May 2022: “Mi Fai Annegare” is the new song I am currently working on. This one is currently in mastering. A song is never finished because you are constantly working on it and optimizing it. So I will just stop working on it in June. 😎 The planned release date is June 25, 2022.
There will also be a video for the song this time 🙂 .
If you are interested in background information about the production, you can read on here. If you want to get to the point quickly, go straight to the article page with the countdown and watch the clock there until the video (or the link to it) appears on its own. 😁
The song was written during the Corona pandemic of 2020/21. That also got a touch of the prevailing mood. However, it is not a Corona song. After the song was written on the guitar, it went to the studio recordings in 2021. I usually record all the instruments myself. This time I wanted to have a real bass player record the bass. I met Martin Motnik during a cover song project and asked him if he would ‘professionalize’ the already recorded bass for my song. Martin is from Ludwigshafen and lives in the USA, where he is, among other things, bassist of the band “ACCEPT”. I emailed the song to him in the US at night and when I got up a few hours later, Martin had already uploaded the final track to my cloud. My master had miserable timing except for the drums. Actually, I thought he would listen to my idea first and then get back to me weeks later. For an amateur like me, it is always amazing how professionals work and easy to acknowledge that they are in a different league. My thanks as well as respect at this point to Martin.
After all instruments were in the box at the beginning of 2022, the need arose for me to travel to Italy for two days. I took the opportunity to record some video sequences for the song for 3 hours on the beach of Alcamo Marina and in Castellamare del Golfo. Anna Pecorella did the filming in intermittent pouring rain. Only back in Germany I could see that the recordings were successful. On another morning in May 2022 the rest of the video shootings took place in Rheingönheim. Camera operator on set: Mike Baumann, an experienced young man who took the video to the next level. Many ideas for camera work as well as special effects would not have been created without him. The few hours on set were extremely efficient and provided excellent footage that I was able to edit and cut in Final Cut Pro before the end of May. At the same time, I was able to continue mixing the song in my studio and finally master it in June.
Considering the whole production, the effort adds up to about 50 days (or about 400 hours) and results from the following work packages: For the video, it is estimated that 10 -15 days of effort were spent in total. For the studio work consisting of recording, mixing, and mastering 35-40 days. About three days added up to combine audio and video and upload the finished product to YouTube. Add to that the time to write and compose the song. 🥹 Since one’s own judgment is no longer sufficient at some point, I really appreciated the expert input of Julia, Matthias and Mike, and the one or other colleague or friend also had to validate the almost finished song. 😊 The duration of the production was thus almost 2 years for about 3 minutes of video. Since music is my hobby, and 97% of the effort was done by me, there are very few external costs. Such a production would be at market prices in the good five-digit euro range. It would also be finished much faster if almost everything did not happen in personal union. 😇