We've all heard about the plummeting prices of CD burners and dedicated duplicators-technical advances that allow amateur musicians to stop dreaming about record contracts and start recording and producing their own CDs in manageable numbers. Well, this homegrown approach to capturing music on CD has also caught the fancy of some seasoned pros.
Guitarist/singer/banjoist Danny Barnes, whose credits include five albums with alternative roots-rock band the Bad Livers as well as numerous sound track projects, has taken advantage of the new technology to make short-run CDs. He was partially motivated by the frustration of having created music that wasn't going to be embraced by the commercial music industry. "I had hours and hours and hours of master tapes left over from recording sessions I've done for various films and records," he says. "I had tons of music that had been rejected, and it was all in master tape form." By transferring this material to a Roland VS-880 portable digital multitrack studio (see "From Your Guitar to CD for Under $3,000," July), he was able to edit the material to his liking and burn CDs with the Roland's optional CD drive. Continuing with the homemade approach, Barnes made the CD covers and inserts out of photocopied newspaper clippings, creating a ransom note effect.
"I made a big box of them up," Barnes says, "and I went on the road for two weeks on the West Coast and sold them. They were all different: I might have stuck one song on more than one CD, but it'd be a different mix, or maybe I'd just stick a couple of pieces together. I got up in the morning and recorded something right in, or I'd have an alternate cut from a recording session. I had stuff on there from me playing solo, hacking around on a guitar, to the Northwest Symphonia, which is the Seattle Symphony, playing cuts from my music that didn't get on sound tracks. I just threw up a Web site [www.dannybarnes.com] to see what would happen."
One run of CDs was a live recording of a show Barnes played at McCabe's Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, California. "I ended with a pretty good high-bias cassette of a good performance," he says. "The [sound] guy used a couple of Audio-Technica mics on the banjo and a pretty good vocal mic. The guy had a pretty good sounding room and everything. So I took that home and dumped it on the VS-880 and sort of tweaked it a little bit: changed the order around, cut out all the crowd noise . . . I sold 100 of those Live at McCabe's CDs."
Barnes is overjoyed with the freedom he now has to record whatever he wants. "One thing that's important to get across to everybody is, 'Hey, we've never had it easier,'" says Barnes. "You get all these complaints about how rough it is to get stuff out. I made a recording of my dog howling and me playing the harmonica very badly for a minute and 17 seconds, and I put it on one of my records. Well, I just got a check in the mail. It got played 138 times on college radio! It's never been easier to get shit out. All the middlemen are shaking in their boots!"
--Teja Gerken