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Going up market
I’m going up market, I’ll be back soon, while I’m there hopefully I’ll sell my new records.
Here’s what I’ve just tweeted, as tweeting seems to be the way to influence the world these days:
It’s finally finished. The album ‘Electric Ian’ will be released on August Bank Holiday (27th) and it’s a bit of a rush release, I should ideally have given it a bit longer, but the first single ‘Summer Blue Fade’ is time-dependent (or at least, has a seasonal dependency), as it conjures up the impression of those impossibly complex rich and deep blue faded graduated skies of late summer evenings. (It’s also about something a lot more than that, more to be revealed later).
The album ‘Electric Ian’ is a concept album, consisting of twelve tracks (each around just over 3 minutes, 40 mins total for the album). The concept is kind of given away in the album title. Each of the songs has a specific topic but I’m not going to divulge what each song is about yet – maybe one day. In the meantime, the lyrics are fairly abstract and apply to whatever the listener wants it to fit to.
On a production note, by far the biggest time was spent on the vocals, including delays waiting for this and that to happen, plans falling through, contingencies into play, etc. I sang the lead vocals and in the end was quite satisfied with how I sang it, in the end just singing parts into the Sennheiser E835 -> Art Tube MP -> Tascam A100 audio interface -> Mac Mini / LPX even though other family members were around in the house and ignoring the fact that the neighbours must be able to hear it too.
The music (when you get to hear it, not release yet, I’ll see if I can find a way to preview it for you) was actually entirely composed and created on Gadget on my iPhone. Everything that is not vocals was done on Gadget. Everything that isn’t Gadget was finished for production in LPX on the Mac. I found that the best way, once it was on the Mac, no round-tripping back to iOS.
Well, as I’ve intimated in the tweets I inserted up there, I’m now in the marketing stage of the album and the single, so you’ll hear a fair amount of me pushing this wherever I go (if you follow me on twitter and other places (I’m not a facebook user)) but here I’ll try not to sell it as much. I’ll still talk about it a lot, but from the production and technical aspects, as well as the artistic stuff. As the release comes nearer I might even put some actual links in for the general public to follow, who knows, perhaps making things easier to buy a product is how this sort of thing should work.
Comments
Great @u0421793 ! Ian, how long did it take to put this project together? Looking forward to hearing some sampling of your work. Best of luck with the release.
@u0421793 congrats and good luck with the release!
Thanks, both. It started just about the time I got my first iPhone (an iPhone 8+) last December, but I count it as starting since the new year really. All the music was finished on 12 tracks around May. Lyrics were fitted to melodies by end of June. Lead vocal melodies were composed before even the first words were written, so they had to fit exactly that. The lead vocal melodies were composed in Gadget by having a Bilbao set of samples of me singing ‘baa’ through the scales, and I’d just position the notes where I thought I could comfortably sing within the key of the song. I took care not to make the lyrics too complex to remember, or too dense to breath during, and the Bilbao ‘baa’ sample set really helped considerably in that respect. There was a time when I knew the songs as having a melody line of just ‘baa ba ba, ba ba ba baaah’ while I’d also have written lyrics that fitted the meter precisely, yet I’d never actually heard those lyrics in that particular tune. It took until late June to have an initial vocal representation of the tunes, so that I could actually learn them.
Addendum: however, the concept and purpose of this concept album and the title Electric Ian was thought of in late 2014. The single Summer Blue Fade, also, was conceived in intent and requirement around that time (and then to have nothing done about it year after year thereafter until this year).
Baa ba ba baa was good enough for the velvets:
Your marketing has totally worked on me. I will be contacting you soon about an estimate for installing a new lamp fixture above my garage door.
Solar, or battery?
I hope it has your sense of humor. And, dude, replace your forum picture with this one. I thought you were... Well, let us say not as cool looking.
It’s actually not humorous rather than abstract and poetic. It’s a concept album so each track on there is about a topic under the umbrella indicated by the album title, and I’ve studiously ensured I didn’t mention any words that directly give away each topic of the song. This made them very distilled and with the restriction of having to fit a recently prescribed melody and meter, it all turned to poemry. I’ll have to get the lyrics up online somewhere (now that I can classify them as published, properly). I did upload the lyrics as I uploaded the song files, so they should appear in iTunes and other places that do lyrics.
I’ll do the forum picture, good idea.
@u0421793
Congratulations. Looking forward to listening.
@u0421793 Mister Dude, you ARE Pep Guardiola and I claim my five pesetas...
Best wishes for your new album Ian!
Brilliant title, ELECTRICIAN, (as opposed to “u0421793”, which is almost painfully unmemorable!)
So, A+, and D- for names.
Look forward to hearing the music!
Oh well that’s interesting. The album is in Amazon already, where you can preview it (but not buy it or stream it yet until the release).
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07GNDH49N/ref=sr_1_1?s=dmusic&ie=UTF8&qid=1534795963&sr=1-1-mp3-albums-bar-strip-0&keywords=Ian+K+Tindale
Well, today’s release day, and lo and behold, it’s up there everywhere (except on Spotify for some reason, but nobody’s ever heard of them).
Here it is on YouTube, if you’re interested in a free listen (the whole album, as a playlist):
Wondered about making a concept album cleverly using my name in the title but realized "A Ryan" might not go over as well...
Congrats on the release!
Cheers. I’m taking a “long tail“ approach to the marketing – I’ll tell people about it long afterwards. The whole concept of a release date is a bit of a falsity these days anyway, it’s not like I’ve got a room full of the streams that I have to get rid of, and press up more overnight to meet demand. The peak sales upon release are likely to be eclipsed by the long tail over time with any digital product, so why not just skip the initial peak and not bother with a ‘release’.
Ian, I want to listen to your music. I tried twice, it said video not available. Definitely an arch marketing twist!
On Apple Music the album appears to be empty. I can find the songs under your name though.
It only turned up on Spotify late last night, and not under my Spotify for Artists app. I think these things take too much time to sort out.
Hear Your album often on spotify - I like it.
Your scanning voice - in german there is the word „skandieren“, hope that‘s no translation failure - reminds me on Talking Heads or New Order.
Well done.
Thank you so much, that really means a maximum amount to me at this time. Thanks, I appreciate it. Also, spread it around – same with anything you like, tell everyone!
I shall, just for you, reveal the track topics. There’s twelve tracks, the album is called Electric Ian because it is a concept album, and the concept is that of electrical phenomena (and more specifically, electrical charge). I’m inwardly quite concerned that people study all their lives and am very concerned that people are not attracted to science and STEM subjects enough (they all seem to want to study business, probably because they think that’s where money is). I wanted to use the concepts of electrical phenomena as the substrate for the songs, but without actually referring directly to anything in the topic at all.
The most fun for me was writing the lyrics to “Mere Unfound”, about Kirlian photography, and how for quite a long time in the 70s the phenomena convinced a lot of people that there was something supernatural going on with it, whereas it transpired that it was nothing special after all and all the attributed effects were normal physical effects, coupled with the highly variable penetration of charge through the object into the layers of colour emulsion in photographic paper. The whole thing about recording an ‘aura’ was totally unfounded.
(The least fun was had on the following track “Scrape Tension”, which I spent more time on than any of the others, revising it and revising it, coming to despise it, and nearly abandoned it).
Sincerely, thanks, and may your path ahead be clear and hindrance removed.
I really dig the music on this, deff would jam to the instrumentals! I'm not a fan of the singing to be honest, kinda made me skim thru looking for non singing parts but deff great production and mastering
Slow Perturb is my favorite.
Obviously that speaks to me as old(er) Dipl.Ing. (graduated engineer) in electrotechnic.
Your voice reminds me a bit of Pete Shelley or Howard Devoto’s to my non-Brit ears. I could imagine some layered vocal harmonies in places - maybe for a subsequent mix. Nice work!
Thank you very much, I’m extremely grateful. One of the things that delayed the release quite a bit was looking for backing singers. I even asked around at a Jamaican independence celebration (my wife’s Jamaican and her daughters and us all go to the celebration in central London each year) to find potential backing singers who won’t cost a fortune. Didn’t come through in the end, so I generally used my own guide tracks in the chorus, hardly so you could hear it through (I faintly mixed in the the original baa-baa-baa guide vocals I did in Bilbao in Gadget to get the vocal melody in the first place).
Er, yes, I think I can hear the resemblance to Pete Shelley:
Pete Shelley / Love Me Love My Dog
@u0421793 Wow - that’s sappy. Didn’t know of this other Pete Shelley, but am well-acquainted with your sense of humor.
Slow Perturb frightens me a bit, if I had to sing it live, I’m sure I’d cock it up before long. I tried to write simple lyrics I could remember as I get older, but I mistakenly made this one a bit on the ‘clever’ side, and when the time came to sing it for the recording, I really had trouble remembering the pattern. The lyrics are this:
The problem is the verses – they have a pattern of phrases that, if you imagine a shift register, are shifted left each line, so you get:
A B C D
B C D A
C D A B
D A B C
I really couldn’t get it when I sang it for a very long time, and had to count off on my fingers. Obviously I did get it, but only with the help of the lyric display in FCPX. (Although I’m sure I did mix up a converge and a diverge).
I nurture a daydream of taking this album (and the following one, which I’m writing) live – somehow. This track worries me. Unless I turn it over to audience participation. Yep, that’s the easy way out, I mean yep, that’s the generous and popularist thing to do.