@blakewalt my 1st album is out "White Noise & Rainbows"

Elektronauts Our Music
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“White Noise & Rainbows” is finally here, and I’m thrilled to share it with you exclusively on Bandcamp :

and all major streaming platforms:

This album is a collection of songs that I wrote and performed over the past years. I used a variety of instruments, including acoustic guitar, piano, electro beats, jazzy drums, synths, and strings to create a rich and textured soundscape.

I chose to keep the live vocals and performances as raw and unfiltered as possible, because I believe that’s where the true emotion lies. Imperfections add character, and I hope you’ll appreciate the honesty and vulnerability in these songs.

It comes with the 4th release: 424

Hope you’ll enjoy it and thank you all for staying around with me during this experiment!

Blake

Original post

My 1st album (I’m fuck old but it’s never too late right?) is ready and I’m releasing the 1st single: Your eyes (This is using the live take from my original Youtube performance but mixed by a mix engineer and mastered by Greg Calbi / Steve Fallone)

you can also find it on Spotify and other streaming platforms below:

Hope you’ll like it. I used the Rev2, SubHarmonicon for the bass line, Animoog for pads/sfx and was using the Octatrack live for the very end.

What’s the experiment about?

I’ve been uploading songs on Youtube, live performances since 2001 I guess.
I picked the songs that would fit together for an album and got them mixed and mastered by professionals. @korpinen helped me a lot in the process and worked on one song too.

So I have 11 songs freshly mixed and mastered and I was about to release the album on bandcamp and be done with it but a friend of mine told me that it would be kinda stupid to spend so much time on an album and not promote it at all.

Well, sure, I get the picture but it’s not like I have a marketing team behind me, I don’t know how to promote myself and all the socials shenanigans are really not for me…

“if the music is good, they will come” was my mind set but it might also be a bit naive nowadays when there are so many music released everyday and with AI… Perhaps my music is not good enough of course, I can’t put this possibility away.

So instead of releasing the whole album out of the blue, I decided I’ll release some singles before,
try promoting them the best I can and see where it goes. I have an idea for the album release date but if I get tired, I might drop it tomorrow so I will keep the release date to myself :sweat_smile:

My past releases on streaming platforms were basically around 0 plays/month. yeah, beat that haha.

So my goal is: 1000 plays for the 1st week of release of each singles. It seems a lot to be honest so I will revise accordingly.

I will try to report real figures so that everyone can see how I will fail. Take a sit and enjoy the drama with me.

Anyway, this post will be a diary of this album release. Would be really happy if people around here shared this adventure with me while enjoying the music!

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There’s no way you’ll ”fail”, this album will be a success no matter what the streaming figures will end up being.

Just checked our emails and it was 14 months ago today you told me you were going to make this album out of your Youtube live performances. So just mixing and mastering all the songs has been a very time-consuming process and the persistence you’ve shown there is yet another factor that makes this album a success in my books.

As far as marketing goes, I think there are many of us here on this forum who can truly relate to your feelings in that department. We don’t know if the singles will reach 1000 plays in the first week but I’m positive there will be people who your music will really speak to.

So congrats on a great album, my friend!

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Great song and video! Congrats on the album.

I guess we all know the struggles of modern self promotion. Don’t rely too much on some algorithm dependent figures, be proud of your music

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@korpinen Thank you for your kind words man. I made you listen to this album so many times, I’m glad you didn’t get bored of it (and all the variations). You were very helpful in bringing the best out of each songs within the limitations I gave you (not changing too much haha). I’m eager to release the song you worked on as it really helped bringing it to the next level but this album wouldn’t have been the same without you so thanks again my friend!

14 months… then I guess our in-progress EP is not going so bad then :sweat_smile: the 3 songs we have are already great!

@Unifono Thank you a lot!

You’re right about figures, they won’t change how I feel about this 1st album. It was great to gather the songs and fine tune the listening experience over the course of an album. No results will change that and the artistic side of it is a precious experience by itself. but I guess we all make music with the hope to share an emotion with others so the more the merrier. for now… 18 plays from 3 people (I’m certainly one of them with 16 plays) I’ll accept the results for what they are and try to learn. Let’s see if the upcoming week will be better.

I’d love to release this album already but bear with me and the upcoming singles. Hope you’ll enjoy the final result.

I’d love to release remixes too so if some people are interested that’d be amazing! (you can DM me and I’ll send you the individual tracks for your eyes now or when you hear a song you’d like to remix)

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Congrats to your release!
Besides the sound the video is great too!
Do not matter too much about the numbers for now, you already made it. :totes:

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@7schlaf Thank you so much! Figures are bad that I know ha…

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Congrats. Looking forward to having a listen!

But I can’t get that distrokid link to work? Maybe it’s just me?

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I love this single! Keep working!

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@brucegill Thank you!

What do you mean by you can’t get the distrokid link to work? The page doesn’t load?

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@muninn Thank you! Glad you enjoyed this song :blush:

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Yeah, but could be me I guess.

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:thinking:

On my side it loads fine, weird… I did use the hyperfollow.com domain name instead of the distrokid one. is this link any better?

https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/blakewalt/your-eyes-2

Direct links to Spotify & Apple Music:

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They all work for me now apart from the hyperfollow

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Lovely production, solid hook, trippy visuals :space_invader: :boom:

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@brucegill thank you for taking the time to check! I guess I should stop using the hyperfollow one then.

@DonovanDwyer thank you for listening and your comment, really appreciated!

as for the figures, I am at a whooping 23 plays out of the 1000 plays I was targeting so yeah, was really optimistic it seems. 9 listeners though out of the 25 followers who are following me on Spotify.

I’m working toward releasing the next single (well, 5min long…) and will see where this one goes. This song (your eyes) is amongst one of my favorite so a bit disappointed here but I know @korpinen liked other songs way more so let’s see. I will upload the live take of your eyes soon as I know people following me on Youtube are really not into Music Videos and more into live performances (which I totally get!).

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I just realized I’ve been using the wrong URL for Spotify as it didn’t open the app directly in Instagram but opened the web page to the album (well, to be honest, I thought it was supposed to work like that). By changing the URL to the one below (directly to the track), the link in Instagram opens Spotify right away… Did learn something here :sweat_smile:

I uploaded the live original take, which the mixed and mastered version is based upon. I used AI to demix the vocal take from the acoustic guitar. There were some artifacts but once in the mix…
You can see I keep playing the guitar in the drop but you can’t hear it. I decided it would be better without it for this section.

The album is using the original live takes as much as possible because if far from perfect they do feel more alive to my ears.

as for the figures:

30 plays from 13 people… no comment…

Let’s see if using the right URL will help next time.

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My 2d release “In the Shadows” is available now:

MV:

Link:
all major streaming platforms (spotify, Apple Music. deezer, bandcamp…)

This is a live take from my original Youtube performance but with a fresh mix done by a pro and mastered by Greg Calbi / Steve Fallone.

The drums are from my modular setup (3 Plaits).

As for “Your Eyes”: 67 plays on Spotify…

That’s kinda miserable.

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Fuck the numbers! You won’t get anywhere if your tracks aren’t on some super popular playlists on Spotify. I ultimately removed all my stuff from the streaming platforms but I had one track which got about 1.000 streams per month. But that never resulted into people listening to my other tracks because they just listened to the playlist.

It really has nothing to do with the quality of your music (which is excellent!), it’s just the way Spotify works. Please, don’t feel bad about it, I did that way too much :smiley: Concentrate on the music, try to get into contact with the few listeners you have and start from there. It will be much more rewarding than to play the numbers game.

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Great track and really like the video as well!

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Thanks!

Great you had one song with about 1000plays/month, it was starting to move in the right direction then! I totally feel you though, it sounds like a silly grinding game with little to no reward.

anyway, figures are what they are. I’ll keep updating them here as it’s a release diary. It might become a nice cautionary tale of what not to do ha.

Let’s see the faith of “In the Shadows” now.