If you want to help Richard X. Heyman release his new album, Pop Circles, you’ve got roughly a week left to donate to his Kickstarter campaign. The album, which is already recorded, will contain 12 new songs plus a five-track EP of his versions of songs he wrote for The Doughboys and is due out June 14. At the time of this writing, fans had donated $5,037 toward the $6000 goal.
Heyman went into a studio to record drum track and then recorded the rest at home with his wife, engineer, bass player, and backing vocalist Nancy Leigh. Julia Kent plays cello and Chris Jenkins viola. It can be difficult to get a good drum sound with home recording, and they frequently need to be recorded first to make a track flow. Though he plays many instruments, the drums are where everything starts for Heyman. “The drums are my main instrument,” he writes in an e-mail interview for the Department of Tangents. “I started playing at a very young age, and have the most proficiency with that instrument among the others I subsequently picked up. I also consider the drums to be the foundation for building a track upon.”
Heyman worked out all of the drum parts in advance of going into Eastside Sound Studios, and found a particular challenge in recording the rest when he got to his home studio. “I sang along in my head (riffs and instrumental breaks and of course the vocal melody) and one of the great challenges we faced was how to contend with all the caterwauling that leaked onto the drum tracks!” he writes. “And not always in the same key as the finished song, I might add. I understand and appreciate the use of drum loops (though I do wish people would own up to their use instead of trying to pass it off as a real live drum performance) but as a drummer, I like a live performance. So what you hear is what I laid down at Eastside Sound studios over the course of ten hours.”
If you’re curious as to what the money goes to, Heyman breaks it down this way. “In a nutshell, the drum tracking cost $500; mixing and mastering 18 songs – $8,000; radio promo – $3,000; PR – $3,600; manufacturing CDs – $1,200; graphic artist – $900; postage – $900 approximately; envelopes – $30. That comes to about $17,000. So as you can see, our $6,000 goal on Kickstarter, if we should reach it, only covers a portion of our budget for ‘Pop Circles.’ The rest we pay out of pocket. We decided $6,000 was a realistic goal based on our previous experiences with Kickstarter. We’ve worked successfully with them in the past. It’s a respected fundraising site with a lot of visibility. And we just like that name!”
To contribute, click here.