A day of work on the new Fall in Green album. The proof-listen last night went fine, the album is complete as far as I'm concerned, but Deb needs an essential listen too. I started the day by rendering the final 16-bit tracks and splitting these, compiling the mp3 headers (I don't make mp3 versions of album tracks nowadays, only short 1-second files with tags which can be copied and pasted to mp3 files as and when needed). Then, the start of submitting tracks to the relevant authorities. The sheet music, apart from these official identifiers, is largely complete.
Then, a slow turn of my mind towards the album art. This has to begin with experimentation, and I've used many of the drawings from Deb's books which illustrated these same works.
I rather liked the pen and ink look, and made up some yellowed-parchment images too. I scanned in the surfaces of some oak, walnut, and a 'coffee marble' tile to explore possible textures. All look good, but I think I'll aim for the media of paper and ink; this seems to match the ethos and feeling of this album. I chose a hand-written sort of font style from Google Fonts.
I have 6 or 7 proto-pages designed. I like to have a broadly similar feeling to textures, and an overall colour scheme. I also like two broad backgrounds, light and dark, so I can use one for the front, one for the back, and have options for overlaying text. I'll also need some band images/portraits, and perhaps some outdoor photography. The album already feels rich in artwork.
One smaller job was working on the vocal processing for our version of 'Mr Tambourine Man'.
