Monday, February 17, 2014

Production Management the Cats Cradle Robbers way

**NEW**: have a look at the updated version of this article on Snake's LinkedIn profile:  https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/production-management-cats-cradle-robbers-way-nick-dallett 

In our day jobs, DJ Essey and Snake are both Technical Program Managers for major Seattle-area software companies, and we bring that toolset to bear when producing music.  Having a common language for project management has helped us to communicate effectively and to put structure around what we do.  This in turn helps us to separate the project management aspect of the band from the creative aspects of making music.  Along the way, we’ve developed language to talk about the unique ways we work: terms like “jaanaap” (a made-up word describing a specific way of mixing time signatures), to "boil" a location (making music using only found objects from that location) or “freakout” (a particular type of melodic development), as well as our own taxonomy for describing the current state of a given track (seed--> draft--> mix ready--> master ready--> final).

As an example, let's walk through the process that led to the release of our new album, Jack in the Bucket.

This project started as a 5 song EP, and was all finished and waiting for sales of our first album to reach a carefully chosen point before publishing, when we had a sudden realization. 
  • We realized that we have a lot of more recent material that we are very proud of, and that are in various stages of not-quite-complete, just waiting for us to be inspired to work on them. 
  • We realized that the only milestone that we recognize as “done” is having these tracks published and available to the world. 
  • We realized that the growing pile of unfinished projects was a psychological burden that was preventing us from fully enjoying our work.
  • We realized that waiting for each album to pay for the next was not working and that we needed to invest more in a steady stream of releases in order to gain listeners.

In light of this epiphany, we instituted a new strategy:  starting now, we are working full bore towards having our backlog of material published and in distribution so that YOU can purchase and download everything we do in its final form.  Jack in the Bucket is the first release in this new strategy.

Step 1:  Organize

We met at “Cat’s Cradle Westerer”, DJ Essey’s lovely home in Seattle, armed with markers and post-its and laptops, to execute the first stage of the new strategy:  grouping all of our unfinished tracks into albums-to-be.

To do the grouping, we performed an affinity exercise.   This methodology is typically used to organize the results of brainstorming into high-level concepts.  In my time at Microsoft Office, we used this exercise at the beginning of each release cycle to bring customer feedback and new ideas together to define release themes.

In this case, the data items – the list of about 60 unfinished tracks – were already present, so we started by listing these on post-its.


(The color in this case was not significant).

Next, we started to put the post-its on the kitchen cupboards.  As we went, we tried to place things in ways that seemed to go together.  This happened iteratively over a period of about 20 minutes, many of the stickies moving several times as we grouped, regrouped, rethought, had epiphanies, and grouped again.




Initially, we each worked autonomously, without discussion.  Towards the latter stages, we started to discuss the patterns that were emerging, and formed concepts around the groupings.  This resulted in some additional tweaks. 

At some point, we realized that several of the collections naturally coalesced into 13 track groups.  Since our first release, Abewsing the Mews, was a 13-track album, we decided at this point that each of the albums should have exactly 13 items.  We tweaked a bit more to enforce this new rule.

Here are the collections that emerged from the affinity exercise:

Jack in the Bucket



This collection started with the original 5 tracks from the Jack in the Bucket EP (Jack in the Bucket, Electrullabye, Swan Station 5, Ujjayi, and Weftovers), and added tracks that we felt hung together with the other tracks.  One pair of tracks – La Voie Lactee, and Boiling the Ocean – were always destined to be together, as the repeated melodic motif in the former track was – by complete coincidence – recapitulated in the opening melody of the latter.

The New   

        

This collection contains some of our newest tracks, plus older tracks that have the same cohesion and poppy freshness that has been coming through in our most recent efforts.

Religious

A number of our tracks relate to collective or individual religious experience – everything from hallucinogenic visions (Acid-washed dreams, Laudanum escapade) to settings of sacred texts (Nandapoorian Daystallian).  These became our third collection.
  

Un--

The 20 remaining tracks defy categorization.  Time will tell what happens with these.


Step 2: Prioritize

The next step was to decide which collection to work on first.  Jack in the Bucket was clearly the closest to done.  We had already finalized 5 out of the 13 tracks.  Of the rest, most were fairly well along in development.  We took each track and labeled it according to its progress along the continuum from “seed” – some ideas and samples, but no final structure – to “final”.  Most tracks were either “draft” or “mix ready”, meaning they all needed mixing and leveling, and some needed evaluation and restructuring.  Lita was still a seed – some cool ideas, but in need of development and structure.  For Lita, we wound up writing a whole new B section in a minor key and recording new parts for that bit to tie the track together and give it more direction.

Step 3: Divide and Conquer

In order to make progress quickly, we split up the remaining tracks and tackled them in parallel, working on two laptops.  We’d each move a track forward – arranging, writing new parts, adding effects – and then swap headphones to exchange “motes” – music notes – so that we kept the collaborative nature of the music.


Step 4 – publish

On February 8th 2014, the day that it snowed and Seattle came to a standstill, DJ Essey was at Snake’s house in Kirkland (Cats Cradle East) to put the finishing touches on the album.  Because of the snow, he was unable to return to Seattle, and this provided enough time for the pair of us to finish the project.  February 9th, we published Jack in the Bucket to our online distributor, CD Baby, and it is slowly making its way to the various digital music resellers that will carry Jack in the Bucket to the world – check it out on ITunes, Spotify, and Google Play, or wait for it to appear on Amazon, Napster, Xbox music, and more.

Step 5 – repeat


The next project on our list is the collection we labeled “the new.”  Retitled “A Quirky Hour for Something New” after one of the tracks in the collection (DJ Essey started this track late one night, long after the coach had changed back into a pumpkin, and the title was taken straight from Snake's bleary-eyed comment), we’ll be working on this for the next few months and hope to have it out before the end of the summer.