diary of a record label

This is where I recount my tales of confusion, excitement and woe as I try and figure out how to release records. Who knows what might happen? Certainly not me.

More MCPS and mastering

Got a bit of paper back from the MCPS yesterday which turned out to be an invoice asking me to pay Declan £36 for the privilege of releasing his track. Bah. I even play on the damn song! Once I send this off, I will then get a license and can go ahead with the manufacturing. woo!

After a bit more listening we noticed that the Uter track is noticeably quieter than the other tracks which makes them all sound great and us rubbish but Kenny's happy to get this sorted for us (apparently it is as loud, just not as dense). We don't want to be remembered as the band with the quiet song. Copies of the mastered CDs have now gone out to the rest of the bands so they can approve them (or not).

Also, we played our first Uter gig last night and it went really well! I had lots of fun and hardly anything went wrong (quite a feat when we had a computer, mixing desk, pedals, temperamental vintage keyboards, bunny lights etc. to deal with). Hopefully we'll get some more gigs arranged soon.

posted by marceline on Saturday, April 10, 2004

LONG OVERDUE UPDATE!

You'll be glad to know the lack of updating has been due to too much happening rather than not enough. Having said that, we are still far too far away from actual record release. Basically all these extra new things have kept appearing that no-one told me about at the beginning, such as:

MCPS
In all those forms I need to fill out for manufacturing they ask for a proof of licensing which I apparently have to get from the MCPS, they being in charge of copyright royalties etc. Ady assures me that this is merely a formality and I won't actually have to pay any royalties. Unless your bandmate goes and signs up with the MCPS before you get your forms back! Thanks Declan! However, these forms are at least fairly easy to fill in so the only delay was getting all the bands to tell me who wrote their songs and how long they are and stuff. Now I'm just waiting for them to send me back some bit of official paper.

MASTERING
Kept this one quiet too. I'm still not quite understanding mastering but it seems to be generally making sure all the sound levels are correct so that none of the songs break your stereo or jump around too much between tracks. Luckily my good friend Steven reminded me that I am acquainted with Kenny from Eska who has done some fine mastering for bands like Reynolds. So he agreed to do my mastering for £75 which seemed fine to me. I collected all the master cds together and gave them to Kenny and a week or so later I have two 2 track mastered CDs. And I must say they sound amazing! I can really hear the difference. Hurray! So now to get all the bands to approve the mastered versions...

Otherwise, it has just been general plodding along with form filling, track listing indecision and pondering the contents of the box. Denim and Diamonds have sent me the artwork for their insert which looks really cool and I've just this evening been having my hands photographed for the Uter insert. I've pretty much decided to get them all printed in one colour (probably grey, excitingly enough!) although I haven't yet managed to get a quote for the printing as the one time I managed to drag myself over to that end of town, I couldn't actually find the damn place! This is probably next on my things to do.

So release date is looking at June/July and I'm quite hopeful of achieveing this. I've been warned there's a bit of a backlog at GZ though so who knows...

posted by marceline on Sunday, April 04, 2004