I just had the honor of being on an expert panel at the Summer NAMM Conference here in Nashville, and the topic at hand was "How to Get the Best Vocal Performance from a Singer in the Recording Studio." Before I showed up, I jotted down some notes, and as I promised the people in the audience that day, I'm putting it in a blog post. And since most people skip all this intro text, I'll get right to it...
This month's release is the final installment in our Year of the Groove [where we've put out one electronic music release a month for a year,] and what a year it has been! As much as I'm tempted to launch into a recap of the Year of the Groove, that is for another blog post. Today is all about this month's maxi single "Make Me Free". Giddyup!
As this spring semester comes to an end, and I go through the process of helping my graduate students have their charts played by the university big band, and get ready to do their culminating projects [like a thesis], I started reminiscing about the big band chart I didfor my master's project when I was in graduate school. I am just now realizing that it's exactly 20 years ago since I recorded this, so it seemed like a good time to post and share it for nostalgia. Also I feel really old...
One of the most frustrating and disheartening parts of releasing music in today's digital music marketplace is when perfect strangers take it upon themselves to freely give away the music that we have worked so hard on, and paid so much to create, thus discouraging the few remaining buyers from actually properly purchasing our work. After releasing our first record in 2007, one day I set up a Google alert so that any time a website was found with "Worldwide Groove Corporation" or "Chillodesiac" in the page contents, we would get an email with a link. Little did I know that within the next week I would get dozens of email alerts directing me to blogs where people [who make a habit of doing this regularly] had uploaded our album artwork and all of the music into downloadable files so people could just help themselves to our work without even connecting with or compensating us.
Since this month's release is comprised of all cover tunes, instead of songwriting, I'm going to talk just a little bit about the creative and production process. And I'm glad to have the opportunity to do this because many of the tracks were part of our Chillodesiac Lounge album and I've never told that story. We were originally going to only release the brand new track Our Love Is Here to Stay for February in honor of Valentine's Day in our Year of the Groove, but as we formulated the release schedule, it seemed like we might as well throw the other jazz standards on the release since many people may not have been familiar with our previous releases and it makes sense to have them all together in one place...
This whole "Year of the Groove" is certainly giving us a run for our money and this last month is no exception. Can we just debrief for a moment?
Our September release "The Legend of the Fall" ended up being used to help promote awareness about the labeling initiative for genetically modified foods. This happened after we were contacted by the Oregon Right to Know organization before the November election. I hadn't planned on any of that happening but was extremely happy to use our song for an issue that was so important for me, so I put a lot of time into creating WGC branded social media content for both Oregon Right to Know and Right to Know Colorado. That took me right up to when I was also working on the video for Supermodel Astronaut...
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