So far, I've looked at the background, tracking and mixing of Another Road. Today, I'll look at the final stages of the production, resulting in the CD arriving through your letterbox.
After we'd signed off the mixes, we sent them over to our trusty mastering engineer Donal. I've spoken a few times about the mastering process and Donal, but it 's always nice to reiterate what a great job he does for us. This was an interesting album as it is so sparse in places, and goes occasionally into quite dense mixes - compare 'Love Affair' with 'Love is Gone' or 'Valentine'. The trick is to match the level of each of these tracks so that nothing jumps out and the vocal in particular is at the same apparent level on each track. Donal is of course very good at this, and as I've said before it helps to know that there's someone else just ensuring that the album has the overall feel of cohesion. While we could do this ourselves, we get so close to the tracks it can be hard to stand back and take an objective view.
During the mixing process Jessica and Mary had worked very hard creating the artwork and layout for the CD, as well as putting together the lyrics and credits for the booklet.
Long time fans will know that we have slowly and gradually made the move from jewel cases to digipacks, and now finally to cardboard sleeves for the CDs. We (and a lot of our dear supporters) were concerned about the amount of plastic that was created in the production of a CD. The weight of the cardboard sleeve is also a factor for us, as it's cheaper to send, and has a smaller CO2 footprint in distribution. You can imagine that our product is has to be shipped from our guy (Phil at MTS in Cardiff) to us. Then we send it out to you. So each CD racks up the miles!
The cardboard sleeves also mean that the boxes they come in take up much less space than jewel case CDs, which helps to keep our costs down.
Our packaging that we use to despatch small orders (1-3 cardboard CDs) are also entirely plastic-free and are recyclable.
These are only small steps, but we do try to limit the environmental impact - and that's not just because of the subject matter of 'Another Road'!
You may have noticed as well that we held back on digitally distributing the album. We thought for a long time about whether we were going to use the streaming platforms (you know the ones we mean), because their business model is so poor and harsh on musicians and labels. You'll have seen all the discussions recently about Peter Frampton having 55 MILLION streams on legitimate sites and only earning $1700 from it. Even if you take into account the label taking a large cut, it's still a ridiculously small sum. So we thought long and hard about whether we wanted to have Another Road available on such sites. It's a double edged sword, because sadly it is a great place to be found, and so many people search for new music on these platforms.
I think we gave in after the album started to appear on pirate sites. We tried a few outlets but have stuck with our digital distributors, State 51. So you can now find Another Road at all the usual suspects.
So apart from picking and packing your orders, that's the not-very-brief tale of my involvement on Another Road. It wasn't a long and hard process, and there was no blood, sweat or tears... it was just a lot of fun working on some very beautiful songs. I hope you've enjoyed my thoughts, but most of all I hope you enjoy listening to the album as much as I enjoyed my bit of making it!
Christian Thomas sits in a darkened room and does techie stuff. He engineers, mixes and provides technical support to Mary and Jessica.
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