Super Short Run Physical CD Manufacture

I mentioned this in passing a while ago, but I just now set up and placed an order with Kunaki.com for a very few – five – CD albums of the 10 tracks my band Ginger Ibex wrote and recorded in February for the RPM Challenge.

Unlike our professionally-recorded 2009 album Firefly, these pieces were written quickly, in styles different from the band’s usual sound, and all recorded in my office-studio with GarageBand, MIDI patches, Apple Loops, and one Snowball USB microphone. The resulting music is fun, but not anything on which we wanted to spend a thousand dollars or more to master and press more crates of CDs to keep in my basement!

How did it work and how did it turn out?

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Quantizing A Recording To Improve Rhythm (Online Course Homework)

If you have ever performed music for a recording session, you have probably had more than your fill of “let’s try another take” and “let’s punch (replace a short part of a recording with another) that note.” However, if you are recording tracks with a software instrument that sends MIDI signals instead of audio sounds, you can edit the MIDI notes inside of the digital audio workstation (DAW) that records the tracks, thus potentially saving an almost-perfect take.

Here’s a video I made for this week’s online Production course homework teaching how to use the Quantize function in GarageBand to make notes that were not played quite on the beat line up more closely (and in a future post I will tell you how I made this screen-capture video!):

Reader Question – Making Music Performance Connections

I do offer to let readers use my brain, and while for deeper and/or ongoing research or support I do charge, I’ll also give a bit of free advice when the question and my response are useful for a blog post. Here is a question I received last week, and my reply. I have redacted all identifying information about the querent to protect his privacy:

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