Digital Din is in its new home...

Well, back to the regular updates. The seemingly constant upheaval in my life seems to be waning somewhat (though I should really keep quiet about it - don't wanna jinx myself!) I got married in November - Josh played guitar for our ceremony (thanks Josh!) and my wife and I have bought our home (which meant yet ANOTHER move for me and my home studio.)

So this one should be the last move for a very loooooong time... and the new home has an amazing space for Digital Din to live; a finished basement. Josh and I have spent time reassembling the studio and are almost set back up, which is good, since we have already got some material written for our sophomore effort and want to get rolling with the new stuff!

As for the current album, we're really stoked with the press that we've been getting so far with "Awaken the Man" - we're selling albums all over the world (we're HUGE in Norway!) and are getting our album on Amazon.com as a regular item, which will hopefully boost sales for us as well. And being named #7 on a list of the top 10 prog releases for 2007 (as well as a separate award for debut of the year) is very gratifying - those of you who've been with us for a while know how long and hard we've worked on this project. We hope you're still hanging in there! As Josh mentioned in his last Diary entry, we really appreciate all of the support over the last several years.

Thanks!

Thanks to Everyone For Your Support!

I know Mark feels the same way, and so we would like to thank everyone for the years of support and encouragement you've given us while we went through the process of writing songs and creating our debut CD "Awaken the Man." It was definitely a roller-coaster ride at times, but in the end it produced a CD that we're both very proud of and think you will all enjoy.

On a personal note, I want to thank Mark for being my songwriting partner. I think in the beginning we were both having a ton of fun and yet in the back of our minds we were both wondering when the shoe (meaning our egos) would drop and things would fall apart. Luckily it never happened, and we produced some incredibly awesome music. Thanks, Mark... you rock!

At long last, completion...

So, after some starts and stops, and more time than we originally intended, we have an official release date for Awaken the Man. It's been a sometimes arduous, sometimes amazing process. Josh and I have labored long and hard on this release, and we really hope that our attention to detail will show in the final product.

I look forward to taking delivery on the first run of the CDs, and getting them to our customers so they can give us their feedback - we've already taken a bunch of pre-orders, and we'll ship those CDs out as soon as they arrive here, even if it's before the release date.

Thanks for reading - hope it's been fun so far - and we look forward to making our second album! (And in far less time, now that we've got the process down and the major life changes out of the way!)

Mastering Completed... thank goodness.

Well, we've finally done it. All of the audio portion of our album is now complete, and we're in the final stage of pre-production and are almost ready to drop off our materials to the duplication house. We're really excited about finally reaching the end of this - sometimes arduous (but ultimately rewarding) - journey, and we really hope that music fans everywhere will embrace our efforts.

All that is left is the finalization of the artwork, which is 90% done. Our amazing album cover design was done with great skill by Nicola Black, and the layout and typesetting was done by our own Josh Sager. The inside cover has a really cool screen of a photo by Willem Klopper, who generously allowed us to use it for our album. Honestly, I'm almost as excited about how this album will LOOK as I am about how it will SOUND!

So, keep your browsers aimed at this site - as soon as we have our release date set, we'll be in touch! Thanks for sticking with us!

On Our Mastering Saga, Delays, and Frustration...

Okay... so by now, I wonder if people are actually reading this site, since it seems everything kind of came to a standstill in March. Well, it did.

Our next step was to be mastering of the album. Again, for those unfamiliar with the process of recording and releasing a CD, "mastering" is the process wherein an engineer uses specialized audio tools (fancy equalizers, compressors, limiters, and more) to take the raw mixes and make them really shine. Among other things, the engineer "sweetens" the sound, removing unusual "bumps" in the frequency response, optimizes the album for playback on consumer stereo equipment, and increases the overall playback volume to compare favorably with other commercial recordings. He also puts the tracks in order, executes any fade-ins or fade-outs, and sets up the playback index on the CD.

We went into Masterworks Studios in Philadelphia shortly after I posted that last diary entry in order to master Awaken the Man. I had previous experience with Masterworks, as Second Story had used the same studio to master our first album, and we had been VERY pleased with the outcome.

Unfortunately, this time we weren't so lucky. I don't know whether it was a matter of not giving Pete an adequate picture of our "vision" - or just a bad night - but the mastered version completely failed to meet our expectations. It sounded "good" but it just wasn't close to what we envisioned. I don't blame Pete - he's a very talented engineer and a helluva nice guy - but he just didn't pull it off for us.

So we got all psyched up for - and paid for - a mastering which underwhelmed us. This was a devastating blow, particularly to me, since I had just spent the prior three months pouring my heart into mixing and remixing the album. I was just spent.

Well, we're back on the horse, and the mastering has been re-done; this time by Fenton Hardy at "The Lake Room." So far, my initial impression is very good - Josh and I have to sit around a couple of stereos and see what we think - but this time it might be "the one." Once we've put our stamp of approval on it (or had any inadequate tracks re-mastered) we can press on and get this album RELEASED!

More to come.