This week was a big one for us — mostly because Emmy finally appears in the video, and we figured out a way to film her that works. She set up in the bedroom with a big black sheet behind her, filmed herself, then added FX after the fact. Once she had the look right, we dropped her performance onto the carboard TV screen she built.
The song, on the other hand… I jinxed myself. It started strong early in the week, and I even said out loud that it was going to be done ahead of schedule. Then a couple wrong tweaks sent the whole thing into the ditch. By release day I was fighting the mix, staring at the clock because of the 6pm deadline. There was a huge hiss in the background I hadn’t noticed earlier in the week, tried recording the guitar and bass but totally lost the original vibe of the song and thats tough to do on release day.
Turns out my pedal power adapter was defective and throwing noise into the chain. I swapped it for an old one and instantly everything was clean. Classic “I should have checked that first” moment. So next week with guitar/bass signal will be cleaner
My other bad habit is mixing while I write. After a couple hours the VSTs start piling up, the signal chain gets messy, and the whole project becomes a train wreck. I always think that mixing as I go will save time, but it never does — it just gives the song a slow-motion collapse. So starting this week, I’m recording everything first, then rendering it all down, then mixing clean. No more Franken-mixes.
Filming was a blast, at least. Editing the music with the video wasnt. The song was 130 BPM, but I mixed it and rendered at 120, so nothing lined up and I had to speed things back up… after already speeding things up earlier for energy. Saturday was just me trying to fix that. One of the reasons we picked Saturdays for releases is because we don’t work much on weekends — we can focus on the production — but even getting up early didn’t stop the spiral this time.
I’m switching back to the Master Section in Studio One, which actually respects the BPM and won’t fight me.
A lot of this is me relearning mistakes I shouldn’t be making. I spent six months doing AI music and not recording anything, so it’s like everything got dusty. But the past few months I’ve been playing and singing again, and things finally feel easier. Tracking is smoother. The muscle memory is waking back up. We dont do any AI anymore its all us doing it the human way, which is way more fun then pushing buttons for hours and hours.
Fewer binky strobe lights this time. More moments of me doing things other than playing — like walking down the cellar stairs and locking the door. We’ll do more of that.
Slow improvements. Never drastic changes week to week, just tweaks while keeping the core look the same. We use whatever we have around the house, and if we do buy something, it’s cheap or it’s something Emmy builds. She made the TV she appears in out of cardboard. She branded her screen with “Emmy Offline,” and we’re putting our websites on the set walls — Coyote Gazette is up, and the band name is coming soon.
The video this week was good, but the song suffered, and when the song suffers, the visuals feel just a little cheesy. All we can do is move forward and do better next week.
Patreon is set up now, and we’ll start promoting that soon. We have tons of leftover footage ready to go. The music is up on all the streaming sites with proper licensing. And honestly, Soundrop is the way to go — five bucks a song, no nonsense. Cheaper than the rest.
I also dug deeper into marketing this week, and YouTube’s algorithm finally seems to understand what we’re doing. We rebranded the channel three times, so it’s no surprise it was confused. Now that everything is structured properly, it’s sending our videos to a more focused group. That can hurt views, but the analytics matter more — impressions are up, click-through rate is up, likes and subs are up comments are up. Shorts views dipped, but that’s what happens when the targeting narrows. It’s all part of the process.
And honestly? It’s a fun one.