One of Bob Baker’s 151 easy music promotion activities from The Five-Minute Music Marketer is, “Don’t create in isolation. Upload a demo version or early mix of a song you are working on.” Seems like good advice. 

This past week, I began mixing a song I wrote last year called “Crashed on Neptune.” Building on the piano centered theme from Semigloss Albatross, I’m attempting to expand that sound to a more realized production. I hesitate to use the term “commercial” because I’m not sure anyone really knows what that means anymore. 

Where Semigloss Albatross focused on the song and only the song—most of the record was just me and a piano—this new project is full-bodied. I’m finding that these particular songs lend themselves to a narrative of sounds. 

The first few bars of a song are fairly important because they should employ some kind of hook that causes the listener to keep listening. This particular song has a chunky electric guitar in the front that seemed fair enough but begged for something more. I imagined a delay that morphed somehow as it echoed. What I came up with was running the sound through a delay effect and the delay return through a wah-wah pedal plug-in. Pretty cool. Check it out.