Welcome to the third installment of our weekly series on crowdfunding, also known as 'fan funding'. The goal of this series is to educate artists.jpg)
on crowdfunding with actual stories from other artists who have had the pleasure, or displeasure, of running their own campaign. Our hope is that you use this information to help you decide and/or plan your own crowdfunding campaign.
Cameron Hays, of Choke The Word, contacted me after learning that I was looking for stories from artists about their crowdfunding experiences. He wanted to present a two-pronged approach with both his experiences with Kickstarter and the band's engineer/producer's experiences with working out an affordable recording budget.
Cameron Hays / Brad Smalling - Kickstarter
Cameron:
In 2010, my band decided we needed to record an album. We’d been playing live shows consistently for some time, but we weren’t getting any traction because we didn’t have anything to sell at our shows and the only audio tracks we had to promote ourselves were a handful of demos we all hated. Unfortunately, even with all six of us working full-time jobs, the cost to finance something of quality was just unrealistic. It turns out that it costs quite a lot to record and release a CD!
Some acquaintances of mine had been using the “ransom” model to finance their literary projects, and I wondered if this couldn’t work for a small independent band as well. The concept wasn’t completely alien, but most of the bands using a donation system were much larger bands like Radiohead or Nine Inch Nails that had a substantial pool of fans to help contribute. We hadn’t really heard of any local groups trying this out.
For those unfamiliar, here’s how crowdsourcing works. The artist sets up a site that includes the fundraising goal along with a tiered list of incentives for people to donate. Donated funds are held in escrow by a third party, meaning no one is actually charged when they offer to help. The money is only transferred if the fundraising goal is met, after which the artist receives the money and the artists are obligated to fulfill the terms of the project and provide the donors with whatever incentives were used to get them to contribute. In other words, if the fundraising is successful, everyone wins – the artist has a fully financed project and donors receive their incentives; if the fundraising fails, no one loses anything and the monies in escrow go back to the donors.
I pitched the idea to the band and everyone was willing to give it a shot. I think we all viewed it as a big experiment where we didn’t really have anything to lose. If we couldn’t generate the funding we needed, we could always fall back on getting second jobs or selling our plasma or something to make this recording process happen. We looked at two websites that could handle our fundraising drive for us: Sellaband.com and Kickstarter.com. Ultimately, we went with Kickstarter (which isn’t specifically music focused) because they allowed us more control over the amount of money we were asking for, and because I knew people who had used it to pay for the publishing of their books.
Estimating our budget was the first step, and also where we made our first mistake: we should have asked for more money. Having never done this before (and being the first band in Colorado to try), we weren’t sure how much money we would realistically be able to raise. Sellaband.com set the minimum for recording an album at $10,000, which seemed completely unrealistic to us. Even with the site itself sending interested parties our way, we just couldn’t see how a band with no track record beyond playing local venues could reach that amount. This whole thing was still a relatively new concept, so we were under no illusions that there was a massive pool of potential donors just waiting for a project to come along for them to bankroll.
We set our fundraising goal at $4,000; which seemed like a difficult but achievable goal. With that total in mind, we began searching for a studio that could work with our budget. There are a number of really great studios in Colorado, but with our budget in mind the field narrowed. Our band includes some interesting challenges for an audio engineer, namely that we have a violin and a cello in addition to the usual bass, drums, vocals, guitars and some electronic sounds. Furthermore, with 6 members of the band, it didn’t make sense for us to track all our parts at the same time. Scheduling a full week where everyone could be in the studio to do the recording was going to be impossible, so we were looking for a studio that could accommodate us recording one piece at a time, but also one with an engineer/producer who was comfortable with recording bowed stringed instruments as well as loud abusive guitar tones.
We toured Evergroove Studio, in the mountains outside of Evergreen, CO and met with the owner/operator Brad Smalling. We immediately hit it off with Brad on a personal and musical level. He knew the bands we liked, he seemed to “get” what we were trying to do, and he put us at ease regarding the difficulty of recording violins and cellos. So while Brad figured out logistics, we went to work on trying to raise $4,000 on the internet.
Brad:
Before they came to me or even started their Kickstarter campaign, Choke The Word had ‘friended’ us on MySpace. So, I was already aware of the band and really enjoyed their music. I remember thinking to myself, "I want to work with this band!" So, when Cameron and Melati (the singer) came in to tour the studio I was pretty excited.
During the tour of the studio, I also felt we hit it off really well. They seemed to enjoy the space and, like Cameron stated, I was able to reassure them that we had experience in recording stringed instruments. The biggest question came down to budget: could we record and mix their entire record for $4,000? While that amount is a lot of money, you have to understand how much time and work goes into recording an album.
You might think that the usual four minute Pop/Rock song could be recorded in, well, four minutes. However, let's look at the reality of it. If each member of the band is doing their part separately, and you have six members in the band, and let's say it takes an average of three takes to get a performance they are proud of; that four minute song just tuned into an 54 minute song in tracking minutes. Allow me to show my work:
(6 performers x 3 takes each) x 4 minutes = 54 minutes
That amount doesn't even include the setup time to select the correct microphone for the instrument and find the right placement of that microphone. Now take that amount and multiply it by 10 (the average number of songs per album) and we have 540 minutes –nine hours!- of tracking time (not taking into account and technical issue with instruments, changing of instruments, breaks, editing, evaluating, last minute arrangement changes, etc).
Allow me to throw one more "oh yeah!" at you…. Choke The Word doesn't write four minute Pop songs. Their songs average four and a half minutes, and while that doesn't seem like adding much to the equation, once you do the math you'll find that we are now at 810 minutes(more than thirteen hours) of raw tracking. Again, that excludes any setup, complications, and last minute arrangement changes that are part of every project.
Those thirteen hours don’t even include mixing time.
When it comes to mixing, there are many, many, bands that want to rush the process. This makes no sense to us here at Evergroove. Why would a band spend so much time and energy to get the arrangement, performance, and feel of a song right and then ask me to create the perfect mix in, say, two hours? It baffles me. Luckily, Choke The Word had some recording experience and knew exactly what it can take to get a great mix. Ideally, we spend a day on each mix.
As you can see, recording can quickly get expensive due to all the things that have to happen in the background, as well as unforeseen changes. As they were looking at me for approval, these thoughts were reeling through my head and I was wondering how to figure it all out for them. I didn't want to trouble - or even frighten them - with all these numbers, so I came up with an answer pretty quickly. I deducted the cost of mixing from their budget and calculated that the amount left over would buy them seven days (10 hours a day) in the studio. For a band like Choke The Word, that's cutting it pretty close.
At Evergroove we never want a budget to get in the way of making a great record. While that doesn't mean we can record for free, we recognized Choke The Word was going to great efforts to make sure they recorded the best album they could for their fans. Because of this and the fact that they were planning to pay the amount in full, in advance, I made a decision there and then to throw in three additional days. That meant that for $4,000 they received 10 tracking days and 10 mixing days including recalls on the mixes. Anything above and beyond the 10 days, for tracking, they would need to pay the hourly rate for. I presented this offer to Cameron and Melati and they were very agreeable. It was now the band's responsibility to make sure that they could track a record in 10 days.
When it comes to recording an album, the logistics are usually straightforward, depending on the band's availability. Generally you start with rhythm tracks like drums, bass, and rhythm guitar(s), all playing at the same time but utilizing the isolation booths. Once those instruments are tracked you then move on to overdubs like second guitar, solos, percussion, vocals, etc. With Choke The Word, this wasn't the case. There was an urgent matter within the band that would make the scheduling and logistics a little crazy: Grace (the violinist) was expected to give birth within the first six weeks of the beginning of the recording process, so we really had to move fast. Cameron was a huge help in planning the scheduling because he had already had an idea of how to tackle the tracking order in such a way that Grace could kind of move to the front of the line. Because of the varied and crazy schedules, each member would track separately in this order: bass and samples, strings, drums, guitar, solos, vocals, and finally percussion and any other auxiliary instruments.
So, how does one record the bass first without at least the drums to follow along with? Good question. Cameron does the arranging for the band with music software and had put together a custom click track along with synthesized instruments of all the parts that they could play along with until we got the real bass, drums, and strings recorded. This helped us get started quickly, so the string section could come in and get their parts done before Grace went in to labor.
Cameron:
In order to put up a Kickstarter project, you must be invited or referred to the site by someone who has already used it. The site points out that these invitations are fairly easy to find, since you can email any project listed directly from their site. We secured our invitation from Arc Dream Publishing, who had a project that I had donated to a few months earlier. The next step was setting up payment, which went through Amazon Payments. This process establishes the credibility of the fundraiser; it can’t be done anonymously, so potential donors can be sure that they aren’t just sending money to a random internet denizen who has no intention of finishing the project.
After establishing our fundraising goal, we set up our incentives. For $10, donors would get a digital copy of the finished album. For $15, they would get the digital copy and a hard copy of the actual CD. $30 added a t-shirt. $100 also put the donor’s name in the liner notes of the CD. $200 would put the donor on our guest list for all our shows for the remainder of our tenure as a band. Finally, at the $4,000 level, the donor could name the album. This last incentive was mostly a joke, since we couldn’t imagine anyone putting $4,000 into a recording project (as one of the members of the band put it, “For $4,000, they can name my first born child!”).
The fundraising drive was scheduled to last 90 days. If we didn’t reach the $4,000 mark in that time, than the experiment was a failure and we had to figure out how to raise the money in some other way. When the project went live, we emailed all our closest friends and family immediately. We reached 25% of our total within 24 hours. Within the first week we were nearing half. Then the donations began to taper off and our fundraising drive reached a plateau.
Part of the problem was explaining the crowdsourcing model in a succinct way to our friends and fans. Some of our potential donors didn’t have the money at the time, so we had to explain that the funds were only transferred at the end of the 90 days if the funding was successful. Others didn’t want to put money into something that might not happen, so we’d explain that if we didn’t reach our goal, no money actually changed hands. For some, the whole concept was so alien that they really had no idea what they were asking for, but that they assured us they’d buy the album when it came out; our response was that if we didn’t get funding, there wasn’t going to be an album at all. Finally, there were a few people who didn’t realize exactly how expensive recording an album was in the first place and thought we were being unrealistic at setting our goal that high.
In retrospect, we should have anticipated these sorts of questions. We also should have prepared a short video presentation for the Kickstarter page. Seeing a short pitch with real human beings in it makes the project seem more personal; all we had was a relatively formal, but excruciatingly vague description of what we were trying to do. Sure it made sense for our fans who had seen us live, but it didn’t introduce our band to strangers stumbling across the Kickstarter page. All we had was a photo of us on stage performing, and since we were all very unhappy with the quality of our demo recording, we didn’t even have an example of what we sounded like.
We should have kept a regular blog of the process. Kickstarter has an option to post updates so that anyone can see them or just the people who have already donated to the project. We should have been more diligent in keeping our supporters apprised of our progress. As we were talking to Brad at Evergroove studio, they should have been in on the loop. When we were working out logistics, they should have been informed. When we were hurriedly writing two final songs for the album, we should have been telling them about it. In fact, we shouldn’t have stopped even after we reached our fundraising goal! The average listener has no idea how long the recording process takes, so some of them assumed that we had broken up while we were spending our weekends with overdubs.
But our biggest regret was not asking for more money. $4,000 seemed so ridiculous at the time and some people close to us shook their heads at us for asking for that much money. We’ve made it clear that recording a quality album isn’t cheap. We hadn’t budgeted for mastering, printing, album art, or even for the cost of t-shirts and shipping to our donors. Bands trying this model need to try to take every possible expense into account (look for a budget template on Google) or plan on paying for those unanticipated items out of pocket (like we did).
No one in Choke The Word is particularly outgoing. None of us have that knack for meeting people and networking and ultimately we all were a bit reticent to spam everyone we knew with the link to our Kickstarter page. We overcame this hesitation quickly and began shamelessly and selfishly self-promoting at every possible opportunity. We’d include the link in signatures on emails, put the link on internet forums, send direct emails to our contacts pleading for assistance, play the guilt card with family members, post the link every few days on all the social networking media possible (myspace, facebook, twitter, etc). We also printed homemade business cards with the name of our band and the URL of the Kickstarter page rather than our band website to distribute at shows. As bad as it felt to harass and annoy everyone we knew about this project, we were determined to make sure we reached our goal because recording this album was intensely important to us. This was not a mistake.
We did, ultimately, exceed our fundraising goal with a few weeks to spare, making us the first Colorado band to successfully use Kickstarter to raise money for an album. We had set aside some of our own band funds in case we needed to push the total over the top ourselves, but we never needed to. The money was transferred to our account in a matter of days. In retrospect, we should have sent an email to every donor reminding them of their pledge and thanking them for their help. There were a few people who were confused about the transfer and one band member’s relative tried to protest the charge because she didn’t now what it was.
We started recording a few days after the money transfer.
Brad:
While the recording process was very similar to other bands that have come through the studio there were some interesting differences.
Before Cameron came in to lay down his bass parts he sent me the custom click tracks and synthesized instrument files so I could import them into Pro Tools and make sure everything lined up properly. This also gave me a chance to go ahead and create a separate session for each song, which helped save a little time during tracking.
The day came to start recording. Cameron came in with his bass, pedals, amp, and cabinet. To get a really good tone for rock bass and guitar it's often necessary to operate the amps at a pretty high volume. This can be very fatiguing for an artist if they are in the same room as that amp for eight hours! In these circumstances, we load the amp and cabinet in to the Live Room and then locate the musician in the Control Room with I. The connection from the player to the amp is made through special tie lines we have installed in the walls. This means the loud amp is in a completely different room than the player, so we can have it at the right level while the player is with me listening at a comfortable volume. This also eliminates the need for headphones and facilitates quick, easy, communication between the artist and I.
Cameron cruised through his bass parts pretty quickly getting everything in just a couple takes. There were some minor edits which we handled as needed and we even had to change some basic parts on the fly because they weren't translating very well in the studio. Choke The Word also uses a handful of samples in their songs and Cameron triggers these in real time with a sampler foot pedal. So, after he was done with his bass parts, we recorded the samples in real time so that they pretty much lined up where he wanted them. Again, with these there were some minor edits and we handled those as necessary.
After we completed tracking the bass I had a strange realization…I still had no real idea of what these songs were going to sound like. At this point I had nothing but a real bass guitar over synthesized approximations of what the rest of the band would be playing! This was the most fascinating part of recording this record for me. I was able to listen to these songs kind of be "born" and "grow" in the studio. It was really exciting!
With the bass tracked, we now had a solid, familiar, rhythmic reference for the strings to come in and record their parts to. Grace and Allison came in together to do their parts, but for various reasons decided to track their parts separately. Allison brought in two cellos of differing scales. She admitted that she preferred playing the less expensive cello since it was what she played onstage, but she was concerned about the sound quality because this inexpensive cello was set up for live use in a rock band (electrified with a pickup for amplification). We decided that it couldn't hurt to try and get a usable tone out of it because, after all, she had the other cello available if we needed it.
While Allison played the cello I moved around listening to the instrument in various sports trying to find a good location to place the microphone. I found a spot and mic'd it up with a Peluso 2247 going to a Great River preamp. It sounded surprisingly good, but not quite right. It had kind of a "dead" tone to it. That's when Allison brought it to my attention that they cello was completely stuffed with foam to reduce the inner resonances to help prevent feedback on stage. We pulled all the foam out (and there was a lot), repositioned the microphone and there it was… a surprisingly great cello tone from a very inexpensive instrument. I was happy we were able to pull this off because I knew I'd get a better, overall, performance from Allison with the larger scale cello since she was more comfortable with it. There are times when it makes sense to sacrifice a little bit of tone in exchange for a great performance. Considering this cello tone was to be used in a heavy, rock band mix, this was one of those times. Allison also tracked her parts fairly quickly. We handled some minor edits as necessary and moved onto the violin parts.
Grace also brought two instruments to the tracking session. One was her acoustic violin that is fairly bright, with a lovely upper mid-range resonance. The other was her custom pink, electric, stage violin in the shape of flames and complete with flashing lights. During the initial tracking, we were going back and forth between the acoustic and electric violin depending on the song. In the end, anything tracked with the electric violin was re-tracked with the acoustic one. This was a decision that I was glad we all made because the acoustic violin blended with the acoustic cello much better.
Because Grace was about 8 months pregnant when she came in, her initial tracking sessions didn't go badly but they didn't go as well as we hoped. Understandably, Grace fatigued quite easily and we just didn't get the best performances out of her. We decided to go ahead and use the initial performances so that we could move forward but that she'd come back after the baby was born. When she did come back, we got great takes from Grace and she pushed through her parts like the rest of the band: pretty quickly with just some minor edits.
Rather than go to guitars next, Cameron felt that a lot of the guitar cues came from the drums, so that is what we tackled next. We booked Chris (the drummer) for three days to do the drums.
While we take all instruments seriously, drums are the foundation of a rock song. The snare the kick, the big tom fills…they all get your foot taping, and who doesn't love playing air drums? As a result, we take a little longer with drum setup than a lot of studios, and because of that drummers are very happy with the drum tones we achieve. Setup for Chris' drums took about 3 - maybe 4 - hours so that we could make sure we had not only chosen the correct microphones for the job, but also took the time to make sure they were in the best location possible and as close to in phase with one another as we could get them. Once we had everything where I thought it was sounding good I had Chris record a bit and then come in and listen and make sure he was happy. After a couple small changes we were tracking drums.
We tracked about six hours each day. That’s a good number of hours to spend playing drums in a day and was a reasonable compromise to the 10-hour days we usually spend in the studio. This prevented Chris from getting too fatigued and helped ensure we'd get good takes. From an arrangement standpoint, there were a couple of sections of songs that just weren’t working out. Sometimes Chris hadn't quite settled on exactly what he wanted to play and in a couple what he was used to playing didn’t connect right. Those took some time to get through, but nothing major. After a handful of minor edits we were done.
To this point, Cameron had been able to attend all the sessions but wasn't able to make it to the drum sessions (the studio is in the mountains about an hour away from Denver). I decided to setup a USB webcam and stream the drum sessions live via Ustream so Cameron could observe and provide input. You can see us tracking the song ‘Horsemen’ HERE.
With the drums tracked we could move on to guitars. We tracked guitars in the same manner as the bass with the loud amp in the Live Room and Mike (the guitarist) in the Control Room with us. I also took a clean DI signal from Mike's guitar so that if we decided to dial-in a different tone he wouldn't have to re-play the part. If that occurred, we could re-amp the part later through a different setup. This proved to be a smart move on a later tracking date.
After a small technical problem with his preamp, I setup mics on his guitar cab and we got down to the business of guitars. Mike tracked about five hours each day before his hands started getting tired, but he knocked his tracks out quickly and again there was very little editing. The only hurdle we had was the guitar solo for ‘Secretion.’ Toward the end of the song the entire band erupts in to this larger than life, war-like, epic feel and we needed a guitar solo to match. At initial tracking, Mike was close but we weren't quite getting the same epic feel from the solo as we had from the rest of the band. Mike took a rough mix home and worked on it, came back, and then nailed it. By the way, remember that DI I was talking about and how that would prove a good decision? When Mike came back for his solos he brought a new guitar amp simulator called an AxeFX by Fractal Audio. He wanted to track the solo through that and re-amp the rest of his guitar parts through it too. Easy enough!
At this point all that was left was vocals and I don't say that lightly. The human voice is probably the most personal and most difficult instrument to capture. Luckily, Melati has an amazing voice and knows how to use it. Tracking was fairly smooth, with only one hiccup in the song ‘Cerrado.’ During the bridge, the drums play big, thunderous, tom fills which Melati kind of "locks" to vocally. Well, the tom fills had changed enough during drum tracking that the cadence Melati was used to singing really clashed with the toms. We came up with a new cadence and Melati took a rough mix home and practiced so that when she came back she could nail it quickly. Again, Choke The Word is full of great musicians, so things went at a brisk pace. Melati could go for about five hours before her voice became tired and she needed to stop. She also sings in another Denver band, Seris, and they have an aggressive practice schedule, so we needed to be careful not to push her vocals too hard so that she could still be able to contribute her talents to her other project.
After vocals, Chris came back in for just a couple hours to do some shaker, cymbal rolls, and other miscellaneous percussion. These were great ideas and added extra depth and complexity to the music.
As I've said before, the tracking was pretty straightforward for Choke The Word. The really interesting part was slowly hearing these songs come together in the studio as the synthetic “scratch” tracks were gradually replaced by real performances. I had a great time and I feel like the band did as well. It was great to be part of the process.
I should probably address mixing a bit, but the reality is that writing about mixing is pretty hard to do (as someone once said: “dancing about architecture”). I will say that with all the layers, samples, complex time changes, etc., this was one of the most challenging records we've ever mixed. There was quite a bit of automation and we had to be use EQ in a creative way to get everything to fit in the mix and still feel full and present. I'm proud of the record and of what Choke The Word has achieved.
Cameron:
We sat on the finished CD for a month or so as we figured out how to pay for the expenses we hadn’t anticipated. When we realized that we’d have to pay for a chunk of the production costs ourselves, we set up a spreadsheet that included all the costs and the amount that each band member had paid. We were able to figure out what percentage of our total costs had been covered by each band member so that when we began to bring in profits from the sale of the CD and other merchandise, each band member would be paid back at a comparable rate and everyone would break even at the same time.
One of our $200 level donors contributed an additional $300 out of the goodness of his heart (and perhaps some personal investment in seeing the completion of the project) to pay for the liner art to be completed by Vaggelis Ntousakis, an artist from Greece whose work we found online. His story is fascinating and worth reading about on his website
Our CD release party was April 8th, 2011, 10 days short of the one year anniversary of the successful completion of our Kickstarter crowdsourcing drive. We have almost broken even on un-budgeted personal costs to make the album and we haven’t felt pressured to sell copies to try to dig ourselves out of a financial hole. The CD is available on CDBaby, and the album is available for download on iTunes, Amazon, Bandcamp and a variety of other music sites. You should buy it.
Cameron Hays plays bass and electronics/samples for Choke The Word and is the primary arranger/composer for the band. His day job involves teaching history, psychology and music classes at an alternative high school.
Brad Smalling owns and operates Evergroove Studio, a solar powered recording studio outside of Evergreen, Colorado. He also plays bass with hard rock band The Threatened. He can usually be found in the local venues scouting new acts for his label and booking agency Mountain Size Records & Media.
Check Out More From Crowdfunded Music:
Making It Count
Leap Of Faith
20 Comments | Tags:advice, crowdfunding, erik peterson, fan funding, marketing | Category: Apps, Tools and Resources, Lessons, Marketing, Music Biz Advice, Recording and Production
also known as 'fan funding'. The goal of this series is to educate artists on crowdfunding with actual stories from other artists who have had the pleasure, or displeasure, of running their own campaign. Our hope is that you use this information to help you decide and/or plan your own crowdfunding campaign.
Welcome to the second installment of our .gif)
Welcome to the first installment of our 
