Listed here are goals for participants in our crazy project.
Gabi
Regarding feedback: what I in particular want to improve on is mixing, mastering, and production. I am not really looking for square wave normalized pop mastering, I want dynamics, but I want it to sound CD ready and nothing does yet. So tips welcome. As far as technique, I generally know my failings already but gentle criticism encouraged.
Daniel James
I am mostly wanting to get back to recording my own music, and see this as a way to get back into the groove. I plan to experiment some in the direction of the techniques and style of music I will be making, but will probably have a bit of fun too. Would appreciate feedback on quality of sound and instrumentation.
Robert Turk
I have my music on SoundCloud (Rob Turk ATX/ ) and also on CDBABY (http://cdbaby.com/artist/RobertTurk) and then iTunes and YouTube as “Robert Turk”… I met Daniel working at Tango Health as a QA Engineer, but no longer work there. Now I’m the QA person for a company called SparkCognition’s DeepArmor team, working in cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. Music keeps me relatively sane, and my wife would say I make too much music probably. I really enjoy it when a groove comes together and something sounds good. With the covers project, I’m having fun trying to do different kinds of songs than I otherwise would be doing. Also it helps getting practice with engineering and mixing too. Mostly the feedback I’m interested in is how many of my CDs are you going to buy on iTunes (hey, I made $56 so far off the thousands I’ve spent on gear!!) or if you like it. I know some of the covers are not good, not polished, maybe not even listenable as my tracks were like 20+ minutes each. But if someone likes them, that’s great.
Andy Roach
My goal is to work more quickly and to be able to produce higher quality music with fewer takes. This is my first time ever trying to play and record covers. I’m hoping this exercise will give me some of the needed skills to create more interesting and accessible original music that also challenges me creatively. My guitar playing tends to be more folk and classical oriented, so I’m looking forward to injecting a little more groove into my music through this project.