Making a CD: Lessons learned

Now that it has been a couple of months, what have I learned? What would I do differently?

1) This was definitely worth the time involved. not so much from a monetary viewpoint, but from a PR (the parents really appreciated it) and from a "cool" aspect (the kids thought it was cool I knew how to do this. Greater cool factor = greater opportunity to teach them)

2) It really brought home the fact that having equipment does no good by itself. You have to take the time to learn how to use it. I had all this stuff (that I use for other purposes), yet it took some thinking to figure out how to make the CD happen.

3) There are easier ways to accomplish this same thing. There are direct - to - CD recording decks out there (or even the Alesis Masterlink). In that case you can record the performance straight to a CD, and even hand the student the CD right there. It's the CD equivalent of sticking the cassette recorder in front of the piano and pressing "Record". You could even get a set of preprinted blank CDs (Diskmakers sells them) that have your studio's logo on them with room to write the student's name on them.

You lose the ability to edit, though.

I'd love to hear from other teachers who have attempted this same thing.

Making a CD: The Reactions

So the MIDI got recorded, edited, transferred to audio, shipped over to the recording studio, printed, and mailed. What were the reactions?

Overwhelmingly positive! I had made the kids promise not to tell what was coming (and most kept the secret!), so the kids received a package in the mail from their piano teacher. I told them it was up to them whether to keep it a secret until Christmas, or to let their parents see what was in it.

I don't think any of them waited!

The parents came up to me over the next couple of weeks and gushed at how good their kids sounded. The kids (epecially the 5 eyar old twins) were just bustin' out with pride on how thye sounded.

The one exception was one of my adult students, who didn't know I had recorded her (she'd have gotten too nervous) - she wanted to sound better than that, and was very aware of her mistakes. This is common in adult students - we as adults are aware of where we are in the process (kids are just focused on the moment).

I suggested she treat it as a snapshot - and can play it in 6 months to compare how much better she is then.

Was it worth the effort? Oh, yes.

Lessons learned from my viewpoint? That's the next entry.

Making a CD: Send it to the studio

Almost done with this series of entries on creating Christmas CDs for my piano students.

To this point I've detailed the equipment, recording process, editing, and graphics creation. The next step: transferring the data to a studio for actual creation of the physical cds.

At this point in the process, I had graphics files for each student's CDs, plus the assoaciated audio files. What I don't have is a way to print on CDs - it isn't something I need to do very often, so the best route for me was to outsource this part of the project. in other words, I hired a friend who has a recording studio - Joey Stuckey, of Shadowsound music in Macon.

Joey offers CD duplication and on-CD printing as a part of his studio services. After a couple of conversations, we figured the best way was for me to email the graphics files to the studio - they also use Microsoft Publisher, so all I had to do was send the original publisher file. I then used sendthisfile.com to transfer the audio files to them. They were MUCH too big to email them, and I've found sendthisfile.com to be reliable, even when using the free account.

Joey and the staff then took the audio and the Publisher files, ran them through their system, and produced the CDs for me. I brought down some pre-addressed CD mailers, assembled the packages (along with a little note from me regarding what this CD was - a low budget Chrismtas card, if you will), and mailed them out.

Next entry: Reactions and benefits