You know it's been quite a journey! My last entry was entitled "The Journey Is The Reward" and from my personal journey through the entire cycle of making records, producing records, engineering recordings, releasing them and watching them work it's been a satisfying experience.
When I created the Cave Pro Tools Recording and Pre-Production Music Studio my goal was to learn Pro-Tools and build an actual hybrid digital/analog studio and produce actual records. i have to say that journey was a blas. Expensive!! But, learning and creating while learning, working with so man acts and musicians was quite a journey. You can actual check out this journey here: https://thecaverecordinstudio.us
I then decided to engineer my own records with local players and chose to do so in the Blues genre because I have always loved the musical format. Some of my earliest influences back in 66-68 were Albert King, Mike Bloomfield and BB King. So, when I started attending local Blues Jams, I learned so much from our local talent that it was quite an eye opener. Some of my local mentors include, Ron Hacker, Kid Andersen, Aki Kumar, Jim Pugh, Chris Cain, Alabama Mike, Terrie Odabi, Terry Hiatt, Baxter Robertson, Jim Dewrance, Tia Carroll, Quique Gomez, Big Jon Atkinson, Mark Hummel to name a few.. What a journey it's been.
This journey took me to the actual process of releasing recordings. I chose Distrokid to release may last AJ Crawdaddy CD and found it to be so much more efficient and easier to use. Very user friendly. Still, the process and input all of the information is a time soak, especially lyric and videos, but in the end, it gets released across the globe on every, "Virtual Record Store". All of them! And with Bandcamp, you can add the physical sale of SWAG and MERCH so as to recoup some of the dollars all of this takes to accomplish. This entire journey has been quite technical and very process intensive. Each Time I release a record, I learn something new which is the reward. Recently, I released my college bands' effort which spans a 50+ year journey. Lucky Mud was formed in 1968 and has endured to the present day with the release of "Keep It Lit" a Dbl. LP that spans each format, Digital Downloads, CD and Vinyl.
Yes, I have accomplished quite a bit and it is still in process as I decided to try and penetrate the GRAMMY bubble. Stay tuned for this journey as it portends to be quite expensive and onerous a task, but I am going to nominate "Keep It Lit" next year and see if I can actually produce a Nomination. Wish me luck!
The journey IS the reward!
