Since last Friday, so just over a week ago, I’ve been making music, and today, I’m releasing my first EP.
I know this is not the post that I had promised you. I thought I would write an article about Blade, but then… I didn’t feel like it. I said I would write a short story, but then… I downloaded Mixcraft 9 Recording Studio.
On Saturday last week, I found myself still needing to even decide what I was going to write about, and instead, I opened Mixcraft and immediately knew that I wasn’t going to get a blog post done. When something catches my attention, I fixate, and it’s all I can think about. It was all I could think about last weekend: I want to make another song.
But I know myself, I knew things would go down that way, so on Saturday, when I started playing with Mixcraft and layering tracks together to form a new song, I said, “You know what? If I’m going to do this instead of what I should be doing, then I’m going to make it work for me.”
LEANING INTO IT
So I got to work on a spooky song. And then I made two more songs. And I even have two songs from before that (they’re not good, but one of them is pretty funny). By Tuesday, I was done with my songs. I uploaded them to my Youtube Music and listened to them in my car on repeat, subjected my child to them over and over. I continued to tweak things that I realized I didn’t like or I realized didn’t work. It’s amazing how much different things sound through different headphones or speakers.
Finally, I went to type up this same post yesterday. I uploaded the videos to Youtube (just my music tracks with a still image of the album cover I made). And THEN I checked the licensing on the royalty-free music that came with my Humble Bundle that got me Mixcraft 9 for cheap.
I learned from the FAQ on the music library’s website that I was not allowed to release my media without some amount of my own original audio included. Literally any amount of audio. And that was something that I hadn’t included yet.
SO HOW THE HELL WAS I GOING TO FIX MY MUSIC?
Now, I could have made this fix very quickly and easily and recorded some sort of intro/outro and appended the same thing to each song.
But I’m too creative for my own good; I got literary with it.
So yesterday, the day I should have posted this blog post, I sought out public domain literary works to read into my three songs. Now, you’ll find quotes from Hemingway and Stoker, and even a song with my own musical vocals (not just a reading), inspired heavily by Robert Frost’s poem “Acquainted with the Night” that gave me WAY TOO MUCH trouble. Harmonizing with yourself is hard when you’ve never done it before!
THE EP – AFTER DARK COMES SUNRISE
So without further ado, here is AFTER DARK COMES SUNRISE:
OCTOBER’S THEME
NEXT MONTH. Let’s celebrate Halloween by playing literary dress up and writing some FAN(G) FICTION. I’m going to try very hard to make some of my fanfics into reality and share them, but if you have vampire fanfiction you would like to share with an audience full of vampire lovers, contact me on Twitter @shailo_sator or email me at hi@shailosator.com.
If you wanna come hang out with me and other vamp lovers on Discord, I’ve got the server for you!
Join the Vampire Fiction You Won’t Hate Discord.