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I’m making solo guitar album “Quarantine in Woodside”.
Story began in April 2020, I was renewing my visa and got a request for evidence from USCIS asking me about the details of future activity. My gigs are all cancelled since mid March and I was not about how I am going to live as a musician especially how I am going through the summer of 2020. Luckily I had a lot of projects that either I was leading or I’ve been in part of, I was able to obtain visa in late June.
Although I had band projects, it came to my mind that I should release solo guitar album to be more independent. I started practicing my 7string guitar to built solo guitar repertoire including practicing classical piece such as La Catedral by Agustín Barrios.
I enjoyed learning these “written out” solo guitar piece, however I wasn’t feeling very confident to make a album just playing in the style with not improvisation since that’s what I’ve been doing past 15 years. I studied classical music for 2 years in the past but that wasn’t my strength.
After I got visa, my motivation faded a little bit and I wasn’t sure what to do with solo guitar, I was kind of busy producing MicroCorgi album and shooting videos with my roommate Yasushi for his youtube channel.
After MicroCorgi’s album was released in November and Yasushi went back to Japan for the time being, I finally made up my mind to start shooting solo guitar videos. At first I was only shooting one video per day, then after a week or so I was able to record more than 10 tunes a day by improvising jazz standards as I used to play in the gig.
By looking back those recordings, I recorded more than 20 tunes, I noticed some tracks represent my best work in the solo guitar in terms of both expression and how I improvise solos, like how Joe Pass did in his records.
I’m becoming 34 years old on 12/30, I thought it is a good timing to release a solo guitar album as a milestone of music career.
This is 2nd time I’m making a crowdfunding campaign, I did it for my first album Earthwards and it was quite a big project working with Interrobang Records.
Opposed to Earthwards, this Quarantine in Woodside project is very personal, also I gained the skills and equipments of producing over these years, now I can record guitar by myself, mix and master the audio in the quality that I am happy sharing with everyone.
So what I need for this project is now only the fee for paying royalty for composers of jazz standards I recorded, also small distribution fee for services such as spotify, itunes etc.
The fee for royalty is around 20$ per song for 25 downloads. I’m looking for 8-10 songs for the album, distribution fee is 15$ per year for my account.
Normally I pay these fees by myself upfront but with this pandemic situation, my income is still 1/4 of what I used to make and I need to become able to build more things on online to sustain my living.
Please consider donating to this project to support my musical career. I feel the strength of being independent solo artist is needed more than ever to live as a musician right now and this could be a start of my new career. I am learning new things everyday and hope to share more solo guitar music in the future.
Also my other projects are releasing albums, MicroCorgi released MicroCosmos in November, Utopia is expecting release new album in the February. MicroCorgi has cool tshirt as well, please check it out at my web store if you can support other project as well. https://yutokanazawa.com/shop/
Thank you,
Yuto