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Kyla Tilley Solo Album
Many of you are wondering what the deal is with the Kyla Tilley solo album I recorded a couple years ago. Well, you’ll all be horrified to hear that I recorded everything just a bit too quietly, and I have to do the whole thing again. There was a bit of time in which we thought only certain parts needed to be re-recorded, or that the recordings could be saved somehow, but after several passes, it’s been determined that the album as recorded would not be able to be mastered to a professional level. It is unfortunate that I avoided coming to this conclusion as long as I did, but there you have it. Sunk cost fallacy I suppose.
I’m just about ready to tackle the whole thing again.
I’ve been oscillating between ideas for how to approach the next wave of recording. I briefly pondered making an RPM style album out of it, but scratched that idea. Part of me just wants to get the album over with quickly and do the recording all in a couple weeks, but I really don’t think I can (or want) to take the time away from everything else to do that. I’ve wondered if I should just spend a few weeks practising then head to a studio to do it all in a couple sessions, but our living room does have very nice acoustics, and I have enough other things on the go that I’d rather take it one song at a time. I made up a 44 day guitar/vocal plan in which I gave myself 3 days of rehearsal and one day of recording per song, followed by a hand off to mix and then adding anything else that needs adding after the 44 days, but I found even that too time consuming. I’m now leaning towards a one song a week approach, but I still need to make a game plan for how that will work. In any case, there will be a bit of experimentation before I settle on something. At least I’m still happy with all my click tracks, so that’s a pile of pre-production work I don’t need to do again.
I have made a couple small changes to the song list since I began. I’m taking two of the Tea & Bread songs off the album, as I think they’d now be better suited to a Tea & Bread album. Tea & Bread the band was born out of me asking Ed Hudson to play violin on the song Tea and Bread for this album, and now it would seem very odd to have our eponymous song on a different project’s album. There will still be some violin on the album though. I’m also going to pop an instrumental piece I’ve been working on into the song list. I’m really impressed by the sound of my classical guitar, even on the poor recordings, so I want to showcase that a little more. I’m aiming for a pretty minimalist album. It will mostly be guitar and voice, with a little bass on some songs, maybe some touches of backing vocals, a bit of violin and possibly percussion on a couple songs but no more. A number of people have told me that plain guitar and voice isn’t enough for an album, but all my favourite singer-songwriter albums consist mostly of voice and solo instrument, so I’m going to go with what I like to listen to.