Just bringing up a blast from the past – Artemis’ ‘Undone’, our very first release. This was a major labor of love. David Earl, our former co-producer, had been working with Artemis on her debut EP ‘Treasure’ and had played me a few tracks. After hearing it, I suggested to Dave that we get her in to lay down some vocals on a track or two that Dave and I had been working on. After the first session, it was pretty much all over – Artemis’ vocals, songwriting and message were so strong that we just HAD to make that the focal point. Dave and I dropped what we were doing and dived right into writing tracks with Artemis – and ‘Undone’ was the fruition. A bit rough around the edges, yes – we were working entirely in our home studio at that point (and continue to do so to this day..) – but the energy and passion, we think, were all there.
This release went on to garner Keyboard magazines ‘Artist of the Month’ and numerous other praises from the likes of Roy Elkins (founder of Broadjam) and Matt Gallagher of Electronic Musician (who would later do a feature on the creation of ‘Gravity’ in the May ‘05 issue).
The whole ‘home studio’ revolution was just getting on a roll when ‘Undone’ came out and the process of creating it brought to us a whole world of other indie artists who were in the same boat – unwilling to get suckered into a major label deal that may get you nowhere, yet still unsure about how best to promote yourselves and get the attention necessary to even make a modicum of income from your music. It’s not easy, by any stretch – between the thousands of dollars in equipment, touring costs, money to pay for cd’s, flyers, posters and website hosting and design, you’re already several thousand in the hole before the cd is even out there. We do it because we love it – the money is secondary to everything, but it sure helps to keep things rolling when you’ve got at least a little to work with. Lucky for us, there were resources popping up left and right – some had the best interests of the artists in mind, others not so much. CD Baby was one that really stood out – they made it extremely easy to get your music out there and did it on very fair terms. Of course you still (as an artist) had to promote yourselves and get people to the CD Baby site, but not having to handle credit card transactions or shipping was a godsend.
Anyways – back to ‘Undone’. I mentioned before that we thought it a bit ‘rough’ at it’s completion – well, it’s ‘completion’ was a task in itself. There is this phenomena in the music world of endlessly tweaking your songs – the mix, the instrumentation, etc. – to the point that you never actually finish anything. ‘Undone’ almost fell prey to that. It came to a point where we just had to cut it off – we had learned so much during the recording and mixing that we just KNEW it could be made better. To do so would take more time – and it had been in the works for over a year at that point. So we decided it was best to get it out there and start on the next one, where we’d be able to do all the things we had wanted to do with ‘Undone’.
We often are asked about what was used to create ‘Undone’ – well, here it is (from what I can recall):
Computer/Software: G4 800 and 500 running Logic (6.x? back when it was owned by Emagic and not Apple) and plug-ins from Native Instruments, Waves and Camel Audio (amongst others). Camelphat was one of my favorite plug-ins at the time (and still is) and you can hear it on the drums in ‘Beside U’. Reason 2.x was also in there a lot – pretty much every song had at least one Reason bit in it.
Hardware: I’m forgetting the name of the interfaces we were using, Sonic-something or other. Basically 8 channel A/D/A interfaces with ADAT optical outputs going to cards in the computer. The companies that made the cards and the interfaces are both defunct now.
Synths/Effects: Roland SH-101 (the bassline in the title song ‘Undone’), Ensoniq EPS-16+, Roland RE-501 space echo and other misc. musical toys.
Mics: Various – AKG 414, Shure SM-58 and several others.
Which reminds me – I hear an awful lot of people complain these days about how they ‘can’t work’ with (insert name of software here) because it doesn’t have xxx feature. This is SUCH hogwash – even the simplest, cheapest software has FAR more capability than a anyone dreamed of even 10 years ago. Complaints like these are just excuses for either lack of initiative, ability or talent. If you can’t write a great song with something as ‘low-end’ as Reason, you just can’t write a great song, period. In other words – quit complaining and get to work!
I’ve probably rambled on long enough about this one. It’s still our ‘baby’ and we hope you love it as much as we do.
Cheers!
Keith
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You can purchase ‘Undone’ on the following sites:
Magnatune • Cyberset • CD Baby • iTunes • Amazon • eMusic • RTFM
