Megacurve - Best Of... maybe

 

I selected 11 tracks I have made over the last 14 years and called it The Best Of... a time machine for myself, brings back memories of what I was doing and being inspired by, at the time I made them.

Available on Bandcamp here for free download.

I have but together a PDF Booklet for this Best Of Album and is about the very long journey it has been, and some notes on the tracks, and their making.

Has 6, 7 and 8 string guitars, Jazz Bass,  synthesizers, ambient sounds and are all produced in the Reaper DAW.

We recorded a fair few tracks with our 4 track TASCAM Portastudio back in the 80s, but those have been lost to time. Don't even own a cassette player anymore,  and don't want one.  There was a time after that where we just used a midi D-110 synthesizer with a sequencer, but my 15years at Roland in Japan, "at a music gear company", was the time I was least interested in playing the guitar and making my own music. Just had to do something else in my spare time.  The release of Reaper in 2005, living in Sydney again, not being in any "music gear company", and having the time, rekindled the passion. 

Half of the tracks in this album have vocals and most of those were done in 2021. 

I had notes of what lyric lines could be in a song. I sang bits of them, rewriting as needed a verse at a time. I then listened back to that A LOT, so that the lyrics became a song I knew. Unlike the first time I tried to sing the lyric. I then re-sang everything, double and triple tracking the parts.  Before vocals they were all just instrumentals, without thought for vocals.  Normally you would strip out most of the melodic guitar or synth under the vocals, but I didn't do much of that here. Something else that makes these different.  Maybe this kind of detail, and the lyrics should be in the Album booklet?

What I have done most of recently is stuff for under 60seconds music comics, and and extended version of the latest of those is included as well, HOW YOU USE IT.  

If I came back on a different day, I would have chosen a few different tracks, but they are all on my Bandcamp page anyway, so this seems like more of a playlist than a best of album. 

At 65+ I am at the age were you see more than a few people you know pass away.  You just don't know how long you have left, and a BEST OF ALBUM was one of those things on I my bucket list, I can now mark off.   

There are 1,000s of tracks uploaded to the streaming music sites daily. Very few of those will get listened too, unless a major artist on a big label manipulating the playlists.  I know that my own stuff will be played once by  friends and acquaintances totaling 10 plays over a few months.   If the production was better (mixing, mastering, fewer playing mistakes etc etc) those numbers wouldn't be any different.  I haven't built any kind of general audience to get more than that, and aren't interested in doing that.  

I don't even try and charge anything for them, but can say some have paid for them, so that makes me a "professional musician" right? 😁    

We can be found at ArtAndTechnology