(This article is first in a series of articles about SCAdians and their adventures in producing CDs. For more info, see yesterday’s intro post.)
By Eric Schrager / Lord Drake Oranwood
I just released my first album of bardic music, Hidden Gold. I’m selling it to raise money for a worthy cause (more about that below). Sophia asked me to write an article on what it was like making this project happen. I spent about two and half years from the time I first seriously considered the idea of making an album to the finished release. I can only speak to my own experience, but this is what it looked like for me. To get there, I had to answer a series of questions:
Why do I want to make an album?
What was compelling about this as a project, that I would want to do this as an SCA hobbyist? I love being an SCA bard, but that’s because I love performing and the SCA makes it so easy to do. “You’re a bard? Awesome! Sing us something? You know, just stand up and give us a piece.” No instrument needed, no band, no speakers. Just get up and do it. You can play an instrument, and many do, but even most of them don’t do it all the time. So why would I want to record an album? That’s a whole other level of effort.
For me, the answer was that much as I love performing, I love writing even more. I’ve always wanted to be a writer of some kind, and over the years I’ve realized that songwriting is my most preferred form. I won’t go into all the reasons (I’ve laid those out in a class I teach on the subject), but I love it and it is one of the things I do best. I consider myself a better songwriter than I am a singer. And, like any writer, I want to get my work out there. In the time I spent in the SCA, it became pretty clear that what gets a song “out there”, where people know it, and request it, and want to sing it themselves, is the same thing that gets a song out there in the mundane world: a recording. There is a small but very real market here in the Society for recorded bardic music, and people love the songs they hear on their bardic CDs. Yes, you can post a YouTube video of a performance at an event (and I have), and that can get a song out there. But I’d never done a complete full-scale creative work of my own–a book, a play, an art show, what have you. I wanted to make a thing. And I wanted that thing to capture my songs the way I hear them in my head.

Did I want to make money on this? No. (And a good thing too, because that would have been really silly of me. There’s barely any money in commercial music, let alone niche stuff like this, if you have a day job.) But I wanted to sell this, since I believe art has value, and people appreciate the value more when they are asked to pay for it. My wife and I quickly decided there was a cause worth raising money for: The Therapeutic Nursery, a preschool for bright special needs kids that helped our son cope with his developmental challenges and develop social and school readiness skills. We were lucky enough that our school district had sponsored the program for us. Most won’t, and with school cuts of the last few years many can’t, even when it’s the perfect approach for a kid who really needs it. We couldn’t imagine a better use of any money we might make. (As people pointed out later, it also makes a really good selling point when promoting the thing.)

Do I have enough really good material for a complete album?

This was tricky. I’d written only three songs when I decided to get serious about becoming a bard. I’d written other kinds of songs for years, but SCA music is its own thing, and for me, at least, songs aren’t things I just bat out in an afternoon. Once in a while, but not normally. For me, a piece I would consider worth recording usually takes about a month to write. I need the right inspiration, I have to put all the pieces together, and I need to revise and polish it until I’m really happy with it. Daily life, and raising a child, had left me with little time to focus on that for a number of years, but now that my son was school age, and old enough to enjoy the SCA, I could make time. And friends and patrons were encouraging me to up my output. So in this first real year of the project (and as a member of the Pennsic bardic community, I measure a bard year as the span between one Pennsic and the next), I set myself the task of a song a season. In the end, I managed to produce six new songs, bringing me to nine. That was getting close.

I wanted to have 12 tracks on the album. A practical consideration: In the age of digital music, where it’s easy to just buy one song, an album is a little more compelling if it’s cheaper than buying track by track. So how to get from 9 to 12? I had an idea for another song, and I had a title and a chorus: “Hidden Gold”. As I reflected on it, I realized that was the title I wanted for the album. I just had to write it. Later, working with a patroness and a teacher, I got the suggestion to use a double sonnet I’d written years before as a spoken word piece, and I learned a John Dowland song that I really liked. In the end, I realized that spoken word and period music would be great additions to a bardic album, so I had my track list.
What sort of sound am I shooting for?
This is a big consideration. Many bardic albums are performed with little or no instrumentation, much the way most live bardic performances sound. Certainly making an album just of what I could actually do myself would make it a lot easier. And while I have taken lessons in a few instruments, I don’t play anything at performance level, so that would be a conundrum. Because I realized two things: (a) I wanted to make a professional-sounding album, or not bother. And (b), I grew up listening to Broadway soundtracks. So what I hear in my head when I write and sing my own songs, it’s pretty rich and full. I wanted that. I wanted other people to hear the woodwind trills, the deep cello counterpoint, the driving acoustic strumming, that played in my head on these songs. Which led me to the next question.
Who can help me make this a reality?
I was going to need some serious help to make this happen. I wanted serious instrumentation that I couldn’t play, and production values I didn’t know how to capture. I was going to have to ask for help.
This was the step that had stopped me back when I was writing modern pop music. I didn’t know who to ask, or how to ask, or how to make it worth someone’s while to work with me on a project this scale. Doing it in the SCA, however, it is as surprising how to easy it was to get help. And don’t get me wrong, I got lucky. Having two old friends, one who played guitar and had experience recording rock music with GarageBand, the other (Arden of Icombe) who had become a music Laurel and could play and arrange music for virtually any period instrument you could name? That was insane luck. But. But. I asked them. And showed them my songs. And they liked them. And said yes.
I told them it was a passion project, and that I’d be donating the proceeds. Honestly? They didn’t care. They liked the music, they were intrigued by the challenge of bringing this to life. I was going to find out how many people would respond to just that: the challenge and fun of a creative project, and the pleasure of being asked. Everyone I asked, without exception, felt flattered that I thought of them. And in the end, for all the work they were going to invest in this project, I was going to be investing more. Because that was the next question:
How badly do I want to do this? What am I willing to invest to make it happen?
There are two main currencies available: time and money. It ends up being a combination of both, of course. But I chose to put nearly all the equity in via my own time. Part of the reason was, having chosen to donate the proceeds, I wanted there to be proceeds to donate, which meant minimizing the expenses. But also I wanted to learn how to do it. And I wanted this to sound the way I wanted it, and no one was going to be able to read my mind better than me. Over the first few months, I watched my friend Dave do the recording, editing and mixing in GarageBand, using decent consumer-level equipment. I learned from him, and quickly took over the process. After a certain point, I saw that I had to, because getting one of my collaborators into my basement studio was much easier to schedule than getting both of them. Which brings me to the next question:
What’s my deadline to deliver this? How do I make sure I get things done on time?

Originally I had the idea to shoot for Pennsic 43, but along the way, my wife suggested I push it back a year and finish in time for Pennsic 44. But then, my wife is a lot smarter then I am.

So I worked backward from Pennsic, picked people’s brains, found out what I would need to do at the tail end of the project (more about that later), and set targets for myself. I aimed to finish all the instrumentals by February or March of 2015, which would give me plenty of time for the end game. (And it left room for schedule slippage. I didn’t finish all of them until late April and was still in good shape.)
Toward the end, I set time aside to work on my lead vocals, since my own time was the thing I had most of. (I probably should have put in more time on those earlier in the project, but I found the process very challenging and procrastinated a lot.)
Crucially, I asked for commitments around the end game items I was going to need help with late in 2014, so I didn’t end up with any critical eleventh-hour surprises that made me miss my target.

Giving myself enough time to get it done the way I wanted was important. And waiting an extra year meant I was able to learn how to do the producing part much better, and was able to get all the time I needed from my collaborators without having to be too stressed or pushy. Which allowed me to address the next question.

How do I reach my goal for quality? do I know when I’m there (or close enough)?
The extra time I gave myself opened up space for a lot of additional collaboration that made the finished product that much better. I was able to realize my dream of having Heather Dale record the vocals for the Faerie Queen on “Tam Lin of the Elves”, since we hosted a house concert for her, and (as I expected) she was thrilled to be able to just have me record her with my equipment rather before they left, rather than have to find time back home to do it for me. It opened up time to find the four female harmonies I wanted for “Lady of the Rose”, giving that song exquisite sweetness, but literally the feminine voice it required to sound best.
The biggest part of getting the quality I wanted was continuing to ask for help. Almost nobody I asked told me no. Everyone had something to offer, even if it was just advice. I realized I wanted to get a mastering engineer to master the album properly, because otherwise all the effort I’d put into the sound was still going to result in a product that fell short of my hopes. A friend connected me to another friend, Neil Fein, who was willing to support my donation project at a special rate, and who gave me feedback on all my mixes so I could get them better. I got some voice coaching from Olivia Baker, a brilliant singer who did some vocals for the album. I ended up forming a small committee to review all the tracks and give me honest feedback about where I could improve things, and reworked the edits and the mixes and my vocals to get things still better. I ended up upgrading from GarageBand to Logic Pro X, which gave me more powerful tools to enhance things further.
And, in the end, as several people had told me, I had to just stick to my deadline, and know there would be a point where I wasn’t totally satisfied with a bunch of things. But since I had focused my efforts for the precious few months on the tracks with the biggest issues, and worked again and again to raise each boat, in the end I knew I’d be pleased with the results. (And even if, as the sausage maker, I might never be satisfied, I had to trust that if my committee was largely happy with how it sounded, listeners would be happy with it too.)

I handed it off to Neil for mastering, and accepted I had done everything I could do, and it was time to put my hands up and step away.

How do I finish it so everything is really done?
Because I’d been talking to people throughout the process, I knew there were key steps left when the mastering was done that would need to be addressed. So I was ready for those and had done my research. The end game included:
  • The album cover. My wife reached out to Countess (now Crown Princess) Caoilfhionn, and arranged a professional photo shoot for the cover photos. She was brilliant, creative, and very sweet (can’t recommend her enough), scouting out a great location, and coaxing good shots out of me, and I don’t consider myself photogenic. I reached out to my good friend Aneleda Falconbridge (who designed the cover for her own album, I Am of the North, the previous year) to do my design. Graphic design is what she does, and does well. Her concept, very different from what I expected, showed me she understood the intention and tone of my project.
Hidden Gold CD Art-04 Hidden Gold CD Art-01
  • Copyright. You don’t have to, but if you’re going to sell your work, I think you should submit your original work and your recordings for copyright. The copyright office makes it pretty easy to do it all online, and it doesn’t cost that much.
  • CD manufacturing. Aneleda and Efenwealt Wystle suggested I check out Kunaki. They do on demand CD manufacture using an online loading process. It is the least expensive way for an independent artist to manufacture a professional-looking CD. Read the FAQs and mind the caveats. It was a reasonable option for me.
  • Distribution. There are many online distributors who can sell digital downloads and distribute an album to the outlets of your choice (iTunes, Google Music, Amazon, Spotify). I went with CD Baby, because I liked their distribution options and their interface.

How do I get people to buy it?

Once it was all done, there were things I needed to do to let people know about it, and establish demand. This was where asking for help was really key. People who’ve been there before, such as Efenwealt Wystle and my teacher Mistress Zsof, had lots of good advice about how to get the word out.
  • A release party. This isn’t that common, actually, but since Arden, my music arranger, was up for it, he recruited several friends, rehearsed the songs, and we had a live concert in my house the day of the release. I ended up with about 30 people there, not counting the band. It was fun, if exhausting, and we sold a decent bit of product there. (If you’re going to do this, make sure you have a good permanent marker to sign stuff with, people will want that, and having come out to celebrate with you, they certainly deserve it.)
  • Singles. SoundCloud and YouTube provide great ways for people to find your music online, and you can share them with people without making them available for download.
  • Airplay. Of course, this is the SCA, so how do you do that? Well, as of right now, there is The Knowne World Bardcast, a podcast dedicated to the bardic arts in the SCA, and Gideon ap Stephen has devoted a lot of effort to make it happen. He was kind enough to get one of my favorite tracks into an episode of the podcast the week before the release, which meant serious fans of Bardic got to hear it.
  • A little help from your friends. I reached out to my teacher, and well-connected friends, who were kind enough to spread the word. Heather Dale, of course, has a well-established fanbase, and having her involved with the project was a tremendous blessing in getting people’s attention.
  • Event merchants. For Pennsic, I’ve found a couple of merchants who are happy to carry the album (Camelot Treasures and Master Kenhelm, in case you’re wondering). It’s crucial to have the product where people can find it at big events.
  • Advertising. My plan is to take Efenwealt’s advice and advertise in The Pennsic Independent and on Facebook leading up to the War.
  • Performances. If you’ve gone to the trouble of recording, you should find venues to perform. I’ll be doing a one-hour concert on Sunday of War Week at Pennsic, performing mostly songs from the album. Again, I’ve asked for help: Efenwealt will be joining me onstage to provide some accompaniment, and Heather will be reprising her duet with me from the album. Based on their experiences, this is vital to stoke demand.

So that is my experience to date. It has been an amazing ride, and I’m really glad to have gone through it. And I’m really looking forward to taking a break from it all when Pennsic is over.