Thoughts, Raves & Outright Beatings

I know.  This blog has become all about Helen working on and promoting her new CD.  Yawwwwwwwwwwnnn….Whatever.  Too bad.   Bloggers are narcissists, anyway.  I am no different.

Anyway…

I received the last of my masters from Songmastering.com.  The guy was nice enough to remix two of my songs, and did a pretty decent job with the third one.  I still found things in parts of two of my songs I wanted to redo, but the guy will charge me if he does any more work on them, which is fair enough.  Besides, I’m anxious to get the thing out, and it’s kinda hard to get total perfection out of tracks done with a PDA.  The feedback, where and when I’ve gotten it, has been pretty damn nice.   I’d rather not push it.

I’ve decided to keep the song count for the CD at 9, after all; I’m still kind of exhausted from that whole month of putting music together, and, to be fair to the RPM Challenge folks, I should promote the same CD that I provided to them.   

I’ve been spending the last several days getting the promo in place for the new CD.  This means following all the good little online artists to places like Facebook, ilike, bebo, et. al, and proclaiming myself in profiles, uploading music, blogging and bulletining like crazy.   It’s pretty exhausting.  I was especially targeting Facebook, Myspace, and Soundclick.  Facebook’s been frustrating, to say the least.  Turns out I had to create another page there.  No biggie.  BUT I also ended up having to create yet another profile on yet another OMD site that plugs into Facebook’s apps-cool as it is, actually-because Facebook insists on you uploading a .jpg of your drivers license or passport before they let you even think of upload music onto THEIR servers - I don’t think so!  Plus it’s hard figuring out which app is musician-centric and which one is listener-centric.  I have room for both, but I have to have reach too, ya know.

I also needed help in putting together widgets.  I found this blog useful for suggestions, even though I can’t use most of it on WordPress, and had to use linked JPG’d screenshots of the widgets, instead.  Grrrrrrrrrr…

Anyway, you can see the results of what I did on the My Music page of this blog.  Nifty, no?

It’s been pretty tiring, trying to get at least some of the work out there to be listened to and promoted.   I’m a little concerned about turning back into this all-internet-all-the-time dweeb I was back in the beginning of the century when I was promoting a goofier musical project of mine.   So I’m thinking of doing PR Genie, and AdSense.  Let someone else do all the work, while I do all the singing!

Good idea? Or Bad?

Anyway, I just have to finish the artwork and then the thing’s going to press.  In the meantime, until the thing’s actually released for real, you can preview and download ALL 9 SONGS from said CD on my Soundclick page (which I highly recommend for the Creative Commons partnership alone, if you are like me and can’t deal with spending $45.00 to register a SONG with the US Copyright office), or you can stream it on my last.fm page (don’t pay any attention to the “buy from Amazon.com” messages - it’s not there yet).   I’ll also have a zip file of all the songs from the CD up on my site before this weekend, which you can download for either free or a small donation (I’m still deciding).

Anyway, feel free to listen, comment, etc.  And if you like it, please tell folks who it is and where you got it!