A Pro Musician Answers Your Questions About Professional Music

[Skunks]

Dear Mr. P-M,

Two friends of mine wrote an EP's worth of material. I pulled some strings and put together enough equipment to get a clunky recording space set up (a basement; vocalist in the bathroom down the hall), and pulled 4 tracks with only a little bit of guitar bleedthrough on all of the mics, etc. I'm now gradually going about mixing it, after the fact, and trying to undo all the damage that a lack of experience did in two days of recording. They're across the country from me, now, and in a state of constant strife; recording more isn't really possible.

So, now that I have about 25 minutes of music that I'm quite fond of, in spite of it being very raw and unrefined and sometimes straight up crude, I'm not sure what to do with it. They're uninterested in commercial success, and my only absolute goal was to have something to set down as a semipermanent portrait of the music that they were making at the time.

Once the mix is done, what can I do on the low end of financial and emotional investment to get the music "out there"? Burn a few hundred copies and give them to friends?

[smoothmoniker]

Originally Posted by Skunks

Once the mix is done, what can I do on the low end of financial and emotional investment to get the music "out there"? Burn a few hundred copies and give them to friends?

Yeah, probably. You can submit it to iTunes using tunecore, and then email the link around to family and friends. You might recoup a little cash, and it'll at least be making the music public.

Get a release from the artists first. People who "don't care about the money" have a nasty way of becoming very care-about-the-money once there's some actual money to care about.