busybee fluffy rambles

I had my release party for Transitions today. It went pretty well! Around a dozen folks attended in VRChat, and another half-dozen tuned in to the stream. Everyone who came enjoyed it and had nice things to say.

I hope that over time I can get more attendance to things, but the time of day for this particular show wasn’t great, as a lot of people wanted to come but had other obligations (such as, you know, sleep). The time I chose was based on trying to split the difference between a lot of peoples' needs. But this is why I also record my shows for posting on YouTube.

This show was also really big and took a lot of work to put on and I am so freaking tired. What I’d like to do is to just start doing more frequent, smaller shows, instead of trying to do these big all-out things on a monthly basis. I should experiment with different times on day on both Saturday and Sunday (which is consistently the least-bad day for everyone) and see if I can get regular attendance going. These shows could just be for funs instead of having to be a big rigmarole.

Right now I’m super tired and I having finished the album I can at least take a break from music production for a while.

I’m also a bit disappointed with the world of indie music and the marketing thereof. I have a whole rant brewing about the asinine way that music marketing works, but tl;dr¹: people only care about stuff that is coming out soon, nobody cares about stuff that’s already out. I hope I’m wrong about this. At least Transitions seems to have a bit more legs than my previous releases. (But my previous releases still exist! They’re still totally viable albums that you can buy and/or listen to!)

Anyway, I’ve submitted Transitions to a few different promo things but I’m not expecting a lot because they only care about stuff that’s upcoming or Brand New, and having been out for a few days it’s no longer Brand New. Which is just… dumb.

When I work on an album, I’m not just working on the songs in isolation, I’m also constantly playing the album as a whole to check things like song-to-song flow, dynamics, and listening for defects that I’d like to fix later before I release the album, since noticing and fixing little issues as I go is a lot easier than trying to do one big quality pass at the end.

With Transitions, I started out by recording Valley Highway, because writing that song became the impetus for recording the whole album, and I ended up using it as the prototype for the overall production style for the album.

Gosh it’s been a while since I’ve checked in! Here’s stuff that’s going on with me, music-wise.

Transitions

The album is almost done. I finally settled on some album art, all but one song is recorded, and I just have a bit of mixing work to do on half of the songs. Hopefully the Bandcamp release will be available soon, and the streaming release will be soon after!

Choir

As always, my choir is doing a couple of shows for Trans Day of Remembrance. Both will be at University Congregational UCC, with one on November 16, 2024 at 3 PM and one on November 20, 2024 at 7:30 PM.

These will also hopefully be streamed, for those who can’t make it in person, but I hope you will be able to attend in the flesh if possible.

VRChat show

I’ll also be performing at a charity show for Aga’s Toys for Tots on November 15 at 2:30 PM Pacific. I don’t know if this show will be streamed but it’ll definitely be accessible in VRChat. I’ll be providing more information as it comes to me.

My big fibromyalgia flare seems to have finally subsided, so I’m back to working on music, yay.

Right now I’m working on recording “Sunny Again” for Transitions. The Transitions version has ended up being somewhat more complicated than I was expecting, so this will take a while to get finished. But I really like the arrangement that I have, and I hope that I can pull it off.

Okay so, let me explain a thing about my two upcoming albums, and then a thought about a possible change of plans. I’d like to hear folks weigh in on these ideas.