Hey, if you have accounts on Digg, Technorati (hi guys: X9ZC64XQKZ2P ), anywhere else like that – could you add the band website and blogsite to it in your accounts? I’ve been reading this book on discoverability and those are sites I never use and have no presence on, and, supposedly, should!

Band official URL: http://crimeandtheforcesofevil.com

Band blog official URL: https://crimeandtheforcesofevil.com/blog

Band blog RSS feed: https://crimeandtheforcesofevil.com/blog/feed/rss2

Pleeeeeeeease? Thanks!

(I’m trying to figure out things like HOW I CAN DO BOOKMARKS and all that, lol.)