49 f M
aking your CDs at home is also an option. It used to be that burning CD-Rs with your computer gave very poor results, but advances in
both computer technology and the laser configuration of commercial CD players have closed the gap somewhat. The price of CD duplicators has also come down.
Jason Steel feels that selling a hand- made CD direct to fans fosters a more durable relationship. “If I sell a CD, it’s made and sent by me. It’s a tactile, physi- cal, desirable object. I do all my own art- work, it’s something I physically press or design myself. I always take five or ten minutes writing a note. Through direct orders I know what people have ordered and get messages from buyers – it’s good to know you’re building a loyal fan base. People want to think they’re taking part in something that is a genuine exchange. It’s something real in an ephemeral world.”
Steven Collins points to the UK pack-
aging supplier Riviera Multimedia, and the aesthetically-enticing Stumptown Printers in Portland, Oregon who print using traditional letterpress or litho tech- niques. At Riviera you can find blank CD wallets, digipaks or even aluminium tins that can be stamped or decorated with photos or stickers. The advantage of this approach is that you can create unique and distinctive packages.
“You know, it seems the more you pay a lot of money, the more you get some- thing that looks like everything else,” Jason Steel expands.
Manufacturing is a significant cost. Here, again, selective DIY can save money and bring in good results. Chris Foster worked on his second CD with Pete Hey- wood at the Tradition Bearers label. “It was recorded at Dave Wood’s studio, Broad Oak, in Herefordshire,” Foster remembers. “I funded and produced the master and Pete provided design, all post production and manufacture – by Birnam, in Scotland. I insisted on digipak and got it, but not without a bit of a struggle.”
Finally, vinyl is making something of a comeback. Increasingly it is possible to get vinyl discs manufactured at low cost and packagers are responding with solutions. It pays to hunt around online.
Distribution
If you want to get your CD into more than just your local shops, then you may want to bring a distributor on board. The hand- made aesthetic doesn’t cut it here. CDs will need to be professionally-finished and retail-ready, shrink-wrapped and with a barcode. Pay-up-front drop-shipping to Amazon and other physical retailers is avail- able from CD Baby and its rivals but more often than not you’ll want to talk to a tradi- tional trade distributor. These no-nonsense companies do not automatically reject self- released artists, but they will nonetheless expect to see a detailed game plan: your tour dates, your TV and press coverage and so on, before taking a punt on you.
Renting your own barcode numbers
from issuing body GS1 is relatively expensive and membership is renewable annually. But barcodes are usually available from digital distributors, your CD manufacturer or from an online barcode vendor such as Barcode1. The UK and Europe uses the EAN-13 bar- code format, while the US format is UPC-12.
Sarah McQuaid was able to arrange distribution with Gael Linn in Ireland for
Sarah McQuaid
her self-released first album after doing national TV. Following that deal that it was very easy to start a direct relationship with Proper Music Distribution in the UK.
“I do sell a hell of a lot more albums, and make much more money doing so, at my live gigs, but the distribution with Prop- er is definitely important and they’ve been lovely to deal with. I’ve had dreadful expe- riences with other distributors. One Irish distributor took 300 copies of my second CD off me and I’ve no idea what became of them. I never saw any money or the CDs.”
Meanwhile, Chris Foster has moved a step further up the DIY ladder with his most recent releases. “We started with a first pressing of 1,000 and are now into the third thousand. We set up a distribution deal with Smekkleysa here in Iceland and sell whatever we can elsewhere. Like so many small concerns, Smekkleysa do not have the means to actively promote even their own releases. The likes of Björk in the past and Sigur Rós now fund marketing and PR themselves.”
Sophie Parkes of Air Cav went with indie label Cargo Records for distribu- tion, while Steven Collins found himself in the unique position of actually work- ing for a distributor, Southern Record Distributors (SRD).
“I’ve been at SRD for about thirteen years but at that time [first Owl Service release] I couldn’t have put out 100 CD-R units through the company. It would have to have been a professionally-manufac- tured product and I’d have needed a cer- tain amount of press in place to make it work. Although I could easily have made a more professional attempt, at that point I didn’t want to. But it naturally progressed to the point where it was only going to make sense to start pressing 500-1,000 copies and getting them into shops. But that came much later.”
When it comes to taking the final product to market, Andrew Cronshaw favours a staggered release on both hard and soft formats. “I’ve done the digital thing now, via Proper Distribution. Seems to me quite a good idea to release the physical CD first and later, once sales have died down, let it go to download.” Anoth- er trick to maximise physical sales is to offer bonus tracks on the CD that are not available for download.
Tech Tips! Mastering your own CD
Top quality CDs can easily be assem- bled at home using a computer with the right software and suitable moni- toring gear. My own set-up comprises a MacBook Pro laptop, a pair of Sennheiser HD 415 headphones, and Bias’s excellent Peak LE 6 mastering program.* Even with headphones, I find extraneous noise a distraction when focusing on quiet sounds, so I avoid working near open windows… or ticking clocks!
CD material must be in 44.1kHz, 16-bit AIFF or WAV files. Begin by opening each file in your mastering software to check its peak audio level. At 0 dB, the digital system is using its full encoding capacity, so it’s best to set every item’s peak level to minus 0.1dB to ensure that your CD packs the same sonic punch as other commercially- available discs.
Next, paste the tracks for the album into their chosen sequence, sep- arating them with a few seconds’ silence which can subsequently be shortened or lengthened. The total duration shouldn’t exceed about 74 minutes. Now ‘top and tail’ each item. Remove breaths, studio atmosphere, and other noises preceding the first note, and flag up the opening with an onscreen marker. Edit, or use the pro- gram’s ‘fade out’ facility, to get rid of anything that’s audible after the last chord has died away. The end of the item should merge seamlessly into the silence that follows it.
As a general rule, a one- to three- second pause between tracks is plenty, though the precise duration of your gaps is a matter of personal judgement. If an item ends with a slow fade, the next track should come in fairly swiftly.
Once you’ve adjusted all the gaps, save everything and take a substantial rest! When you return to work, revisit the track junctions, listening again to the last 30 seconds or so of each item, the gap itself, and the first few seconds of the next track. You’ll want to make some more adjustments after this. Also check that the markers in front of each song are positioned to provide a quick (but not clipped) start when you cue up on them and press ‘play’.
The mastering programme pro- duces an audio CD by converting the areas between your markers – the music for each item, and the silence preceding the next one – into specially selected ‘regions’ of audio, and generating num- bered tracks from them. Their timings and other details are stored in a ‘playlist’ specifying the content to be burned to your CD-R. The data on the disc can include your tracks’ Internation- al Standard Recording Codes (ISRCs).
*Bias ceased trading last year, but Peak LE 6 cost me about £95, and com- parable software for Mac and Win- dows is widely available: Sony’s CD Architect 5, priced at about £110, is highly regarded by PC users.
Nick Freeth
Photo: Colm Henry
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