Crisis, Resolution, and a Change of Plan

This week began with a bit of a shock. See, there’s a studio where I’ve been recording my music pending the hypothetical day when my home studio is up and running (right now it’s a temporary kitchen while the construction guys tear my house apart). Anyway, in the studio where I’ve been working is a computer used for recording and engineering my music. In the computer is a hard drive, and in the hard drive is all the data that stores my recordings.

Which brings me to the shock I had when my engineer/producer/friend who owns the studio called me to say the hard drive had crashed. And that talk we had a while back about installing an automated backup system? Well, that didn’t exactly happen.

We still had the MP3’s on the web site of course, but you can’t get a really good quality CD out of an MP3: it’s a data-compression thing. So we were looking at a real possibility of needing to re-record everything I’ve done these last six months. “Chagrin” doesn’t even begin to describe the feeling.

Anyway, as I listened to all the music I might have to do over I had an epiphany: I can do these songs better. I’ve been working like crazy to crank out a song every week, but on a lot of these songs I’ve been basically publishing demo-quality work because I was in such a hurry to get to the next one.

I’ve learned a lot in the last five months. I’ve learned to my joy that if I work very, very hard, I can in fact crank out a song a week. Besides what’s aIready up on the site I have a number of songs in the hopper that we could record and post weekly. However, they won’t be my best work if I do it that way.

Furthermore, I’ve been neglecting too many other important things: getting gigs, polishing the old stuff, and the very tedious business of just selling my music. I’ve been sitting in my room for fifty or more hours each week researching and writing like a maniac, but I haven’t been nearly proactive enough about getting my name onto the various directories of musicians for hire by libraries, schools, museums, etc.

So I’m changing the plan. I’m going to let go of the song-a-week, at least until I’ve taken care of some other projects. I’m going to take some time to polish my work, then go back to each song I’ve recorded this year and do it better; then I’m going to release the best album of my career. I’m going to actively pursue more paid shows, and if you’ve got any ideas about that I want to hear from you. There are other irons that I’ve left sitting in the fire way too long; I hope to have news for you soon.

By the way, I just learned that the data surgeons were able to save all of my recordings from the studio drive. That’s great, but I’m still going to take those recordings apart track by track and then rebuild them.

Of course, now I will also be bringing along my own backup drive. Sometimes a nice crisis can a good thing, but let’s not tempt fate.