The concept album - selection of songs

Some people asked me "Why did you not put all the songs on the concept album, and how did you choose which ones to put on?"

Fair question.

My advice to anybody thinking about doing a concept album is to aim for recording all the songs from the musical for the concept album, and if I had to do it again, I will most likely do exactly that.

So, why did I not record all the songs for The exile concept album?

The most important reason to keep in mind is the cost. It cost money to record a song. There are a total of 27 songs in The exile. I included only 16 songs on the concept album. To do all 27 songs would have more than doubled the cost.

The next thing that I had to consider is that you can fit a maximum of 70 minutes of music on a CD. More realistically, it is wise to plan around 60 minutes of music. A whole musical usually takes about 90 to 120 minutes of music. To do them all would require a double CD. Once again, that about doubles the cost of printing the CDs.

Once I have decided to do only a partial recording, the next decision I had to make was - which songs to include or exclude from the concept album.

I listed all the songs, and then first decided which songs MUST be included. i had to choose which songs are the best songs. This is very subjective to choose the best songs. Everybody has their own favourites.

Next, I decided which songs I should leave out. This decision was based purely on cost. (After all, if a song had to be left out because I thought it was not good enough, I better had to rewrite the song to improve it!). The cost factor was related to the number of singers on a song. Each vocalist charged a session fee for a song. Does not matter if that vocalist do only a single line on the whole song, and some songs needed lots of singers, each doing only a single verse or single line. Those were the songs I left out. Those "company numbers", where a whole chorus of singers do a sing-along can get very expensive. Unfortunately, as musicals go, these company numbers are sometimes also the most important ones.

I know there would have been better ways to do this. Next time (if there is a next time) I can probably get more songs out of a singer withinin a single session with a bit of better planning.

Finally, I tried to select songs which, when listening through the album, would tell at least a complete story. I did not wanted to leave out any songs which would cause the story as a whole to be confusing.

 

PDCA - So, how much have we done?

Remember our plan? Let's remind you. We had the problem with so much to do in so little time. Then we drew up the big plan.

 

First, let us remind you of the basic principles of planning: Plan, Do, Check, Action (PDCA). No plan (Plan) is worth anything if you do not do (Do) anything. After you have done something it is worth your while to check how you have done against the plan (Check), and then take corrective action (Action) if you are not achieving the plan.

 

We now got to the end of the month of March. So, what did we plan to do?

 

To summarize, we planned to have 3 songs written for Rock fable, of which we wanted 2 recorded with vocals. For The exile we planned to have 2 songs vocals recorded plus 2 songs back tracks recorded. For Wake not the dead we wanted 2 songs back tracks recorded. That is a total of 9 songs backtracks, of which wanted 4 vocals recorded.

 

What have we done?

 

For Rock fable we have 2 written, with backtracks recorded. no vocals.

 

For The exile we recorded 4 backtracks, no vocals.

 

For Wake not the dead we recorded 2 backtracks, no vocals.

 

Yup, that is a little bit behind schedule, is it not? Rock fable is behind with the writing of one song. For the rest, we achieved plan on the backtracks, but when it comes to vocals, we are sadly nowhere. That is 4 songs behind.

 

What is the problem? As we have discussed before, the problem is to find singers.

For Rock fable I have a singer, she is just not ready yet. I will see her tomorrow, maybe we can discuss it and work out some plan of action.

For The exile, I uploaded all the backtracks, with lyrics and scores to indaba, but no success yet. If we hired professional singers we probably would have been on schedule.

 

Now I will have to make some decisions. Throwing money at it might solve it, while, on the other hand, the problem may get solved if we work a little harder at it.

 

Fact is, let's admit, I have not worked hard enough at getting singers. Just uploading songs to indaba and hope for the best is just not going to cut it. My countermeasure must be to actively seek singers on indaba, network more, and invite more singers to my projects.

 

My strategy for April will be to invite at least one new singer to each project per week. Once I have built up some momentum, I can ask singers who participated in one song to contribute to the other projects too. This way I just might get at least something done.

If you are interested, or know somebody who would be, just contact me.

Hold thumbs and let's hope we make better progress next month.

And b.t.w. in the meanwhile I am spending much more time than what I planned for with Protea Stage Productions. That definitely contributed to my falling behind schedule, but the experience gained there is worth it, therefore I will continue spending time with them.

 

Finding Nemo to sing

Now that we kickstarted our project to record the rest of The exile somgs and got it back on track, we have to face the problems. The biggest problem in this project will be to find enough vocalists to sing our songs.

For The exile, the concept album recording, I chose specific vocalists based on some restrictions, e.g. I hade to make sure that I have one vocalist per character and that vocalist had to sing all the tracks where that character was required. I also choose the timber and the sound of each voice carefully to it the written vocal ranges and to ensure that the characters for Tyler and Melissa sound younger than the other characters.

For the rest of this project, I will not restrict myself in the same ways. The only requirements are that the vocalist must preferably be a a specific gender and the vocalist can do the required voice range. I will not try to match voices to characters. This approach may sound strange for a musical, but the idea is not to end up with a cast recording, but rather something that will sound like a compilation or concert recording.

There are not many sources for finding vocalists. First possible source is friends. That means I must have friends, or at least ones that can sing. Failing that, I can try to make friends. That is a long and hard process, and assumed that I frequent the places to find them and the ability to befriend them. Failing those avenues, I can hire local musicians. For the concept album recording, that was also not so easy. It is a slow process and they charge standard union session fees. Each vocalist wants to be paid a session fee for rehearsing and recording the song. Recording of chorus lines or backup vocals require the same, multiplied by at least 3 musicians. I will also have to be present at all sessions, requiring me to take leave from work. All that then need to happen in a studio that cranks up studio time. All and all, it works out to about R10,000 per song (about $1,00), plus my own time and cost of leave (yes, we buy our leave).

For the concept album recording I opted for Studio Pros. Each vocalist now charged $150, and that includes a lead vocal and one backing vocal track. That has brought the costs down to about $300, or R3,000 per song. Studio Pros includes all studio time and everything was mixed in my home studio. That is still pretty expensive going at about R30,000, or $3,000 fot the whole project, but for a final album that can be sold, that is a possibility we may wish to keep in mind. Another advantage of this route is the time saving. Turnaround times for Studio Pros are usually a few days. Even a large project like the concept album recording was finished within three weeks. And best of all, it needs very little time from my side to revord the vocals after I upload the files.

However, we first want to see if we can get away for free. There only a few places you can get people who are happy to sing for free, and most of them I have not found yet. The one place I have used before is Indaba music. I had a huge successful recording of Ghost town there. So, I will try Indaba again.

Progress is sure to be slower than what I planned for, as I will rely on volunteers only, but let's give it a chance and review our strategy as we go along.