New CD for download: Yellowgold - The Mellower
Yesterday saw me finally release a new album under the Yellowgold moniker! It's available for download and is completely FREE. It's being offered in a number of un-DRM'd (lossy and lossless) audio file formats so you can choose your favorite method.
Yellowgold is the name of a solo project I began way back in 1992. My buddy John Kuehne and I were playing a lot of music together, and both of us individually picked up a Tascam 4-track tape recorder. From there, we amassed a huge collection of master tapes filled with collaborative music as well as our own solo projects.
Each of us named our solo projects (his was The Fabulous Medicine Men) and we even went as far as to give them fictional histories and discographies, which we later went through and filled like requests. To this day, I've never finished the number of "albums" listed in Yellowgold's fictional discography. For the record, this album wasn't actually on that list either.
The Mellower began around two years ago when I purchased a new acoustic Ibanez guitar. If you are interested in spurring your creativity, buy new equipment! Works every time.
Then, over the course of the next few years, I'd record my own jam sessions to mini-disc. Later I'd sit down with the jam sessions, pick out the gems, and save them to audio files on my computer. This became my idea bank for The Mellower.
Anytime I felt inspired to produce a new track in Pro Tools, I'd pull open my idea bank and thumb through the ideas (of which there ended up being many!) If something caught my ear, I'd begin on that project. I tweaked these songs continuously over the course of the last eight months. I'd burn the playlist to CD anytime I had a lot of chores to run to get a sense of the current state of all songs. Also, I'd move the most recent playlist to my iPod Nano before going on a big trip with airplane time in order to listen in that noisy environment, writing notes about things that struck me during each listen. Then I'd incorporate those changes when I made it back home. I did this at least six times for The Mellower. I could definitely say that I am sick of listening to this album!
But I am extremely happy with the final result. At a certain point, you just have to pull the trigger when it comes to releasing something like this... because you can be too much of a perfectionist and never think it's "ready."
I used Bandcamp.com to host the album. Brent Kelley, a good friend and ex-drummer of Freak in a Jar, used it to distribute his own music, Laengthengurthe, and I was blown away at how clean the site is, and the amazing download options given to the listener. They make it easy to set up links to your Paypal account in the case that someone wants to give you a few dollars for your music (and people have in the case of The Mellower! Totally unexpected, but pretty awesome to say the least.)
Now, to move on to other projects. Does it ever end? Thankfully, NEVER! ;)
Yellowgold is the name of a solo project I began way back in 1992. My buddy John Kuehne and I were playing a lot of music together, and both of us individually picked up a Tascam 4-track tape recorder. From there, we amassed a huge collection of master tapes filled with collaborative music as well as our own solo projects.
Each of us named our solo projects (his was The Fabulous Medicine Men) and we even went as far as to give them fictional histories and discographies, which we later went through and filled like requests. To this day, I've never finished the number of "albums" listed in Yellowgold's fictional discography. For the record, this album wasn't actually on that list either.
The Mellower began around two years ago when I purchased a new acoustic Ibanez guitar. If you are interested in spurring your creativity, buy new equipment! Works every time.
Then, over the course of the next few years, I'd record my own jam sessions to mini-disc. Later I'd sit down with the jam sessions, pick out the gems, and save them to audio files on my computer. This became my idea bank for The Mellower.
Anytime I felt inspired to produce a new track in Pro Tools, I'd pull open my idea bank and thumb through the ideas (of which there ended up being many!) If something caught my ear, I'd begin on that project. I tweaked these songs continuously over the course of the last eight months. I'd burn the playlist to CD anytime I had a lot of chores to run to get a sense of the current state of all songs. Also, I'd move the most recent playlist to my iPod Nano before going on a big trip with airplane time in order to listen in that noisy environment, writing notes about things that struck me during each listen. Then I'd incorporate those changes when I made it back home. I did this at least six times for The Mellower. I could definitely say that I am sick of listening to this album!
But I am extremely happy with the final result. At a certain point, you just have to pull the trigger when it comes to releasing something like this... because you can be too much of a perfectionist and never think it's "ready."
I used Bandcamp.com to host the album. Brent Kelley, a good friend and ex-drummer of Freak in a Jar, used it to distribute his own music, Laengthengurthe, and I was blown away at how clean the site is, and the amazing download options given to the listener. They make it easy to set up links to your Paypal account in the case that someone wants to give you a few dollars for your music (and people have in the case of The Mellower! Totally unexpected, but pretty awesome to say the least.)
Now, to move on to other projects. Does it ever end? Thankfully, NEVER! ;)
Labels: freak in a jar, music, rock, yellowgold
posted by Jason Howell at 8:59 AM
2 Comments:
Jason,
I saw you're twitter post about your album so I thought I'd check it out, and I absolutely love it! I bought it as soon as I heard the song "One night out".
I don't know if you remember or not, but we met at the last NYC BOL meetup (when you came to install the tricaster, which was broken), so now I can tell my friends "I met him" when you go platinum! Best of luck with the album man.
-Drew
Hi Jason - I dig the album! I've played a couple songs on my radio show AND put it in the show's podcast Keep up the great work!
Colin MacIntyre
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