Look Mom, My Band Got on the Cover of a Magazine! A Retrospective After Releasing our Debut Album

As the year winds down and we begin to settle into the holidays, it’s a good time to look back on our professional journey over the past 12 months. Ironically, one of my professional goals was to work on my personal growth: specifically improving my creative capabilities. The creative objective involved my band: get signed to a label and release our debut album. I initially wrote about it here.?

I have found that both the mind and body needs exercise to improve. We lift weights to build muscle. We run to improve cardio. We read books to build and create new neural pathways. I think it’s also important to exercise our creativity. The best way for me to improve my right-brain abilities is to focus my energy on doing something I love. For me, it’s writing and playing music. Over the past 18 months, my band embarked on a journey to record its first album, sign a record deal and release it to the public.?

As human beings, we are complicated. When you work at a company, you are bringing your entire self. Hence, what happens outside of work impacts our professional lives, both in positive and negative ways. I think it’s important to incorporate fun outside of work - whether it’s family, fitness, hobbies, travel or anything that brings you joy. That joy will also find its way back into your professional life. In my own personal world, there is no doubt that playing music has helped stir the creative juices in our company.

SO, on to the album… What’s happened since its release?

It’s been about three months since our band pushed out our debut album ONE. Despite my earlier concerns around the vulnerability of putting ourselves out there, I’ve been surprised by the positive encouragement around having the guts to do it. The fear of humiliation and judgment stood in my way from doing this in the past. The humbling reality is the misperception that people are actually thinking about you. Releasing the album was important to us, but not to anyone else. The fear of judgment was real, but the truth is that we overestimate how much attention others pay to what we do. Once we get rid of that blocker we are free to create and release more efficiently.

And, yes, sadly not everyone likes what they heard as evidenced by the nervous giggles following my question, “What did ya think of the album?”

But that’s OK because not everyone likes peaches.

I recently took a guitar lesson with Rodney JONES who has worked with Dizzy Gillespie, James Brown, Maceo Parker, De La Soul, Lena Brown, Kenny Burrell and many more. You can learn more about this incredible musician and human being here. It sorta went like this...

He asked me:

Rodney: Jeff, do you like peaches?

Me: Huh? Um, yeah, I guess…

Rodney: Well, I don’t like peaches.

Me: (with nervous giggles) Um. OK, thanks for letting me know.

Rodney: That’s not the point. Peaches are like your [band’s] music. Some people will like it. Some people won’t. And that’s OK

Me: So, whatdidya think of our album?

Rodney: As I said, I don’t like peaches.

And that’s OK…?

Our album was released by modern soul label Color Red in Denver, Colorado and produced by Eddie Roberts of The New Mastersounds. They handled the marketing, distributed our album to all of the major streaming services and managed the production to vinyl via a pressing plant in Madrid, Spain. It’s been a blast to say the least.

A debut album is a scary thing and is a first attempt at sharing or perhaps exposing a band’s creative efforts for all of the world to critique. The feedback has ranged from the “Hollywood No” (meaning no response) to a surprised, “Wow, this ACTUALLY is pretty good.” The emphasis on “actually” can be a veiled insult - the expectation that the music was going to stink… but again, that’s OK.

The Initial Results

Here’s the initial summary from our Spotify artist dashboard.

The numbers are fairly small, but given that we had zero expectations, it was good to at least get an initial baseline. Over the course of the past few months, we learned that most of our listeners are outside the US with our 3 largest cities being Istanbul, Helsinki and Berlin. We were featured on one editorial playlist on Apple Music, added to over 1,000 playlists on Spotify and even got radio play on 2 terrestrial stations in the US and 1 in Sydney and 1 in Poland.

It was a big honor to get placed on Apple Music’s editorial playlist of “New in Rock.” The playlist gets released weekly by Apple curation team and brings to light their view of some of the most noteworthy releases that week in the rock genre.?

In Chartmetric, our largest market is Turkey, followed by Finland with mostly males between the age of 25 and 34. I can’t say that I know anyone in Turkey or Finland much less between the ages of 25 and 34. I don’t think I know many people in the US between 25 and 34 for that matter. Having said that, we’d love to play a show in Istanbul or Helsinki!

We also were featured on the cover of the A&R Registry, an industry rag for music professionals. Thanks Ritch Esra !

Color Red decided on “Yeah Yeah Yeah” as the single and we launched it the first week of October. We then followed up with the full album launch on November 1 with another tune “Alive” as the focus track. Interestingly, neither of those songs are the most played.

We got a lot of questions about how we got the “retro sound” on our album. The feedback was that the album sounded “live” as if they were standing in the room with us as we were recording.?

The Retro Sound

Like our favorite artists of yesteryear, we took the route to record analog to quarter inch tape. Granted, Zeppelin, the Beatles and Hendrix didn’t actually have a choice to do anything but analog, but it raises the question:

Why go analog in the digital age?

As a neophyte sound engineer myself, I have learned and implemented various tools like compression, reverb, delay, EQ, De-essers (a fave for ear-splitting cymbals) and a myriad of guitar effects, but all in the digital format. Many of these tools are remarkable as they were modeled after the original analog gear.?

However, there’s a certain beauty of all the warmth that analog brings to the table particularly when compression and additional harmonics created through saturation happens naturally. I’m going to do a post on the specifics of compression, harmonics and saturation at a later time but I’ll provide a high-level overview now.

The analog sound is obviously reminiscent of yesteryear because bands like Zeppelin and the Stones didn’t have access to digital technologies when they recorded their masterpieces. But, the recordings were iconic, the songs were perfection and forever etched into the souls of billions… so is that analog sound.

There are numerous technical descriptions around why analog sounds the way it does, but unless you are a recording engineer or producer, it may not matter. Even the artists or bands themselves often don’t know or understand why their recording sounds the way it does. But here’s how a listener versed in the analog sound would describe a recording: creamy, warm, live, vintage.

We recorded to RTM (Recording the Masters) quarter inch tape on a vintage Tascam 388 analog reel-to-reel recording device. While the Tascam 388 was released in 1985 (and now discontinued and considered "vintage"), several modern bands have recorded on this device including the Black Keys, the Arctic Monkeys, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard (my current favorite band) and Ty Segal of Fuzz.?

Now onto the LIVE feeling to our recording…

The LIVE Sound

To cut to the chase, the recording sounded LIVE because we basically recorded it LIVE, together in one take. All of the instruments were recorded at the same time in one room, including all of the solos and dynamics. No overdubs. It was an authentic musical moment to capture a unique sequence in time when the band was creating together. Vocals were recorded later. On the positive side, this meant that the energy and the groove and the subtle adjustments we made on the fly to find the pocket were captured. That meant there were certain nuances of the music that would be really difficult to attain if recorded separately. On the negative, when we experimented and it didn’t work out, the mistakes were captured as well. If the band was cranking and the soloist flubbed it, we had to ditch the recording and start again… as painful as it may be. But the authenticity and LIVE made it truly real and memorable for the band.?

When I listen to old Miles Davis recordings, it’s fun to hear different takes of the same song. The vibe is different with each take. The solos are different. The band might play the head with a different feel - sometimes the melody is behind the beat, sometimes ahead… They sometimes sound like different songs. Check out the various takes of Someday My Prince will Come. Amazing stuff. We wanted to capture the same authenticity of the LIVE sound in our recording.

Because we were limited on time, Producer Eddie Roberts made it clear we had three chances to make the best recording and then we had to cut our losses and move on. It made for an intense and focused recording session.?

The other attribute was working closely with our Sound Engineer. The group dynamics are incredibly important. How is feedback given and implemented? Can the band work through its emotions and deliver? How does the team deal with frustration? These are all important factors when in a creative process. It’s also even important to continue building a relationship OUTSIDE the walls of the studio as well.?

I liked how our Sound Engineer Dylan Brown put it.?

“I gotta say I thoroughly enjoyed my time working with the Fuzz Collective guys. They understand that making quality records is as much about the personal connection and camaraderie of the team as it is about putting your nose to the grindstone or the technical nitty gritty of studio recording. We spent a lot of time out on the town or having conversations over a bottle of wine in the studio kitchen and the connection those conversations afforded us all allowed us to be honest about our visions for the recordings. So, when we were in the studio we all knew exactly what each of us (band mate and engineer alike) were meant to contribute. I think you can really hear that friendship we fostered in the music.”

It was truly an incredible experience and I can’t wait to do it again.

Come check out our album release event on January 11, 2025 at Brick & Mortar Music Hall in San Francisco. Get your tickets here. Special thanks to Cole Yasuda for making the awesome poster below. Yes, notice the "yacht" in the background... the kid has jokes...

Fuzz Collective is:

Ethan Beard , Bass and Vocals

Pete Chung , Harmonica and Vocals

Tim Fisher , Drums, Percussion and Vocals

Jason Tavano , Keyboards and Vocals

Jeff Yasuda , Guitar and Vocals