The Making of Robot Love: Production Diary

08/12/00
Considering the relative success which my mp3s had enjoyed (over five people had downloaded them!) it was decided that the next step should be taken: to actually produce a CD with my name (and songs) on it. But how to go about such a task? I began to scour the web for small, independant labels which might be interested in such a venture. The result was a CD swap with the folks at YuccaTree Records but no takers on the disc (okay, so really I only contacted one label -- not exactly scouring...).

So anyway, after receiving a rather inspiring email from artistic legend and purveyor of all things whimsical, Rodney Greenblat which contained some valuable advice:

Dear Victor,

I checked out the "quirky" music you make. It does have a strong resemblance to songs I've tried to make myself. I like it.

Questionable Advice:

Advice#1 Get famous.
My success with music has largely come from the fact that I am a famous visual artist in Japan. I realize getting famous is very difficult, and I don't even know how I've done it, except that hard work, consistency, and ability to work with others may have helped.

Advice#1 Publish or die
Make a CD or a 7inch record, and sell it. If you can't even find a tiny obscure record label on the web who will publish it, then publish it yourself, and sell 25 copies at a near by underground record shop. I think mp3s on the web is a nice thing, but to me it is not enough. Make cool objects people can hold and collect.

Aside from that I have no idea what to do with the music industry.

I hope this is not to depressing. Anyway good luck. It sounds like you are having fun, so you really can't go wrong.

Fun+
Rodney

Far from being discouraging, this was exactly the advice I needed to hear -- and I was having fun. So the decision was made -- make something cool for people to hold and collect (and we're not talking Scotch Rocks here...).

08/14/00
Just ordered the software with which I'll prepare the master disc for the album... WinOnCD version 3.0.7, by the German company CeQuadrat. It's cheaper than Adaptec's EasyCD Creator, though more powerful (and ironically its sold by Adaptec, now that they've purchased CeQuadrat)

08/16/00
The WinOnCD software arrived on schedule and I've begun to mix and master the tunes for the master CD.

08/18/00
Wrote a short intro for the CD, which will segue into Vampire babies. Also re-recorded some vocals for The Return of Captain Bigshot, but for whatever reason, they aren't working. "In My Way," has also been split up to become two short interludes on the disc.

09/04/00
Wrote another short interlude for the disc (Advice For Young robot), and have gotten the mix so that it sounds the way I want it, in terms of normalizing the volumes of the pieces and the song order. Now, just to work on the graphic design...

09/21/00
Work continues on the design for the cover. It's coming along nicely, and I think we'll all be proud of the results.

10/22/00
Okay, so it's been over a month since the last update, but we've been busy! Jackie and I have finished up the cover design, I've listened to the audio disc I recorded and it's sounding as good as can be hoped. The graphic file has been burned to a CDr and the whole bundle has been sent off to Oasis Duplication to be burned. We dealt with some technical limitations in the creation of the graphics, so hopefully they'll still be able to work with it. In six weeks or so, I should have 1,000 copies of this puppy. Now begins work on the website, ;-)

11/02/00
OASIS was very nice and sent us a copy of the proof for the cover art and disc art for us to, well, proof, I guess. Everything looks fine so they've been sent back. From here, we're told it's only about four weeks until the whole mess is delivered right to our door. Four weeks for me to figure out what I'm going to do with 1,000 copies of Robot Love

Does anyone have any ideas?