Alistair

I have started learning to use Reaper, with a lot of help from Nick. You can get a long way very quickly with Reaper. There are masses of learning resources available too. It's quite a daunting DAW initially but worth the time taken to understand it. I have generally been wary of the recording process but lockdown gave me time to get into it.

Tom Waits Neil Young Steve Earle Warren Zevon I disqualified myself from the top million the day I wrote a song called 'I Can't Be Your Bread and Butter If I'm Not Your Cup of Tea'

Benvenuto, Homer! Spero che ti diverta bene qua.

Rudi It turns out it was nearly 13 years ago!!!!

Rudi, you have an uncannily long and accurate memory. I must have told you that 10 years ago. You've probably got files on the CIA.

When I say 'made' a physical CD, I mean that I made it rather than having it professionally pressed and printed. Take the Box of Goats album 'Universal Theory Of Everything'. That took roughly 9 months to make, on and off, spread across many evenings, recording all the different parts at Nick's house. We had recorded two tracks in a studio, were starting to gig, and needed something to give to venues to get us more gigs and to sell at gigs to anyone who wanted one. So an album was the logical thing to do as we already had loads of songs and we needed a physical product. It was fun making an album, at least to start with, though I think we ran out of steam towards the end and there are a couple of tracks that are not really finished. I designed the cover, burned and printed labels on to the CDs. We got played on the radio on the back of sending one in to the local radio station and I probably sold about 20-30 at gigs. That's not many. On the other hand I don't have boxes of unwanted 10 year old albums sitting at home either. I just made enough copies for what we needed. At least those who bought the album might have listened to it. I doubt they would have if we had just given them a link to Soundcloud - the moment would have been gone by then. Was it a waste of time? Well, no, it was hard work - but enjoyable work - and that's not the same thing. Whether you release physically or online you still have to make the recordings and, as I said previously, an album gives you a purpose and a focus that releasing single tracks doesn't. I don't miss all the printing of labels and burning of CDs though. I didn't make an album to make money and unsurprisingly I didn't make any! All my Soundcloud material can be downloaded for free, though it is generally not because why would you if you can come back and listen any time (or, it's crap!)?. What I do know is that many, many more people around the world have listened to my music online than ever did to the physical CDs or the cassette albums I made in my bedroom 35 years ago - and that's the main thing for me.

Some of my Soundcloud albums were actual physical CDs. Everything up to Charm Offensive was. Though I have tinkered with Hidden Talent by adding and subtracting tracks. It's a compilation in any case.

If you post a link to your online music I will gladly listen to it. But if I have to wait six aeons for a physical album I probably won't.

Who cares what the survey says, I want to talk about making albums!

I am extremely rich so I bought a thousand monkeys and put them in a room with a thousand typewriters to write lyrics. Then I bought another thousand monkeys and put them in another room with a thousand guitars to write music. But for some reason that didn't work too well, so I had a thousand copies of Bert Weedon's 'Learn Virtuoso Guitar In Only Three Chords' book delivered to the room with the monkeys with the guitars. Then,not only being extremely rich but also blessed with infinite patience, I waited a while...quite a long while actually, but then realised that the monkeys with the typewriters and the monkeys with the guitars couldn't contact each other. So I bought another thousand monkeys, and trained them how to open doors,so they could move between the rooms of the monkeys with the typewriters and the monkeys with the guitars and match up the lyrics produced by the monkeys with the typewriters and the music produced by the monkeys with the guitars. That's how all the stuff on my Soundcloud site was written. Alistair McIntosh is just a stage name for 3000 monkeys. It turns out that somewhere along the way the monkeys wrote Adele's 'Chasing Pavements' before she did but no-one noticed because the lyrics got paired with a death metal riff and the melody with a rap song. If I'm honest, writing with monkeys doesn't work too well, they are much more interested in preening each other. I'll probably just go back to collaborating with McNaughton Park, he's much lower maintenance.

Another approach is not to worry too much about quality and write as many lyrics as you can. Many of them will be dross but parts of them might come in useful at a later date. Some of them will be good and then you have something to build on, to hone, to craft and develop. What good looks like is so much in the eye of the beholder too, I have put lyrics here for critique and have had completely opposite feedback from different posters on the same lyric. Who is right? Ultimately I have to decide which feedback, if any, I prefer. Sometimes, if I am happy with a lyric, I won't post it here. 'The perfect is the enemy of the good' - you just have to start. In my younger days I used to just start writing and then work out what I meant later. Sometimes, believe it or not, that worked. Usually it didn't but it gave me something to use.

Oh, and I listen to about 200 new albums a year by other people.

I mostly listen to music in my car!

What Steve said. For me. I have loads of songs that I have never recorded. Rather than just recording them randomly and putting out endless single recordings, grouping them as an album gives me more purpose and a little more urgency. But I am talking about Soundcloud digital albums these days. I'm done with creating physical CDs and artwork. I used to burn CDs to sell or give away at gigs but I don't really do gigs anymore and I can reach more people via the web. Thinking of the songs as an album also makes me approach recording in a different way. Nick and I did the Box of Goats album with a full production. That led me to do my next album 'Charm Offensive' as stripped down as possible. The next one 'A Walk In The Park' was a set of songs McNaughton Park and I wrote together. The one after that 'Rose Tinted Spectacle' was a re-recorded retrospective of songs I had written in the 80s. My next set 'The Slow Reveal' is appearing gradually on Soundcloud as I get round to recording or writing the tracks. And I know what the next two albums after that will be.

There has always been good music (i.e. what I like) and bad music (i.e. what the other guy likes) . There has been good music written by committee (Holland/Dozier/Holland) and bad music written by committee (too many to mention). The more some writers are original, the harder it is for other writers to be original. There are undoubtedly more bad songs than ever but because there is so much more music than there ever was. So perhaps the problem is more that there is too much music, and therefore the good songs are harder to find, so it seems that poor songs are the norm? I will grant you Meghan Traynor, though. And Death Metal. Nearly all death metal sucks. But that is kind of the point of it. And I wish music wasn't so damn easy to make and share these days so that people like me couldn't share our abysmal songwriting skills with the world