After managing to put together a reasonably sounding selection of music for our wedding, I made the decision that I wanted to release some of my own music. However, I wanted to release it to raise some money for a local charity to me. The robin Cancer Trust (RCT).
A couple of years earlier, a close family friend of ours, Robin Freeman, lost his battle with germ cell cancer. It is a very rare form of cancer and is very invasive. As there was very little awareness about this rare cancer, the Freeman family, along with other close friends set up the RCT to raise awareness. The charity has gone from strength to strength under the watchful eye of Toby, Robin's younger brother and now they promote awareness nationwide.
Here is a link to their website to check out the great work they do.
https://www.therobincancertrust.org
I set about going through my old compositions, along with some new ones, to find a nice mix of relaxing pieces. Originally I set my mind on 14 tracks but 2 others got added later on. I recorded these pieces using the techniques I had learnt from recording the wedding album. The most notable change was recording the pieces at a higher volume along with starting to master the ability to splice audio recordings to make one seamless piece with cracks and pops. This was all done with my digital piano, audio in and out cables to the computer and audicity to record with. These recordings were then exported as WAV files and then converted to MP3's.
I'm not going to talk too much about the tracks on the album as I'm sure I will revisit these at some point for programme notes, but my personal favourites are "Synergy" which was written late on and is the lead track and "The Last Leaf to Fall" which was written for Robin. This was the last piece on the album which I thought was poignant. I have used the idea of a slower, more intimate track as a final thought provoking piece on each of my albums now and I like how it works.
After the recording and editing (I hadn't really learnt how to mix and master then so the sound quality is a bit rough), I had to start looking into how to get my music out to the world. I think I will cover the distribution and artwork side in another blog post as otherwise it gets a bit long! In the meantime, I will leave you with the title track from the album to have a listen too.
Have a great day everyone