May 24, 2014
This week I packed the Filk and Cookies master discs into a bubble mailer, sealed it with a kiss, and shipped it off to Precision Disc in Surrey, BC for manufacturing. As silly as this may sound, Filk and Cookies has been my most ambitious project to date. Here’s why.
Filk and Cookies is my third full-length album. The first, Indelible, was engineered, mixed, and mastered by my former partner Nicholas Stoll, while I, blissfully, exasperatedly, gleefully, woefully laboured in my role as guitarist and singer, completely ignorant of all mysteries surrounding audio production. I had a much more active role in the second, Thought Experiment, on which I worked full-time out of my home studio, engineering it on my own and learning much of what I know about audio production in the process. Once all the tracks had been laid down, however, I relied on Nick Stoll to take what I had made and make it beautiful, make it work. Once again, a veil of legend obscured his arcane secrets. I wouldn’t have even known where to begin with mixing and mastering Thought Experiment.
Since then I have earned my Digital Audio Certificate of Achievement from SAIT, so that I have a working understanding of every step of the process now, green though I may be. A little over a year ago, long before my successful Kickstarter campaign, even before my failed Indiegogo campaign, I was going stir crazy without recording to do. So I started work on something light, something whimsical and fun, that I wouldn’t have to take too seriously – in other words, something I could handle by myself. That is why Filk and Cookies is my most ambitious project to date: because, with the exception of a few fine souls who contributed their time and talent as session musicians, I did it alone, from setting up the mic right down to burning the discs and sending them away with a kiss. What is more, I did it without the benefit of a proper studio space, which means I had furnace rumbles, upstairs neighbours, magpies, mowers and motorbikes to contend with. The album is not perfect, but it’s beautiful, and it’s mine, and I am more powerful than I have ever been. I have created something from nothing.
What a wonderful age we live in, that such things are possible.
