Silber Blog

It seems so hard to get things done these days.

Spent most of the day researching places to try to get to advertise on QRD.  Contacted about 100 more indie labels.  It’s strange to me how no one gets back to me about advertising.  Except people I talk to on the phone.  Which isn’t really my deal.  I’m not calling & begging for $10 for an ad that probably has a lifetime value closer to at least $50.  I’ve pretty much decided that all 100 ad slots are going to be filled.  If 90 of them are Silber related, that’s fine.

Spent another chunk of the day doing some research about record stores.  Passed on the remainder of it to one of the Silber interns (thanks Steve!).

Did a little work for mastering something for vinyl for my son Andrew.  If I’m really going to start mastering for vinyl, I need to get some kind of software that can do what I do when mastering for vinyl because a lot of it is mechanical, but tedious in my software.  Roll off this eq, roll down this eq, make anything below this frequency mono.  Anyone know if there’s a good freeware/shareware for making those adjustments while still using my ears for other parts of the mastering process?

Talked to Brian McKenzie a bit about the Wet Teens release. (I want to have them make some radio edit versions of certain songs, because I’m not sure that you can say “fag” on the radio or “dick” when referring to a sexual organ.  But The Wet Teens seem to think making it into a double entendra (sp?) is kind of a violation of the work of the original Michael Mercury (the current Michael Mercury (Michael Charles Wood, Jr)’s father).  I don’t know, I think if he was around he’d tell Michael to do whatever it takes to make the band work.)  Also talked to him about an Electric Bird Noise album for the fall, recording the Electric Bird Noise/Remora duet/versus record, & whether or not mastering a recording should go out of the box at the last minute to “warm up” the sound (I’m torn on this because one of my big things with mastering for people is that I get it done quickly & inexpensively & transferring the songs to tape & then back to digital would add an extra 2-3 hours of labor time, essentially doubling the amount of time I spend on an album, raising the price to what a lot of other engineers charge.  Maybe I’ll start doing a single track & offering to do the whole album, but letting the clients know the price difference.).

Got an email from Nick Marino about how the script for Extreme Lost Kisses is going.  Of course the answer is I’m not sure.  I’ve tried to scripts for it.  One of them came out as nihilistic black ops & over the top even by my standards to try to tell a fifty sentence story that could be read in one sitting.  The other is maybe too goofy.  I think I might pretend I’m Stan Lee & have Nick do the story like Jack Kirby used to & then I just put in words.  I’ll send him the scripts & get his feedback I suppose.  It makes me have more doubts than ever about me trying to write a “mainstream” comic one day.  I’ve been pretty into the golden age comics lately & I really would like to try my hand at something in that style.

I talked to Mathew Reese (former music director at Jacksonville State’s radio station & current indie record store employee) about trying to do more to reach out to stores in an attempt to really stay involved in making physical objects.  He told me that over the past year more & more servicing at the radio station had gone to digital only (which is interesting) & that he thought reaching out directly to stores offering some of the back catalog at deeply discounted prices for purchase (not consignment) might be something that would work.  I never know how much it costs for my CDs when they get them from the distros, but Matt said new releases are $8.99-$11.99.  So if I can swing to sell stores some of the overstock at $5 a piece with a minimum order of four discs total, it might be worth it to everybody.  We’ll see what happens.  I’m going to ruminate on it quite a bit.  Probably try to run that attempt at promotion in the fall.