One of the brilliant things about recording and self-releasing music is that you learn so many new skills.
There’s the process of recording and production, obviously, then the funding and the promotional aspects.
Recording an album takes a lot of time and money. In the past we’ve used Crowdfunder, so you have to learn how to pitch the rewards. This time we have concentrated on pre-sales of the album to get some upfront funding to help to cover costs. We’ve done all of the recording of our vocals and instruments in our home studio. The production, mixing and mastering we leave to the professionals!
Artwork for the album has to be created – fortunately that’s a skill we already have from the day job.
When we had the crowdfunding we were able to employ professionals to help with the promotional aspects, PR, photography and video creation, but since then we’ve made our own way as much as possible to save costs.
You send out press releases to hundreds of magazines, radio stations and podcasts to get pre-release reviews and plays of the album.
As a hook for the press releases you release at least one single and video ahead of the album release. So we’ve learned how to make videos ourselves and use YouTube in various ways. They are not professional looking videos, we don’t claim to be film makers, but we have great fun making them and hope they are enjoyed.
For our Bungaroosh album release date, we are creating a video for the title track… using stop motion animation. We all know that a few seconds of Wallace and Gromit will take hours of work, so we are under no illusion that this will be a quick process. After a few false starts in trying different techniques, we have found a brilliant stop motion ap which you use on a mobile phone connected to a laptop. This means you get a good screen view of what you are working on (and what you’ve just done). If we had time, it would be great to create models and make them move, but our time working on this video is limited so we’ve simplified it as much as possible, using paper cut-outs and green screen. We grew up with Captain Pugwash and Paddington on TV, love the Talking Heads and Peter Gabriel (Sledgehammer) videos, so we are talking about low tech appearance. Which is just as well. It’s really tapping into our creativity. And patience. After hours of sourcing and cutting out images and about 4 days animation and editing so far, we have the intro and first verse filmed. But we’re getting quicker so, who knows, it might be ready by release date!
Look out for Bungaroosh on 19th April on our YouTube Channel (or look up Milton Hide).