13 steps to take when you're recording and publishing your bands music

Since I’m going to mention different persons involved with the project of making STUD’s 3rd album by their names, it’s fair to briefly introduce myself and the other guys in the band. I’m Mika Kansikas, the guitar player, songwriter and the producer of STUD’s albums. I’ve also done big part of recording and mixing the albums. The other guys in the band are Ari Toivanen (vocals), Jyrki Partanen (bass) and Stenda Kukkonen (drums). Besides being great musicians and friends for life, they have done their share of adding flavours to the songs here and there, doing the background vocals and percussions, and of course being the most important judges of the end result.

Enough said about us. Let’s jump back to the topic. After my last blog post I started to think that I really didn’t answer my own question: How is it possible to spend 2+ years recording an album before anything is released? So, let me try again. One big reason, of course, is that we have our day jobs, families and other involvements. But when it comes to the actual recording process, there is simply so many time consuming phases to go through before you can proudly hold a copy of your album in your hands. That is, if you still want to make a physical CD, as we do.

I’m just going to make a list of the things that we have been doing to get to the point where we are now, when the first single has been released:

  1.  Doing the initial planning of the whole recording process
  2. Songwriting, writing the lyrics, arranging the songs
  3. Geting the necessary equipment for the project
  4. Making demos of all the songs that will appear on the album
  5. Recording the tracks: drums, bass, guitars, vocals, keyboards, background vocals, percussion
  6. Editing and mixing the tracks
  7. Getting the artwork done for the album and the first single
  8. Mastering the single and the whole album
  9. Having promo CD:s made
  10. Promoting the band and the single
  11. Taking care of the copyright registrations
  12. Having the single available in YouTube, Spotify, iTunes, Google Play, etc.
  13. Releasing the single
As you can see the list is long and I'm sure I already forgot something. What makes the whole thing even trickier is that you're not just doing these things one by one, but you're constantly jumping back and forth between things. And at every stage you must listen to the songs and how they're sounding and evolving, over and over again.

I'm sure this is familiar to those of you, who have done all this in your own projects. However, in my next posts I will be covering the different phases more thoroughly.

-Mika

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