It’s been busy times nonetheless – I just haven’t really been able to finish much, but I did start a lot of things.
First of all, and I’m kinda reluctant to tell, is that I’ve started vocal coaching sessions. In an earlier life, I’d sung in a few pretty ambitious choirs for about ten years of my life. Nonetheless, I just haven’t been super-happy with the outcome of my vocals in my recent songs, and feedback I’d received through reports from e.g., AudioKite and ReverbNation confirmed that: There’s room for improvement on the singing part. (BTW: Found a great article with some background information on market research for musicians over at musicthinktank.com.) In true launch-and-iterate fashion, I’ve been learning from the feedback and put together an action plan: Started vocal coaching sessions a few weeks ago (with Classic Vocal Studio’s Juan Lago in Zürich), and I’ve already noted a dramatic improvement. We’re getting there.
Second, I’m looking very carefully and consciously at improving my mixing skills. Been learning a lot off of YouTube, obviously, but also from Graham Cochrane’s The Recording Revolution, a great site with a lot of valuable resources and really useful and worthwhile online (and offline!) classes. This is tough, but really beneficial.
Third, I’ve been running a lot of different experiments getting my music out there and heard (more) – not just AdWords (for Video, i.e. YouTube) and Facebook campaigns and quite a bit of Twitter activity: Just yesterday I created my first YouTube playlist, inserting one of my own songs in between fantastic tracks by the likes of VNV Nation, Rotersand, Covenant, Depeche Mode, Rammstein and others. It’s all experiments, let’s see what sticks.
Oh, and on top of that, I’m actively working on a few tracks at the same time – looking forward to finishing one or more soon so I can give you guys something cool and new to listen to. Stay tuned!