Catching up... Ready to release the Ciaccona April 30th!

Wow, I knew I was behind on posts, but...oops!... it's APRIL!!! 

Somehow, pandemic time either feels excruciatingly slow, or it whips by... !!

But I've gotten a LOT done since my last post, and I'm very pleased that my recordings of the complete Bach Partita No. 2 and the Ysaye Ballade are completed and I'm thrilled!

The Ciaccona from the Partita has been approved by CDBaby, my digital distributor, and it's being sent to all of the digital platforms out there (Spotify, iTunes, Pandora, YouTube, etc). It will be released April 30th!!

Here's a quick timeline filling in the gap:

•  Finished building the recording studio at the end of the summer and hired my producer, the fabulous 5-time Grammy award-winning producer Elaine Martone, and master engineer Daniel Shores. I was SO glad I hired Elaine - we worked closely together in the sessions. She guided me and served as a second (and better!) pair of objective ears, warmly suggesting repeats and do-overs in a way that was encouraging and trust-inspiring. I thoroughly enjoyed those sessions, which were grueling in the best way, and incredibly inspiring, creatively. We had so much fun!!

• Getting everything set up before recording, so that Elaine could run the session with me remotely from Cleveland was challenging, but we managed to get everything to work with Dan's expert help (Dan was in Virginia). We used a combination of zoom (for video conversation) and the AudioMovers app (so Elaine could hear my real sound - enhanced a bit for ease of listening - in real time, with minimal latency, or time lag). It took a lot of tweaking and learning how to do this, but we did it!
  
  
• My amazing engineer consultant in Nashville, Fett, helped me learn the Logic ProX recording software so that I could run the actual recording technology myself in the session. That was pretty challenging, but I managed to make it as simple as possible, so that I could really concentrate on the music-making and just click a few buttons in between takes to do the actual recording. 
  
  
• The Ciaccona is a monumental piece (15 minutes), and it took nearly four hours to record. Because the Ysaye is an even more technically demanding piece, I realized that I could PRE-record much of it before getting together with Elaine for that one, to save time and make it easier on me. This is an INCREDIBLY advantage to being able to record in my own studio. I can do it whenever I want, and make as many takes as needed, free of pressure. It worked out beautifully to have most of the Ysaye already recorded, so that I only had to finish up a few parts with Elaine, listen to the whole thing with her super-ears and recommendations, and then patch up some sections here and there with her help.
  
  
• Once each piece was completed, I sent the files off to Dan for editing. I learned the hard way that there are some glitches with Logic ProX and how it names files... so that it got extremely complicated trying to match up the correct files with our notes and the files Dan had. I shed some tears at one point when it all seemed TOO confusing and too much to handle... but I finally got everything sorted out on my end, and Dan figured out the rest on his end.
  
  
• A few rounds of edits, checking, re-recording some bits... and we were done! 
  
  
• Next, Dan re-recorded  the completed versions in his beautiful church-recording-studio in Virginia, so that we could get the real ambient sound from that gorgeous space. A few more tweaks listening together - all three of us together, remotely - and then Dan mastered it...  and ... VOILA!!! My first professional solo recordings DONE!!! Everything was completed by the end of January.
  
  
• In February, I started looking into how to release the recordings. I did a bunch of research and talked to some people with some experience in today's digital recording world. I finally decided to release one piece at a time, starting with the Ciaccona, now slated for public release on digital streaming platforms on April 30th. Doing it this way - releasing one piece every 6-8 weeks - will extend the exposure I get for these recordings, and it will also give me more time to record a couple more pieces to complete the album, which I plan to release sometime in the summer or fall of 2021.
  
  
• I'm writing this on April 4th, Easter, the same day I just received the first round of edits of the Enescu Sarabande for solo violin that I recorded on my own a few weeks ago (no producer this time - I can do it myself now - wow! :) 
  Fett from Nashville is my engineer this time around and I'm really delighted to be working with him!
  
  
• Next steps: listen to the edits, suggest a few changes and perhaps re-record a few notes, chat with Fett this week, and soon I'll have another single ready to be released! But the Ysaye is next in line, first.
  
  
• I'm also practicing a couple more pieces for future recordings. I'm hoping to record the Kreisler Recitativo and Scherzo-Caprice sometime in the next couple months. That piece will complete the album content. 
  
  
• I am loving this process!! Although it's daunting to look at the digital world of distribution and realize that it would be a full-time job to promote my music, and I just don't have that kind of time. So I'll have to be content with getting the word out there the best I can. Mainly, I'm just incredibly thrilled to have gotten myself to this point. What an amazing pandemic project for my 50th birthday!!
  
  
• I really look forward to sharing the Ciaccona with you in a few weeks!!!!