My latest tasks have been

• updating my website(s)

  Check it out nilsmusic.com got a total make-over, so did nilsmusicproductions.com. There is still more work to do , but they have come a long way over the last 2 weeks. My website has to represent my image and look. That’s why I always like to give it a facelift , when I have a new album out and new photos available.

• I have a show coming up in 2 weeks, so I also started on the first live arrangements for the new songs.

What works on a album does not always work live and vice versa. So I came up with a different arrangement for three of my songs. I will add the new material in stages to my show.  Not only will I have to practice my new melodies and arrangements, so does my band. And with that I had to write out charts for the musicians. I also edited together a mock recording of the live version, by cutting up my tracks and rearranging them, take the bass out here, bring the chorus up to the front of the song, add a break down, etc. I am a big believer of getting off the paper ( charts) as soon as possible, and it helps when I can offer my band recordings of the live version to play in their cars while they are driving, to get the music and the arrangements into their heads.

• I made backing tracks for the live versions

I like to run additional sounds from my laptop for certain songs in my live show. Those tracks are usually, string parts, rhythm guitar parts and maybe some additional synth lines and such. I am only working with one keyboard player live, so that helps to enrich the arrangements. I have a pretty slick system going, where I can control the length of certain sections on my laptop with a foot switch, so we are not stuck playing an arrangement with solos etc a certain pre-determined length. We keep it dynamic and open, solos and vamps are open till cue. As a further benefit I also have the bass, drums and keys in that laptop and they can be un-muted if needed. I.e. in case a bass player shows up late for rehearsal or I need to play a solo track date. I use Logic Pro X for that and I think I might do a separate educational video on that subject in the near future for my YouTube channel.

• I created jam tracks with lead sheets for every song on the album

The jam tracks have been popular with my guitar player fans. I sell them as downloads from my web store.  They are basically the songs with my guitar taken off. Some guys use them to perform with as backing tracks or just for fun to jam at home. All jam tracks do have an ending. I planned ahead in that when I recorded my album I recorded every song with an ending, even the ones I know I would fade on the album. But I did have to do a separate mix for that ( not from scratch, just one without a fade) and I had to write chord charts / lead sheets for all the songs.

• The publicist is hired

He had me do an epk ( electronic press kit)  page, specifically for press with album notes , bio , music and such that he can distribute to his contacts. we hired a review to write a new bio and review of my album for press distribution

•  I made radio edits and radio single artwork for the single

Radio does not like to play songs that exceed 4 minutes ideally one likes to keep the length of radio singles between 3:15 and 3:50. Unfortunately the song that the label selected as a single (Straight Down The Line) came in at 4:20. So I had to make an edit to shorten it. Sometimes this is easy sometimes this can be pretty tricky. This was somewhat of a challenge, but we got it done. The radio promoter we use does still believe in sending out physical copies to radio stations. So the label will press up a limited series of singles with the radio edit and the album version ion it and distribute it to the radio station program directors. These CDs also need artwork, which had to be created. They are off spins of the album art, but it still has to be done.

• I have several plans at hand for music videos

The original place I wanted to shoot at wanted too much money. 3 grand for the rental of the facility plus liability insurance. So I am coming up with alternatives. I have friends who have an empty pool. That might be a cool place to shoot a video in. I also could rent a rehearsal stage and film there. Then I have a friend who own s a drone and I was scouting locations for an out door shoot. The idea is to just get as much cool footage as I can and edit the video(s) myself. I have gotten pretty good with final cut pro.

As you can tell there are plenty of important steps to be taken once the CD is finished. This is certainly not a complete list and it will vary from artist to artist, depending on your situation. But I hope this series gave you a bit of an overview and insight about what is required from an artist, whether he/she may be independent or signed to a label.

Here is a list of resources I had mentioned in this series.

Kim Giles –   independent arts services  www.independentartistservices.com

Ron Boustead – Resolution Mastering  www.resolutionmastering.com

Jürgen Reisch  – Photographer       www.jurgenreisch.com

Copyrights –  library of congress website. www.copyright.gov/registration/

Help with production and writing – that’s me :o)    www.nilsmusicproductions.com

But here is what I have accomplished so far:

The photo shoot and the album artwork are done. The CDs are being manufactured.

We had a great time at Jürgen’s studio.

Check out this video of the photo session

I’m kind of excited about it. I think it looks great, hope you agree

I took care of the copyright registrations. That is done at the library of congress website. https://www.copyright.gov/registration/

You can copyright your whole album as a body of work for $55, which is cheaper than doing each song individually. I yet have to register the songs with ASCAP, but I still got time with that, since we are not sending a single to radio yet.

I started with writing charts and thinking about live arrangements. I have a show coming up in a few weeks and I want to add a few of the new songs into the repertoire. At the same time I am creating backing tracks for solo track dates, production tracks (mostly strings, rhythm guitars and sound f/x) for band gigs, which I run from my lap top computer. I also convert the backing tracks into jam tracks, which I am selling on my website along with lead sheets. These backing tracks need to have endings. Thinking ahead I recorded my songs with endings in the studio, even though most songs on the album have a fade out ending. This allowed me to easily make an alternative mix with an ending. This whole process takes a week or more. I just commit to do one or two a day until I’m done.

I am doing pretty well selling backing tracks on my website. Check out https://www.nilsguitar.com/jam-tracks/.  I am also considering creating tablature note by note transcriptions and importing them into a program like guitar pro 7 for students. This program allows them to isolate passages, slow them down and practice along with a pretty decent synthesized version of my guitar .

Or I just might create an instructional video for my YouTube channel, to show some of the tricks and fingerings I used in my solos and melodies.

All this I call secondary content and will ultimately help me to promote the new CD.

Still in the planning stages are the website update, the video shoot, editing promo videos from behind the scene footage I collected. I also researched some publicists, who could help me with my press releases and publicity. The social media campaign will slowly ramp up over the next weeks, especially once I have some video material.

As you can see this is easily a full time job. It can be overwhelming. There is a large variety of tasks to be done. I handle it by making a to do list, organizing it into different categories and checking off items bit by bit.

I will let you know in my next blog how my progress is moving along. Until then

Cheers, NILS

I made a list of all the things I want to have in place by release date 3 months from now.

• Photo shoot
• CD cover and booklet design, credits
• Live arrangements / backing tracks
• Copyright and performing rights registration of new songs
• Music Video shoot
• Promo videos
• Create secondary product(s)
• Setup social media campaign
• Press releases
• Update website

I will address these points one by one in the following weeks in my blog series.

Depending on your situation there might be additional items you need to get together or pay attention to. If you are fully independent you will have to press CDs and find distribution, and design a marketing, advertising and radio campaign. If you don’t have a press kit yet, then you better get on it. If this all sounds overwhelming you might benefit from the expertise of an expert like Kim Giles of Independent Artist Services. http://www.independentartistservices.com

Kim has been working with many independent artist to give them guidance and direction to get their careers going. And she is an expert in helping them plan an independent CD release and marketing campaign. Her fees are reasonable and are well worth the investment, since she also can obtain discounts for her clients for some of the services needed.

For myself, first on my list is a photo shoot. I will need new photos for the album cover, for my website, for press photos and for an internet campaign. I want to go with my friend Jürgen Reisch (www.jurgenreisch.com)   to make that happen. Jürgen is an outstanding photographer. He has a photo studio in Hollywood where he does a lot of fashion photography  but also has some quite impressive credits for album covers, like Prince, Earth Wind and Fire and Nils ( Pacific Coast Highway and Ready to Play)        :o)          

Once I have the photos, we will have to get on the design of the album cover and booklet next.

For the cover I want a photo that will stand out through color and design. That photo then will be worked over, manipulated, cropped and  played out with album title and artist name. This is the most important part of the process , because the cover is the calling card of the CD. I always try to imagine what my CD will look like in a rack amidst various other CDs. If it draws my eye to it, it’s a great cover. I am also a good idea to create a unified look from web site to album cover to fb page etc. It’s part of a branding strategy and will help to re-enforce the image.

For the booklet I already assembled the album credits and wrote my Thank You-s. I always create a file with production notes, while I am working on a CD. That file includes budget, song titles, Publishing info, a to-do-lists and also the players that played on each track. A album production can easily take a year or even longer and sometimes it is be hard to remember who played on which song, if you use different musicians. Designing the layout for the booklet, the back cover and the CD face can be a very creative and fun process. I enjoy it, but I’m not always the best suited for the job. I am lucky to have help from the record label, when my graphic design skills just don’t cut it.

All this can take a couple weeks or more to get finished, and then there is the time it takes to print the booklet and art work, so don’t underestimate how long this can take.

In my next blog I will address further points on my list, so stay tuned. And if you haven’t joined my mailing list. Please do so and be part of the fan club. It comes with various perks, gifts and discounts. you can join at www.nilsguitar.com

Once a record is mixed it still needs to be mastered.

There seems to be a lot of confusion on that process and it’s necessity, so let me clarify a few points.

For the purpose of this article I am limiting my expertise to CD mastering. Mastering for Vinyl is a whole other ball game and definitely needs some specialized equipment and understanding.

Mastering is the final step in the recording process. The main goal of mastering is to prepare your CD project for replication and to balance your tracks that they will sound great on any system.

This often includes :

• making sure all songs are in the right order
• making fine EQ adjustments, so that each song has a balanced sonic signature
• enhancing the stereo image, if necessary
• carefully adding some compression, to obtain the same perceived volume level
• ensuring that all songs have a similar sonic signature ( balance between bass, miss and highs)
• making sure that the spacing between the songs feels just right
• making sure that the fade outs are clean
• adding ISRC codes (which will let your songs being tracked by SoundExchange and such to collect performance royalties)

Even though there are an abundance of tools and plug-ins for mastering available, such as Izotope’s Ozone and several others, I highly recommend letting somebody else master your project.  In today’s world most projects are recorded and mixed either in a home environment, or at different studios by different engineers.

For one, I would never master a project in the same room and on the same speakers where it is mixed.

Mastering facilities have a finely tuned room with highly accurate speakers and amplifiers. Your home studio and even some professional facilities have their own characteristic sound. Some rooms (especially home studios) will have some shortcomings , so do have cars and living rooms in which you might double check your mixes. So if it sounds good at home is not a necessarily guarantee for it sounding good on other mediums.  A neutral listening environment and a good mastering engineer will ensure, that your CD sounds good wherever it’s played back.

For your CD to sound like a coherent project, the mixes need to have a similar sonic signature. If you get tracks mixed by different engineers in a variety of places, you will definitely have big differences within your mixes. Even though each mix might sound great in itself, you will like likely encounter that one track might be much louder, more bass heavy or has more treble than the other. The lead instrument, or voice might be louder on one track than another and mastering is the art of making all these mixes sound like they belong on the same album.

I am still a believer in albums and I cherish the experience of listening to a whole album in sequence, as opposed to downloading the one or other track. As an artist I want to take the listener on a musical journey. I spend a considerable amount of time figuring out the right order of my songs, not unlike putting a setlist together for a live show. There a subtleties I learned over the years that have quite an impact on the listening experience, such as spacing between tracks and the speed of fades. The generic 2 sec pause does not always sound right.

Finally if you want to make some money from your recording through airplay, you will need to have ISRC codes embedded into the files. These codes ensure that companies like SoundExchange, which collect monies for the artist and the master owner, properly track your song.

Mastering engineers are experts with a specialized skill set and equipment. But they are not magicians. So the old “we fix it in the mix” (to dismiss problems in the recording process) is just as wrong as “we fix it in mastering” to dismiss problems in your mixes. Try to get your mixes to sound as good as you can before you send them to mastering. And don’t over-compress them; leave the mastering engineer some room to work in.

And don’t get cheap on this process. I learned the hard way, when I tried to safe some money on mastering and going to a cheap place, just to find out that the final result was horrible. A bad mastering job can actually destroy your project. I went and borrowed some money to have it done properly and was rewarded with a great sounding album.

There are many great mastering places out there. If I may recommend someone, then it is Ron Boustead at resolution mastering. He mastered my last 5 albums and he is excellent and reasonable. Your music can be uploaded digitally and can be delivered digitally by him directly to the printing facility. So even if you are not local, you should check out his services. Here is a link to his site. RESOLUTIONMASTERING.COM

Until next time this is Nils signing off

PS:  For the last few years I have been helping new and established artists by writing and creating tracks and getting their music presentable for radio and commercial distribution. For those of you you need some great material and want some songs recorded, check out my site nilsmusicproductions.com

On Saturday, the rehearsal for my concert was rough. I had suffered an upset stomach the evening before, and I was very shaky and could hardly stand up during rehearsal. Fortunately the band knew their stuff and we got through it just fine. I just went to bed afterwards to rest. I had to be fit for the show on Sunday. I was the last act to close down the festival and wanted to make sure that everybody stayed to the end and danced. Paul Taylor had joined me on “Pacific Coast Highway” at the All-Star concert. So I asked him to sit in on a couple of tunes on my show, to give my set another dimension, which he did. The concert went very well, the sound was good, the band felt solid and the audience was totally into it.
The whole room turned into a party and we had the best of times. I sold every last piece of merchandise I was able to bring, which is always a good indicator, that I reached the audience’s hearts.

The evening after the last show, Christian invited all the musicians and their partners to a wonderful dinner at this rustic old restaurant. The food was fantastic and the atmosphere had something of a family gathering. It summed up the whole experience in a perfect way. It felt we all got a bit closer to our fellow musicians.We shared stories and wine, with Nate (East), Joey Summerville, Gerald Albright, Steve Cole, Gail Johnson, Paul Taylor and Sandy Shore and Donna from smootjazz.com

Now I’m sitting in the lobby, waiting for our shuttle back to the airport.
After a long series of extended goodbyes, we leaving this beautiful place wishing we could stay longer. We took it all in, the music, the location, the beautiful hotel, but it seemed it went by just too fast.

When we arrived at the hotel it was first class all the way. There was a welcome banquet, and the hotel and staff are just wonderful. Christian Bößner, who organizes these Festivals, really got this one right. I am happy to see that his hard work is paying of. It seems to get better every time I come back.

The next morning we had a rehearsal for the All-Star concert. Everybody got to pick a tune, something simple enough for everybody to learn quickly. Most artists were fighting their jet lag. I was glad that I had a full week in Europe already and was used to this time zone.
The All-Star concert took place in the most spectacular setting. An unfinished church offered the backdrop to an open-air venue with its majestic walls.

The concert was a total blast, we don’t always get the opportunity to jam with each other, so for the artists and the audience this was a special treat. Each night there are two concerts and then an after party. Richard Edwards is really a superb DJ and had the crowd going all night. When I left at 3am it was still in full swing.
I heard it went on until 5 am.

Tonight I have to go to bed just a bit earlier, because I have rehearsals for my show on Sunday in the morning. The festival provides the backing band for each artist. I had played with some of the musicians before in previous years at festivals in Augsburg and Biberwehr. They are very capable players and I hope we can take the show even further now, that they are familiar with my groove.

I will let you know how it went. Til then……

Since the Amsterdam show was cancelled, due to the illness of the promoter, I flew directly to Munich the next day. Here I have a few days off, before I fly on to Mallorca for the Jazz Festival. I also noticed a booking mistake I made. I booked the first leg of my return to LA, (from Munich to London) for 10 pm flight instead of 10am. That would mean I would miss my connection to LA. And since it was a cheap flight booked through fly.com, I could not change it nor get a refund. I had to buy a new ticket and throw the other one away. What happened that everything got so stringent with the airlines? I find it outrageous. The lesson here is, to better book through the airline’s site, I would have gotten at least a partial refund. It makes me appreciate and miss Southwest Airlines even more. No fees for changing a booking. I think when I’m back in the States I should apply for becoming a spokesperson for them :o)

In Munich I like to visit my parents and yesterday I helped my Dad with the yard work. This morning Bambi stopped by to inspect my work, approved and ran off into the woods. My parent’s home boarders to a national forest.

I will take a few days off and write more from Mallorca
until then…..

Inside the Ellington Hotel

the Roots bar from my hotel room window

I woke up this morning just in time for breakfast. I counteracted my hangover with a couple of cappuccinos, before carefully adding some OJ, a nice omelet and some fruit and yogurt. The Ellington has a fantastic breakfast buffet. Everything you could ask for, so I wasn’t going to miss that. Fortunately I had a day off.
Later I visited JazzRadio Berlin, which had brought me to Berlin to present me in concert and we talked about a couple of logistics for ​t​he show tomorrow. Then I went back to my room and restrung my guitar and practiced a bit, putting the set list together and just relaxed. This evening I met up with my buddy Carsten, who played bass on a couple of my songs. So I gave him a copy of the new CD “Alley Cat”. We had a nice dinner and I got back before midnight. After all, tomorrow is show time…..

read part 9

Knodd

Mittens likes watching TV

Then I installed an app called Viber, which allows to call over Wi-Fi. So while in the hotel on a Wi-Fi network, I could talk to my wife for two hours without occurring any call charges, once she had installed the same app on her phone.

As I am trying to upload this to my blog, I was kicked out of my Wi-Fi from the hotel. I had purchased the option for 72 hrs and I think my time just ran out. I’ll try to connect later. Hopefully one day we will have ever present internet access and look back at these primitive times thinking how ridiculous and unnecessary complicated things were. Just like we look back now at a time before we had cell phones.

read on to part 7