Blog
How To Guide: Creating a CD
Written by Louise
At times I have felt really quite hard done by about this. Jimmy asked me to look into CD Reproduction companies (imagine booming voice: “Louise, create CD!”) – an area I knew (know?) NOTHING about (a bit like the whole website thing) – and I asked the band for their suggestions, and I looked at the websites they pointed me to, and I compiled a final Top 5, and I asked for samples from all of them, and I spoke to all companies involved. And after ALL THIS, I went with my gut instinct on the company I trusted the most to not talk b*llsh*t and who would actually deliver a personal customer service, and then I get Andy saying ‘why did you go for a company in Somerset?!’.
Oh, I’m sorry. Oddly enough, not knowing about the practicalities of repro companies, and being given the task to find the most cost-efficient company (by which I mean, standard and CD spec (jewel case, JakeBox etc) to cost), I failed to question the logic of location.
Anyway, it’s been fine (fingers crossed, they’re in the post right now), so my critics can all go away.
Ok, so where do you start? Google, I suppose. Although, honestly, I looked at about 50 CD reproduction companies, got quotes for all of them and everything – so you could just refer to my Top 5. I spoke to such lovely, helpful people at these companies, but in the end I went with one that didn’t intimidate me. I liked the straight-talking, testimonial-based, quick email response of Nigel at Copysound. His costs were also relatively low, and the standard of printing across all the companies was pretty much of the same standard (and I worked at a commercial gallery in Mayfair for a year, so I’ve not got that bad an eye for these things).
(Also, something you should know, that I learnt while researching all this, is that when a company is producing a short run (ie 500 copies or less) they use a different technique to when they’re doing a long run. The technique is more cost-effective to produce, but at this level each CD is pretty pricey. As soon as you hit the 1000 copies mark, each CD is considerably cheaper – they use a glass master for this, as opposed to ‘burning’ the 500 CDs, which is basically what you might do on your computer at home. The end.)
Running concurrently to this, you need to think about your design. You can probably even have this sorted before you choose your CD reproduction company because they can all cater to anything really. You can even get some really snazzy packaging, like the JakeBox which is my favourite, but it ups the price per CD considerably.
We knew that we wanted to include quite a lot of text with our CD, because this would pretty much launch our whole label and it was important that wherever someone looked (be it website or CD or whatever) they would get a feel of who we were. So we opted for a 16 page booklet, which is quite big really – you can go bigger, but then you just start getting into the ‘book’ realm, as opposed to the more diminutive ‘booklet’. Plus, we are also quite big on the whole lyric thing – we like people to be able to read what we wrote (well, what Jimmy wrote, let’s face it).
And then you’ve got the cover. I even went to HMV and browsed what sort of covers I liked. A bit pointless really, I think, in retrospect. I still don’t know about covers. I only know, as the artist here, what I like and what I can do. And what I can do is make things. And what I like is something that’s not too smart and that is full and homemade and free (as in loose, like free and easy, as opposed to ‘free’, no money free, gratis). We talked about the higgledy-piggledy nature of who we are (I am so keen on not being contrived), and we talked about the colour scheme on the website, which reflects the colour scheme of the villa, and we thought about a tiled effect and I suggested knitting a patchwork blanket that we attach memories to. And this all sort of made sense, and tied into the album being a cummulative thing (Six Months of Saturdays and all that), but just didn’t feel ‘do-able’.
So, easy peasy lemon squeezy, I bought a square pin-board online (not so easy peasy so I strongly recommend this company if you are definitely looking for a square one), collected lots of photos from our Spanish trip and time in the studio, as well as photos of the band as kids, printed them all off (had to buy a printer for this!) and stuck them on the board. Ta-da! (Also used ticket stubs, fliers we’d had printed and playing cards, if you’re interested. (Oh, and I also sewed the letters S M C and C onto a cushion cover, for the whole home-made effect thing.))
Photographed it all with Jimmy’s digital SLR (recommend good quality camera for detailed artwork).
But who on earth was going to teach me how to put the whole booklet together?! I don’t know how to produce graphics stuff on a template (CD reproduction companies provide the printing templates that you have to use)! Luckily, thanks be to god, Rob in our band is a graphic designer and said he would help! (PLUG: contact Rob at www.camelart.com for graphic design work) God, am so lucky – honestly don’t know what I’d have done without him, which doesn’t really help you if you’re reading this for guidance, does it… Some companies provide helpers for this process, but I imagine it gets expensive and you also have to know exactly what you want, which I rarely do.
Rob and I designed the inside of the booklet, as well as the tray card (the bit at the back of the CD that lists the tracks) and the actual CD, continuing the idea of the pin-board cover. All higgledy-piggledy and ‘thrown together’. It actually took a good lot of hours to achieve the ‘thrown together’ look. I almost physically made each page, gluing and sticking, which we would then scan in to the computer to match the templates, but it would have erred more towards the messy side of home-made, so we abandoned that plan.
Once we’d got it all together, Rob sent it all over to Nigel at Copysound, we requested a proof (essential), the proof came back brown, when it should have been terracotta, so we asked them to lighten the whole thing up a bit more, and now… well, now we’re waiting for the boxes of CDs to arrive!
I think that’s everything. As usual, I will let you know if I remember anything more of this ridiculously long process.