I may have found a reason to record

A lot of SCA bards cut albums.  A few have asked me if I have one, and the answer has always been "Aw, HEEEEEEEELLZ naw!"  I need this to be my hobby.  And while I may be serious about doing it well and serious about teaching, I need to stay on this side of "serious" in general, right?  I need this not to feel like a job.  And producing a CD, and then trying to promote said CD in order to recoup costs, would start to feel like a job.  And then it would stress me out and make me enjoy it less.  I went through this years ago with acting, I learned my lesson.  I love this a lot, but I don't wanna go pro - not even semi-pro, not even hemi-demi-semi-pro.

But I think I've found a reason to record my songs.  I've reached the point where I have too many songs to keep reliably practiced up.  So I find that I'm spending all of my time practicing the songs I haven't played in a while, rather than writing new work.   I feel like I'd like to record my songs so I can have them somewhere in a practiced, finished state.  I want to be able to take out a CD and say, "that's my song!" or to listen to it to remind myself when it's time to practice it up again.  Mostly - I just want my songs to feel finished.  Then I'll feel freer to move on to other music.

I think if I record my songs to have an album, it'll drive me nuts.  But if I record them for myself, then it'll be alright.  And I'll also have an album.

So Aeron and I are looking into home recording equipment now.  I don't want it to be a big, studio-digitally-post-production-mastered ordeal, right?  But at the same time, the idea is for my songs to feel "finished," and the lap-top mic recordings you've heard on my blog sound anything but finished.  So we'll see.  If anything comes of this, you'll read it here first (assuming I remember to blog before I Facebook).  And it will be a digital download, because dealing with CDs and jewel-cases and album covers and whatnot are what we're trying to avoid here.  :-)