And I
feel like I can do what I want
leavin' leavin' leavin' leavin'
I'ma do what I want
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I added a Free Download option to both Fanlink pages where you can download both albums in their original .WAV format. You can turn these uncompressed files into .MP3 as you like. For those who, like me, prefer to have music on their own device rather than relying on streaming services.
The free download button is at the bottom of this page: fanlink.to/SAWU
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I finally sent the tracks to a distributor. They will review them and if the album is approved it should hit streaming platforms and music stores (except youtube, I'll take care of that) in 28 days. I heard some people simply didn't get any reply at all from this distributor, so hopefully I don't turn out to be one of them. I can't believe this is almost done...
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All 20 songs are essentially done. I've been doing 5 solid hours every day lately. Extremely demanding to do this for me, since I feel like my mind has been in a coma for the last 2 years. Only thing left to do now is to start listening to my own tracks a lot, to spot anything I'm not happy about. Then I can go back and tweak what's necessary. Mostly, it's all down to volume levels now. Everything else is pretty much done for good, won't need to make any big alterations (I hope).
Personally I think most of the tracks are fire, but it depends a lot on what volume you listen the tracks at. By design, this music appears to be lower in volume then commercial music. So if you listen to my tracks, the first thing you'll notice is that it seems quiet and that it needs to be turned up. Please do turn it up as loud as necessary!
Also listening with headphones or earphones, or without, makes a huge difference. With headphones you can clearly hear every sound as intended. Without, it's just some muddy noise and some voice, really doesn't do it justice. And if you listen from your phone's speaker, well, then it's just garbage. I know commercial music releases are not like this, they sound just fine on any speaker, but hey what can I say, my music is meant to be listened to with headphones. I'm not Rick Rubin or Dr Dre so this is the best I could do in terms of production.
I do have some minor gripes with some parts of some songs, but it's really something that I can't fix any further than I did, unless I want to spend who knows how many more months doing it all over again. I think I will have to accept a few subtle flaws here and there, which might not even be flaws for the listener.
So yeah, the thing is 99.98% done at this point.
On Youtube, I will release 3 tracks at once and then 1 once a week for the remaining 17 tracks. On other platforms, I will release the whole album at once. So if you really DO want to listen to it, you can actually find it all available from the start. You can even download it for free. The once-a-week releases on Youtube are mostly to try to get a periodic wave of new people to notice the activity on my channel.
But, I do expect an anti-climatic ending to this whole project. As in, I will release it on as many music platform as possible, free streaming, free downloading, everything, and.... nothing will happen. On Youtube, maybe I'll get ~10 views or so per videos, a few dislikes, some comments ridiculing me, and that's pretty much it. I expect nothing more.
I did this because I felt it was meaningful for me to do it and I am satisfied I poured so much energy into making it real and even managed to be happy with the final product.
Maybe in 100 years someone will stumble upon this record by chance, really listen to it and think it's the realest shit anyone has ever made. By then, I will probably be gone for 100 years already.
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Little update for the two and a half people who even read this.
So, my work is close to the end. I have 100% completed 6 tracks out of 20 so far. The other 14 are at 95% and still need post-processing, mixing, and mastering, which for me is something that I do in one single stretch of time (but still taking a few days per tracks).
I'm very happy with the results so far. I'm sure nearly everyone will think "uhh WTF is this?", but if I like it myself, then I think I have succeeded. I think everyone has their own specific tastes in music, and if you just happen to hear some random track that sounds nothing like the stuff you normally listen to, you won't like it. So I don't expect any kind of acclaim when I release the tracks, on the contrary. But it has been meaningful to me to put my innermost thoughts on paper, in rhyme, voice them out, and create a music around them that I believe fits with the meaning of the words.
To shed a little information on the content: it's basically a collection of stories or expression of my feelings. I wrote the bulk of the songs at the start of 2020, so it's either about some episodes that I lived around and prior to that time, or things I felt in general all my life. The topics are dark and depressing. The music is usually heavy, not meaning heavy metal or heavy rock; heavy in the sense of... emotionally heavy? Kind of relentless, at times brutal and cacophonous.
I'm pretty sure that the track I just finished today messes with your breathing and/or heartbeat, and honestly that's not even intended. Like, while listening to it I feel like I should be constantly exhaling and never inhaling. Because there's a repeating sound in it that maybe makes you unconsciously sync your exhaling with it, but it's just constant exhaling if you sync with it, so it fucks up your breathing and heartbeat. But the song is fire (in my own opinion, of course).
I've done 37 hours of work in the past 5 days alone (each hour counts 50 minutes though). But to be honest, I nearly always feel like just laying flat for 24 hours a day, and do nothing at all, without even moving a muscle. I'm not lazy. I'm just incredibly detached from... life? Like, I've been shut in my room for eons now. I only go out to buy food and since I'm eating very little (lost nearly 5 kilos in 2 months, I think) and I'm buying lots of groceries at once, I only have to go out every 3 weeks or so. In February I only left the house once. ONCE. In a whole month. I never had that happen to me before.
So anyways. The point is that, I don't know how I'm managing to do this, but with my very little remaining life force, I'm finishing this album. Then I can just wither the rest of my energy away in peace, and that's it :)
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Quick update: I've been pumping in a solid 35 hours a week of work on the music, and it's coming along nicely. A few tracks already sound like they're what they're supposed to sound and I'm quite happy, while some others are not quite there yet, but the progress is steady and not too slow, at this point. Hopefully another 6 weeks max and it's done. But if not, so be it, I'll keep working hard on it and it's out when it's out.
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Not really having a good time these days. My project is taking longer and longer than expected. At first I thought I would be done by May. Yeah right. Then I thought July. If not July, definitely August. October? Hell, if this album is ready before February, I'll be super happy.
So what has happened since the last update:
After buying a second microphone and second audio interface (first one of each turned out to be too crappy), I started recording my vocals. This would be the second time I do a complete recording of all the 20 songs, with multiple takes for each part (minimum 4-5 takes, sometimes even 15).
Then as I went back comping the lyrics, I was just so dissatisfied with the quality, but back then I couldn't yet understand what was wrong with it. I kept comping (comping is the process of going through all the takes and choosing the best part of each bit, and stitching them together) for maybe 2 or 3 weeks when it finally dawned on me that the vocals were sh!t because I didn't treat my room before recording. Treating the room means you make it as reverb-less as possible. This means that the sound has to be absorbed by soft things like curtains or blankets so that it doesn't bounce off flat surfaces and go back in the microphone.
So near the end of September I literally built a fort near my bed with my room's own furniture and blankets, pillows, clothes, anything I could put together. I had to stay with this makeshift recording booth in my room for over a month and I couldn't even use some of the stuff I used to make the fort until it was time to finally dismantle it.
For over a month I basically re-re-recorded all of my lyrics again (third time now) and this time I was finally happy with it. Now I've been comping lyrics again, and syncing them to the beat, which is requiring some extra creative work sometimes, because the instrumentals that I have don't necessarily line up in length with the newly recorded vocals.
At the moment I comped and synced 9 songs out of 20. Today I was at work on it for a 8 whopping hours.
After all the songs are comped and synced, I still have to do the mixing, which will require me to go back to the creative stage, where I try blend everything together and add some effects to make each song sound as interesting and powerful as possible.
Then there is the mastering, which is mostly about raising the volume as high as possible, without distorting the quality nor losing clarity, etc.
Some of this stuff is not stuff that I just go and do it, I still have to learn about some of it, which means I still have to spend some hours watching videos, reading about it, asking questions in discord servers, and so on.
So it truly pains me to realize that there is no way these songs are ready by the end of the year. But the worst thing is that I'm really sick of struggling everyday between my will to do this project until completion and the total lack of motivation to do pretty much anything at all. Not just working on this project, I mean anything. Like, I can't seem to find a shred of pleasure or interest in doing anything. But hey let's not get into that right now. Post's already too long.
Yeah so basically, I'm still doing this album which nobody asked for, nobody even knows I'm doing it, nobody expects it, and I myself have absolutely no expectation that even if I put it here on this channel or anywhere else it's going to get noticed to begin with. Then before even one comment of praise can be found, I expect a fair amount of ridiculization (which apparently is not a real word), dislikes, hate comments, that kind of fun stuff.
And I'm not even doing this for money. The whole thing is going to be free.
I just hope I can see this thing to the end before too much more time passes because I really can't take it much longer.
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Little update that nobody asked for on something that almost nobody knows about.
My music album (if we want to call what I'm doing "music".. it's debatable) is 90% done but I am once again behind on schedule. I was planning to release the first 3 tracks at the end of this month and then release the remaining tracks one per week.
At the moment I am sitting on 20 completed instrumentals that match 20 fully written lyrics. I am now supposed to be in the process of re-recording the vocals (the ones I have are a draft from 1 year ago, recorded in Tokyo), but I am not happy with the quality of the microphone and audio interface that I bought.
Therefore I am buying a new audio interface, and I am considering buying a new microphone as well. I am really going all out on this project at this point and spending as much as I have to in order to have a final product that I can be proud of. I mean, this might be the last real thing I do, so I really want to do it properly.
So basically I am waiting on new equipment right now, then I am going to re-record the 20 tracks, then I will have to learn how to post-process the vocals, and then I have to learn about mixing and mastering which is the final step before the album is complete.
That's regarding the creative aspect of it. On the administrative side of things, I have to figure out what can I do to release this thing into the world without it going completely unnoticed... which I'm sure it will be, anyway. I am not trying to make money out of it, I just wish that I could reach someone who might be able to relate to the kind of stuff I wrote.
Either way, unfortunately the August deadline might not be met, but September will probably be it. I hope. I'm really fighting with this thing because honestly my mood is and has been soooooo low that I feel like doing absolutely nothing. Many days I really don't have the mental energy to even think about anything, I just wish I could sleep forever so that I wouldn't have to worry about anything. And yet I am working on this daily.
Not that anyone is waiting for it or even knows I'm working on it. But still.
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Not sure if anyone can read this or even cares, but I just wanted to say hello again. I would like to tell you that I've been working on a project. It's a music album. 20 tracks. I had never done anything like this before. All songs are written and performed by me, and the music is also composed by me. I had to learn to use a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) to do this, which is something I had never touched before. Both the music and lyrics are probably not what anyone can expect. I wrote the bulk of the songs in the first half of 2020, and I started composing the music around October 2020. I am currently working on track 16 of 20. I might be done by August. Then I will start releasing the tracks gradually. I won't make any videos to promote it or talk about it. Just posting the songs, and nothing else. After that, I might never post again. We'll see what happens. I hope you guys are doing well.
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All the kanji I studied on Kanji Garden since January. 410 kanji. The difference in color means how much I've practiced each kanji so far. The pinker, the more I practiced it. I study kanji every day for an hour, and I'm still bad but I got a lot better. Hopefully one day I can read fluently!
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