Autonomous Resistor.net - Independence & Choice

It's not our intention to follow the time-honoured formula of popular music construction. The 3.5 minute song; the verse-chorus, verse-chorus middle-8,verse-bridge and chorus-chorus; For us what's produced and mastered is what feels right. If it just happens to fit into the standard song creation template it's merely coincedence. Our aim is to get the songs to feel right otherwise there really isn't anypoint to doing it.

Don't get us wrong, we can and will co-operate with producing other artists in the future but external producers....well we'll leave that one open for now.

The studio equipment we use is widely available and is generic, there're no items that can't be purchased off-the-shelf. Our main consideration here is equipment specification to ensure it will do at least what we need it to do. This means that as a minimum we can capture a high quality raw sound and so we can have the whole song in its raw live format. The primary physical studio facilities used are indeed very basic, the environmental noise floor is too high to allow us the full range of accustic recording facilities. The use of software limiting functions allows us to handle this to an extent.

We will need a solution to handle softer vocals/quieter vocals and this is likely to take the form of renting 2 or 3 hours of external studio time, a F*** of a lot cheaper than purchasing a purpose built acoustic studio.

The majority of our recording and development is performed using our own equipment in-house, which means we don't have an expensive cost-clock running all the time. This allows us the flexibility to cut or add and to listen without the costs spiralling. We DO have the choice of going to an outside studio but we also have the facility to rehearse and record, well before hand so that these costs are small. Effectively we want to come away from the studio with WAV tracks to incorporate in to our mix in our time.

The overall production responsibility remains with us, the sound and its' quality is down to us. Yes, we also have the opportunity of contracting in a "producer" and that is also an option.

On digital mastering there are a couple considerations associated with the nature of the product being made available. Again we have a choice of how to do things however a quality cost balance has to be achieved. We aim to go about mastering as follows MP3 64Kb/sec, MP3 96Kb/sec, MP3 192Kb/sec and Primary Wav are to be mastered in-house on a per song basis. CD Albums may be mastered & manufactured under contract.

Initially we won't offer CD's as an option, the reasons are primarily about cost, demand/risk and also the fact that we haven't completed sufficient material to produce an Album yet (just a minor point)!

As you will have seen in the digital mastering section we touched on the mastering of the products we intend to make available. We are focusing on internet distribution of our work in MP3 format to start with. We will look closely at any demand for other cost effective formats, as well as making WAV files available sometime in the not-so-distant-future.

Production of CD's will remain on the back-burner for the time being.

The primary distribution method is via file download on the internet as this method reduces the dependencies on intermediaries and is relatively straight-forward. The risk here is priamarily to do with the format and the reliability of the MP3 players that customers (or dare we say fans) are using. We continue to ensure that the majority of players are compatible with the formats we realease by testing on a variety, but in some circumstances players are just not up to it.

It is important to ensure that solving customer problems is not side-lined, and by being soley responsible for the internet part of our operation it is our responsibility to get things sorted-out.

Well, what can we say? The majority of our costs are controlled or contracted by us. There are certain other costs which haven't been identified so far but as such they are not really production costs however they do come into play once we start selling, namely the taxes.

It is imperative that new cost effective ways of promoting what we're producing are used, but that doesn't mean hyping or plugging. If it costs us as much to promote as it does to produce then THIS and only THIS devalues the production. Ensuring the productions are accessible by free distribution of lesser quality full length songs we view as positive.

Making our productions more exclusive by maintaining high retail prices is quite an absurd load of bollocks.