Introduction by Johnny Grubb
Hi, and welcome to Railroad Earth's new album, Amen Corner!
Someone had the bright idea to maybe give y'all something a little more interactive to do with the new album than just listening to it and telling all your friends how great it is. So, since we recorded this whole thing ourselves, and since more and more people own computers with audio recording and mixing capability, we thought it might be fun to give you a whack at some of the individual tracks from our new record to play with on your own time. This may evolve into a remix contest or it may simply serve as a digital audio primer for some of you out there. In any event, the whole thing will be rolled out kind of like this:
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"Hard Livin'" AUDIO FILES DOWNLOAD NOW |
"Been Down This Road" AUDIO FILES DOWNLOAD NOW |
AUDACITY TUTORIAL DOWNLOAD NOW |
AUDACITY SOFTWARE DOWNLOAD NOW |
We're going to give you guys 3 tunes to work with. The first one will be “Been Down This Road,” since it's pretty straightforward in terms of what needs to be done in order to make it sound good. It's also one of the easier mixes on the album…meaning that, for those of you who have never done anything with multi-track audio files before, this will be the bottom of the life-long learning curve. We will be introducing other tunes in the very near future and will be adding extra content to the already available songs after that (i.e. alternate solos, overdubs, un-effected tracks, etc.).
For those of you who don't already have a mixing application on your computer (i.e. Garage Band, Pro Tools, etc.), we have provided a link to a free program called Audacity, which I've chosen not just for its lack of cost, but also it's stability and relatively easy interface. I'll also be writing a VERY basic tutorial about using this program as the basis. So if you want to get involved, but don't know where to start, start there.
Disclaimer: This whole idea presumes some familiarity with computers, downloading and installing software. Basic stuff, I hope. I will attempt to guide everyone down the path as well as I know how, but user feedback will be a necessary part of the process for everyone. However, keep in mind that we are on tour pretty much this whole summer and I have no idea how popular this project will or won't be. That said, I'll try to answer all questions as quickly as I can and perhaps eventually add an FAQ section if the same questions keep popping up. Please direct all questions to AskGrubb@Railroadearth.com
Additional disclaimer: The file format that we will be offering is .mp3. We'd love to offer .wav files for you, but bandwidth is a commodity that costs us money. Thus, in order to be able to do this thing as close to free as possible for everyone, we've been forced to make a call on how small to pack these files down. All files will be at 128k. We trust you understand.