A busy day of various jobs. First, it's the release day for Letters From A Square Spoon, so lots of basic launch admin; scant online promotion, emails sent, launch effects on Bandcamp. I've sold the last of the first edition of The Flatspace Soundtrack, so had to attend to that happy event. Then, essential shopping duties for Easter.
After that, I transferred the lyric reading videos for A Drive Through The Town to my art channel, part of a long term migration of those videos. So much of music, like my painting, has a long term component. For every new album I update an older one, and there are 4 or 5 older albums that I know I can update now with far better mixing (and sometimes vocal or guitar) quality. Progress always marches on (or always should), so doing all of these now would only make them seem poor in future years or decades.
I'm also experimentally switching music distributors and having a change of strategy here. This initially means a necessary re-release of The Arcangel Soundtrack, my first album from 2001. My initial idea was simply to switch distributor with the original tracks, but I have a few options here. I've made a better quality recording of all of the tracks a couple of years ago, just before I sold the Yamaha SY-85 (this process is probably documented in this blog!). This means I could remaster the tracks, this is option 2. Option 3 is a bigger remaster, as there were two contemporary tracks: Archetype's Theme, and Gabbro, which were not used, so I could include those. Archetype's Theme is annoyingly poor in quality though, its mix quality, the track seems to be entirely mono except for the reverbs, which I don't like. I can't update, tweak or change anything without an SY-85 synthesizer and a few days of work.
If I remaster I must think how. Most contemporary remasters boost the volume, but I'm inclined to reduce it, to improve the quality. The mixing of many of the tracks was poor by my standards of today, too heavy in bass, but they remain pretty, not too bad. Choices choices.
The latter half of the day consisted of experiments with these tracks.
