Month: August 2020

At last, it has arrived!! A few days ago some boxes arrived, and the Found My Way CD was actually here.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the Found My Way album was actually finished at the end of 2019, and has been on Spotify since then. But whilst I wanted to get the CD available at the start of 2020, I had to actually create the full cover artwork for it.

Then life got in the way in February as I was knocked down by a bus, and had a stay in hospital for a while followed by more recovery at home. So my ideas for the CD cover took a lot longer to come to fruition.

But a few weeks ago I was well enough to get everything together and finish it. And now here it is.

Acknowledgements

There’s a few people I want to thank for helping me create the album, and more recently helping with getting the CD artwork finished to the correct format.

Recording the album

Most of the album was recorded and mixed at Miacon Studios in Horsell, near Woking in Surrey. Neal Leggett is the owner of the studio and he operated all the recording equipment during the sessions.

All the songs were my own, except one track ‘Don’t Let Go’ which was the result of a collaboration with Francis Greene – a guitarist and keyboard player who I regularly encountered on open-mic nights. Having co-written the song, Francis was happy to come and record some keyboards and backing vocals on the track. That was a fun evening. See Recording Don’t Let Go for more detail on how this track was written and came together.

As well as backing vocals from Francis Greene, I was fortunate to have some other help in the vocal department from Karen Terry and Tracy Ginn.

Tracy and I had met at an open-mic night in Woking some years ago and had performed together at many open-mics since.

Karen is a neighbour who I’ve known for a few years, and she has been a singer for ages. Whilst we’ve never done open-mics together she has instead been involved with other events like Ripley Rocks for example.

In terms of other contributions during the recording, I should mention Joanna Lawrence – another Woking resident and an accomplished string player. She agreed to be part of the project and her viola and violin can be heard on two of the album tracks. She did well decoding the hand-written scores that I gave her.

Creating the CD

Once again I’d decided to use Disc Manufacturing Services to actually make the CD. I’d previously used them to create the Life Line CD some years ago, after a recommendation from a fellow musician – and I would myself recommend them too.

They have many artwork templates already set up and it’s just a case of choosing the one you want to use. Fortunately I have a bit of experience with Photoshop, but that’s more in the field of creating website graphics. The people at DMS are helpful though and are happy to spend time answering your questions and helping you get everything to the right format and standard.

Once the order was placed, the turnaround was pretty quick too – I think the CDs arrived less than two weeks after the order was finalised, and I’d paid.

What next?

Please let me know if you’d like a copy of the CD, and I’ll do my best to get it to you as quickly as possible. I’m selling them for £5.00.

With face-to-face open-mic nights not running at the moment, and unlikely to be until 2021 at the earliest, opportunities for playing you the songs live are very limited. But I may be joining in with some of the virtual open-mic nights in the near future, once I’ve worked out what I need to take part.