I’ve been asked if I’m releasing vinyl. If you don’t know, because you’re not anyone’s stan, vinyl is one of the major ways musicians make money now. Vinyl editions of albums have become so popular that one of this free land’s most popular artists released an album with multiple covers so that her superfans would have to collect them all. If you’re not actively touring or having your songs regularly placed in film and television, vinyl would be pretty much the only way to turn any kind of profit or even really break even in music right now.
So it makes sense to ask: am I going to release King Jaymes, which drops the day after tomorrow, on vinyl? I’ll let you in on a secret. I didn’t know myself. But I’m smart enough about the stuff I don’t know to know who to ask, and I knew this was not a question for marketing. This was a questions for Zsolt.
If you’ve just joined us, Zsolt Virag is my co-conspirator in the effort to overturn the world’s gloomy future with great music. He has taken what I am capable of giving, from an engineering and performance standpoint, and he has created lush, crystalline, sonic temples of mixes that only a genius, and only a really sensitive genius who has an enormous capacity for empathetic connection that allows him to understand the artist’s intention inside the noise, can create. Zsolt is my Sir George Martin. And Sir Zsolt races motorcycles to settle his mind.
When I tell Zsolt that he is my GM, he doesn’t disagree, but he describes me as a prodigy who is making a real commercial record out of thin air with not much more than a mic, a Taylor guitar, and a living room. He is not my producer, really. He’s my mixing and mastering engineer, but his talents are so incredible, and he’s so inspirational to work with, that our collaborations are a lot like working with a producer. When he tells me what I’m doing is rare, I believe him. But I wouldn’t really know it otherwise.
Zsolt lives in Serbia, but he loves American music and his command of English is spectacular, especially considering he’s never had the immersion experience. When I asked him what he thought about me marketing a vinyl version of what we had created, he responded with something that he described later as off the cuff. He could and would write much more if he had the time. And I know he’s not lying. Because this ‘off the cuff’ overview schooled me big time.
And so I want to share it with you. Because there are a lot of people out there who really think they know vinyl, and they don’t bother to ask about these things. When you know the following, you will look really smart at parties. So here it is, all you pretty much need to know about vinyl from the genius mixer’s perspective:
Vinyl requires a new mix and a different master. You see, vinyl only works with mono and stereo, and so all that beautiful width I created will disappear on vinyl.
Stereo width is made predominantly with anti-phase information, so the needle can’t at the same time move to the right (main signal) and to the left (anti-phase signal) and vice versa. That is one of the limitations of the medium.
Second, all the bass information would have to be summed to mono, because in all modern music of today, you have a high emphasis on wide stereo bass. Your music is no exception, I made sure of that. But stereo bass would make the needle jump out of the grooves and skip, so it’s a must to keep it mono.
The level of the tracks as well would need to be much much lower, somewhere in the realm of Apple Music, and your vocals might need to be de-essed more. They are perfectly fine now, but vinyl has a tendency to react poorly to sibilance, causing again the needle to skip if there is a high burst of high freq energy.
As you can see those would all require a new mix (not a complete zeroing out of the faders and starting from scratch, but zoning in on the key issues I mentioned) and a new master. And I heard it’s not cheap to press vinyl.
He’s right on that last score. Vinyl is so much in demand right now that you have to line up a facility a long time in advance. And America moves fast, just as fast at throwing things away as making things. There aren’t many facilities that can do it. You can guess what that has done to the cost.
So, for now, or as of Friday, you’re gonna have to listen to King Jaymes on plain old digital. But! There are differences between digital files. What you hear on Apple Music and Spotify are not the WAV files that I deliver to the distributor. Each has their own method for reducing the file size to something like an MP3, with Apple spending a lot of effort to emphasize their “lossless” experience.
To hear the original WAV files of any of my songs, you need to hop on this ride and sign up for my email or follow my Insta. I’ll let you know when and where those are available. For example, right now you can stream an exclusive preview of the album-only track When I Was Young on my homepage. That’s a WAV file. If you scroll down you might find a few more. If you want to own your own copies, that will be available soon on my Patreon.
I feel like the astronaut listening to the countdown now. As I write this is there are 110,753 seconds to go. I plan to make every single one of them count. (Get it?)
Click here to presave King Jaymes.
I’ve been asked if I’m releasing vinyl. If you don’t know, because you’re not anyone’s stan, vinyl is one of the major ways musicians make money now. Vinyl editions of albums have become so popular that one of this free land’s most popular artists released an album with multiple covers so that her superfans would have to collect them all. If you’re not actively touring or having your songs regularly placed in film and television, vinyl would be pretty much the only way to turn any kind of profit or even really break even in music right now.
So it makes sense to ask: am I going to release King Jaymes, which drops the day after tomorrow, on vinyl? I’ll let you in on a secret. I didn’t know myself. But I’m smart enough about the stuff I don’t know to know who to ask, and I knew this was not a question for marketing. This was a questions for Zsolt.
If you’ve just joined us, Zsolt Virag is my co-conspirator in the effort to overturn the world’s gloomy future with great music. He has taken what I am capable of giving, from an engineering and performance standpoint, and he has created lush, crystalline, sonic temples of mixes that only a genius, and only a really sensitive genius who has an enormous capacity for empathetic connection that allows him to understand the artist’s intention inside the noise, can create. Zsolt is my Sir George Martin. And Sir Zsolt races motorcycles to settle his mind.
When I tell Zsolt that he is my GM, he doesn’t disagree, but he describes me as a prodigy who is making a real commercial record out of thin air with not much more than a mic, a Taylor guitar, and a living room. He is not my producer, really. He’s my mixing and mastering engineer, but his talents are so incredible, and he’s so inspirational to work with, that our collaborations are a lot like working with a producer. When he tells me what I’m doing is rare, I believe him. But I wouldn’t really know it otherwise.
Zsolt lives in Serbia, but he loves American music and his command of English is spectacular, especially considering he’s never had the immersion experience. When I asked him what he thought about me marketing a vinyl version of what we had created, he responded with something that he described later as off the cuff. He could and would write much more if he had the time. And I know he’s not lying. Because this ‘off the cuff’ overview schooled me big time.
And so I want to share it with you. Because there are a lot of people out there who really think they know vinyl, and they don’t bother to ask about these things. When you know the following, you will look really smart at parties. So here it is, all you pretty much need to know about vinyl from the genius mixer’s perspective:
Vinyl requires a new mix and a different master. You see, vinyl only works with mono and stereo, and so all that beautiful width I created will disappear on vinyl.
Stereo width is made predominantly with anti-phase information, so the needle can’t at the same time move to the right (main signal) and to the left (anti-phase signal) and vice versa. That is one of the limitations of the medium.
Second, all the bass information would have to be summed to mono, because in all modern music of today, you have a high emphasis on wide stereo bass. Your music is no exception, I made sure of that. But stereo bass would make the needle jump out of the grooves and skip, so it’s a must to keep it mono.
The level of the tracks as well would need to be much much lower, somewhere in the realm of Apple Music, and your vocals might need to be de-essed more. They are perfectly fine now, but vinyl has a tendency to react poorly to sibilance, causing again the needle to skip if there is a high burst of high freq energy.
As you can see those would all require a new mix (not a complete zeroing out of the faders and starting from scratch, but zoning in on the key issues I mentioned) and a new master. And I heard it’s not cheap to press vinyl.
He’s right on that last score. Vinyl is so much in demand right now that you have to line up a facility a long time in advance. And America moves fast, just as fast at throwing things away as making things. There aren’t many facilities that can do it. You can guess what that has done to the cost.
So, for now, or as of Friday, you’re gonna have to listen to King Jaymes on plain old digital. But! There are differences between digital files. What you hear on Apple Music and Spotify are not the WAV files that I deliver to the distributor. Each has their own method for reducing the file size to something like an MP3, with Apple spending a lot of effort to emphasize their “lossless” experience.
To hear the original WAV files of any of my songs, you need to hop on this ride and sign up for my email or follow my Insta. I’ll let you know when and where those are available. For example, right now you can stream an exclusive preview of the album-only track When I Was Young on my homepage. That’s a WAV file. If you scroll down you might find a few more. If you want to own your own copies, that will be available soon on my Patreon.
I feel like the astronaut listening to the countdown now. As I write this is there are 110,753 seconds to go. I plan to make every single one of them count. (Get it?)
Click here to presave King Jaymes.
