Tag: bandcamp

Today my album went live on iTunes

I’m not gonna lie – that brought a big smile to my face. It’s about €1 more expensive than it is to buy it direct from Bandcamp, but iPhone users can download it direct to their phones through the iTunes store, if that’s something that you wanna do, whereas with Bandcamp, you do really need to be at your computer, and not on your phone, to download it.

If you are enjoying the record, and use iTunes, then please consider rating the album and writing a little review that people can read on the iTunes store page. That would make me very happy indeed.

There are delays with the physical CD, and it’s looking more and more like it won’t be ready for the actual launch days. But sure, I’ll still play the gigs and celebrate this album going out into the world. If you’re around Galway or Dublin next week, drop in and listen to me playing songs from this record live.

At each of the gigs, there’ll be a small little choir group singing with me for a few of the songs. It’s different people in each city, and they’re basically friends and acquaintances, and strangers and twitter followers, who all said yes when I asked if they’d like to sing with me. I’m really looking forward to getting them up on stage with me. It should be a lot of fun.

I’ll also be playing some songs that aren’t on the new album, which I held over for the next one, or which have been written since this summer. And I’ve reworked some of my favourite covers too.

Stream my album, and buy it if you like.

The digital version of my album went out to my fundit funders yesterday, and about half of them have already downloaded it at this stage. But you can now stream the album on Bandcamp or Soundcloud, and if you like, you can buy it from Bandcamp. It will shortly be available through iTunes and other digital stores over time.

Bandcamp is my own preferred digital retailer, as quite honestly, I get to charge you less for the album, and I make more money directly as it’s not going through a middle man of any kind.

The CD itself has had another little setback – I’m starting to take it as a hint that CDs maybe aren’t the way forward. The designer’s computer had a hard drive failure yesterday, and I’m not sure if he’s been able to retrieve any of the work that has been lost. Here’s hoping that he can.

Mastering, gigging and a free download

Mastering is an interesting art. I was able to attend the mastering session for my record at Wav Mastering in Limerick, and experienced the recordings gaining more definition and going from being a bunch of tracks that I’d recorded to being an album that made sense to listen to. I find it hard to explain exactly what it’s like without resorting to a bread analogy – so imagine you’ve made 12 loaves but baked them just as a round of dough on a tray. Now, imagine all those 12 loaves were baked in the same loaf tin instead. They still will taste the same, but they’ll look more uniform as a result. I guess that’s how I see mastering. I don’t know if that even makes sense – but it works in my head and I hope in yours too.

I was due to play at Song Cycle in Whelan’s last monday, as a sort of prep for myself to road-test some of the really new songs I’ve never played to an audience before. However, the mental floods in Dublin that evening meant that the evening didn’t go ahead at all, so apologies to anyone who may have braved the weather to make it in.

I wanted to play those songs live before playing them at the Jazz Festival gig tomorrow, but alas, they’ll just get their first outing at that gig instead. So, if you’re around Cork for the weekend, drop into the Festival Club on Sunday evening, and I’m playing in the Legends Suite.

I’d been hoping to have the record ready and out there before the Jazz gig, but various things always seem to crop up to add to the delay. But that’s really helped and added to the whole learning process. These last 6 months have been one big learning curve for me, and comparing the demos I was doing at home before going into the studio with the finished album I have now is mindblowing to me at times. But I wanted to be able to start sharing some of it with people, so here’s a track called “Helen” which you can listen to and download for free via Bandcamp. I hope you enjoy it, and spread it around. The full album will be available in November, all things going to my now re-adjusted plan: