I've been working on a full-length album, and it's been going pretty slowly. That project seems to keep getting interrupted by other projects, sometimes "quickies", other times ones that themselves take quite a bit of time to finish. One of the latter type, a set of duets with Beverly Bremers ("Don't Say You Don't Remember"), is just now starting to make it's way out into the world. This particular project started back in March of 2007, when Alexei Ustinov of JMT (makers of the JMT Orchestrator plug-in that came with, or maybe still comes with, SONAR) asked me about the possibility of writing English lyrics for one of his songs (originally written in Russian). There was another part to his request, and that was that we initially would be able to use the result to help demonstrate some second generation Vocaloids from PowerFX, with the idea being to have the two new Vocaloids, Sweet Ann and Big Al, do a duet with the song. That part of the project was finished in late May of 2007, and anyone who's interested can hear the result, which is using an early draft of the lyrics for "Make Me Feel", at: http://www.jasminemusic.com/vocaloid/05-28-2007.htm They are the first two demos on the page. I'd actually written the lyric keeping in mind the Vocaloid singers, so there could be two layers of meaning, depending on whether it was humans or robots singing the lyric. We'd also talked about the possibility of trying to do some kind of off-the-wall video with a male human singing to a female robot, but neither of us had the video production wherewithal to actually attempt that. However, I did do another demo of the song using the MIRIAM Vocaloid from Zero-G, both with the idea that it might eventually be something to use if we went somewhere with the video idea and just to have a female-sounding voice to sing along with for the duet while trying to get some feedback on the song. By this point, the song had been getting pretty good feedback, and Alexei approached me about the possibility of producing a more polished recording, where he'd take care of the tracks over in Siberia, where he lives, and I'd take care of the vocals on this end. I thought if we were going to go to that trouble, we should do it with a real female singer, so I asked my friend and occasional collaborator, Beverly Bremers if she might be interested. She was. Actually going back and forth on the arrangement took some time, and I thnk it wasn't until about late February of this year that Beverly and I finally recorded our vocals to the Russian-produced tracks. (Of course, we were recording in SONAR. I have no clue what they were using over there.) I also ended up adding a couple of keyboard tracks (B4 and Rapture LE) to the Russian tracks, which are all live musicians and real (i.e. not software) instruments. Initially it was just going to be the one song, but I got the idea that it might be nice to have another track to accompany it -- kind of like a double-sided single. I suggested a song called "Unsaid" that Beverly and I wrote together back in the late 90's that seemed to work well enough as a duet, and Beverly agreed. I'd actually produced some tracks for that for another singer's demo a few years back, so I used those as a starting point, changing the key for our voices, adding some updated sounds, and changing a few of the parts out. That one was a total SONAR production, though I don't recall which version of SONAR it started on. Meanwhile, I played the second song for Alexei, and he asked if he could produce some tracks for that one, too. The result wasn't quite what we wanted to put the song out there, but was kind of neat in its own way -- I affectionally think of it as a Leningrad Cowboys stadium remix. ;-) I hated to just let that sit on the shelf, so I suggested using that one (production done in whatever, vocals mixed in SONAR) as a branded remix for Alexei's production company, Virartech. But it seemed a bit odd to have a remix of one of the two songs on the overall release, so, thinking about the original Vocaloid demos of the song, one of which was in some kind of club style, I asked if Alexei might be interested in doing a dance club remix of "Make Me Feel" as well. I didn't realize at the time that he was fairly new to the whole idea of club mixes, so that took some time and back and forth, after getting some feedback from some guys in the US and UK who were more knowledgeable about that area than we were. Once the club mix was done, Alexei also did a shorter version of that, which he referred to as a radio mix. The net was a 2-song, 5-track project. More time for admin and artwork passed, and we finally got all our ducks in a row to release it last week. It's only now starting to make its way into e-stores (it's in Napster and Lala already). If anyone is interested in having a listen, the best place to listen at the moment is Lala.com: http://www.lala.com/#album/2306124484406511236/ You do have to register to hear full-length songs, but it's painless and immediate (a screen will pop up when you try to play a song), and they also give you 50-free "web songs" (which you can basically use for unlimited on-demand streaming of the songs you "purchase" with those credits) when you do. Once you're registered you can listen to any song they have all the way through once. No credit card is required or anything, and I have to say I've really enjoyed messing around in Lala, checking out new and old stuff (e.g. found a live album from one of my all-time favorites, Jim Croce, that I didn't even know existed until finding it and listening to it there). This project was quite unusual for me in that I was pretty much only concerned with the vocals on four of the five tracks, though I did do final mixes on two of those and played keyboards on the one. I also did do the mastering on all tracks. It took a long time, but I have to same I'm pleased with the results. Rick -- ======================================= Rick Paul Closet Cowboy Music (ASCAP) Web: www.RickPaul.info MySpace: www.myspace.com/rickpaulmusic =======================================
