Doing It Myself : Why It Took So Long To Make This Album, Part One
Crissi Cochrane
It was so long ago when I started plans for this album, I’m not even sure where I planned to record it - at home? at a friend’s house? - but I do know that I started making my demos with Cool Edit Pro, the painfully primitive software that I was using when I first started recording things as a teenager.
After “Pretty Words” went viral on Spotify in 2016 and I started getting a steady stream of magical, fat royalty checks, I updated my arsenal with a new laptop and the full version of Ableton Live 9, which I promptly taught myself to use with the help of an excellent (and free) crash course on Coursera.org.
The course required us to complete homework projects of recordings we’d made. It was November, so I started making some Christmas tunes as my homework assignments. They turned out so nice, I released them (the Santa Baby EP).
I was so relieved to be able to do this by myself - I always found that, while producers made my music sound absolutely amazing in ways I couldn’t possibly do on my own, it was always a little difficult to really express what I wanted. Mostly because I didn’t know what that was, and I lacked the language to explain it properly. I always felt like, in the studio, I would be trying to push all of my ideas through the filter of another human being. Finally, I could just mess around and not be wasting anyone’s time. The feeling of self-sufficiency was so wonderful. It gave me this little flame of confidence - I might not be the greatest live performer or the most excellent singer, but now I felt I had a sort of life-raft under me that most musicians don’t have.
After releasing that Christmas EP, I was sure I’d be producing my new album myself, and doing most everything in the box - digital instruments only, aside from my guitar and voice.
But the biggest challenge for me is arranging songs. I just don’t spend enough time with other instruments to be able to “hear” those parts in my head. On “Santa Baby”, I was recording cover songs, and there were so many versions out there that I could build my arrangement from. On my own album, I had nothing but blank slates.