D. Lee Jackson

Words and Music

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My Debut Solo CD’s Release Date Is Out

Posted on 2018-03-21 Written by D. Lee Jackson 3 Comments

Small CD FrontCalibrations has a release date! The album will be released on Friday, March 30th, in both CD and digital formats. The digital format will be made available through Amazon, iTunes, Spotify, and many other sites for a suggested retail price of $9.99. The CD will be available from the CD Baby Store for $12.99.

ADDITIONAL: The digital version is already available for pre-order from Amazon!

For those of you who tuned in to The Cyber Den on Siren Radio to hear Jake “The Voice” Parr announce the release date at 10:00 a.m. BST, my apologies—they were experiencing technical difficulties during the first hour and weren’t able to get the announcement in until the second hour of the show. However, next Wednesday (March 28th), Jake will be back on the air at the same time to play sneak previews of two of the tracks from the album. Remember, that time is 10am GMT, 5am EDT, 4am CDT, 3am MDT, 2am PDT, and for Australian listeners, 9pm AEDT.

Due to a misunderstanding in the original ordering process, I have ten discs in my possession instead of in the warehouse. Instead of letting them gather dust, I’m going to offer these ten as signed, numbered copies with brief messages of thanks for $50 each. I’ll never have any more signed and numbered CDs made available. Once these ten are gone, that’s it.

The sale will most likely take place beginning on Monday on eBay. I’ll have a link posted here that will guide you to the sale.

Thank you!

Filed Under: album, music Tagged With: album, music, publishing

The CD Secret is Out

Posted on 2018-03-14 Written by D. Lee Jackson Leave a Comment

Small CD FrontAfter long months of coordination with artists (who finally wound up in Texas, not Denmark), and after a lot of anxiety over whether or not I was going to be able to pull this off at all, the deed is finally done. Calibrations, my very first solo album, is in the processing phase.

The album will consist of twelve tracks of music and two tracks of spoken word, created with the help of voice artist and now good friend Jake “The Voice” Parr. This very talented Brit conducted an overseas interview of me for one track (take it or leave it – my interview talents are questionable) and helped me read the liner notes and track list (for those purchasing the MP3 version).

Nine of the music tracks are taken from the songs I wrote for Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary World Tour, episode five (Alien World Order) a couple of years ago. If, for some obscene reason, you haven’t played the game yet, here’s your chance to hear the music from it. All tracks have been looped and fully remastered for outside-of-game listening.

The three new songs are going to have to remain a bit of a mystery for now. Let me just say that there’s something old, something new, and something a developer didn’t want me to do. None have been heard by the public before: for that matter, none of them have been completed before. One even had its beginnings as a failed test in 1996 or thereabouts. Believe me when I say it didn’t fail any tests this time.

There will be a digital and a physical release. Disc Makers is handling the creation of the physical discs, but I believe you’ll have to go to the CD Baby Store if you want to buy one. The digital versions will be available almost everywhere, though—iTunes, Amazon, you name it.

The release date? Hopefully that’ll be before the end of March, although I can make no guarantees. Watch this space for updates.

Finally, here is a larger version of the cover art, produced by the talented Allison Sheeler.

Calibrations Cover

Filed Under: album, music Tagged With: album, composing, music, publishing

All Over But The Shoutin’

Posted on 2018-01-31 Written by D. Lee Jackson Leave a Comment

Musically speaking, the album is finished. It’s passed the car speaker test and the crappy laptop speaker test. There’s going to be a “liner notes” track recorded for people who buy the digital release, but the music has been mastered and is now finished.

Now comes the hard part: getting it ready for distribution.

I thought I would be going with CD Baby. Well, I still am, sort of. I’m actually going with Disc Makers. They handle the front end of things, as in printing physical copies. They then turn over the album to their “sister” company, CD Baby (who they own), who will make the album available to iTunes, Amazon, and so on.

I need jewel case art for folks who buy CDs, and that’s being worked on in Denmark. The “liner notes” track will be recorded via an overseas link to England. (Bits of the music have been beta tested in Russia and Australia, making this a truly intercontinental project.) Once these two items are done, it’ll be time to start submitting things to Disc Makers.

If you ever plan on doing this yourself, please note: DIY album publishing is not cheap. An order of 20 Jewel Case CDs plus everything else runs over $200. It’s much cheaper to go with a digital-only release, but I’m dealing with special circumstances. I’ll keep you up to date on the progress.

Filed Under: album, music Tagged With: album, composing, music, publishing

New Software and a Lament for Paper Manuals

Posted on 2017-09-21 Written by D. Lee Jackson 4 Comments

RTFMLearning new productivity software is a wonderfully terrifying experience nowadays. Wonderful, in that you’ve got a new tool to help speed up your job or to let you do something you couldn’t do before. Terrifying, in that you’ve got to learn how to use it. Some software is very easy to use at first, but the really powerful stuff is buried behind a wall of menus and checkboxes. Other software, like the piece of software I’ve just purchased, is so powerful that there’s no easy way to use it without reading the manual.

Ah, the manual. How I miss thee. You are still there in spirit, but your body is long gone, eaten away by online documentation and help files.

In olden times, some people would sit back and relax with a good book. That experience is still possible, even if you want it in digital format. Me, I used to sit back and relax with a good manual. I remember digging through the depths of Borland C++. I remember being enthralled by learning the macro language of my favorite text editor (which I still use, almost twenty-five years later). I remember programming a utility for my employer using Microsoft C 6.0, but doing it using a manual for version 5.0 because someone had lost the correct manual (I still made it through the project).

Manuals were portable. Try eating at a workplace cafeteria today with your computer strapped to your neck, or even with a laptop. Or, dare I suggest, in the Chamber of Meditation. Some people used to read magazines in the bathroom. Computer nuts would read manuals. I even got the creator of my favorite music making software to admit to that once.

Occasionally, you’d find a text file included in a piece of shareware. Those were meant to be printed out and read, just like commercial software’s manuals, since we were still in the age of DOS and multitasking was in its infancy. Besides, ribbons for dot matrix printers were relatively cheap.

Then, one day after Windows had come into its own, someone in accounting somewhere decided that it would be less expensive to distribute a company’s software without a printed manual. All of those advances made by people who learned programming with a manual in hand had led to programs that would display manuals in a window on the customer’s computer screen instead. Not only that, it was “green”—no longer would trees have to die so that manuals could be printed, and less carbon would be emitted by shipping heavy boxes of books instead of just a disc with a manual and/or help file. Shoot, no carbon would be emitted if the software was distributed via the new internet, which again was made publicly usable by the very same people who spent nights—that’s right—digging through manuals.

As I said earlier, I now have a nifty new piece of music software that is supposedly powerful as all get-out. However, I don’t know that yet. I have to find the manual and read through it online. When you consider the way this software’s interface looks, I think I’d be better off with two computers: one for showing the manual, and one for running the program. Sure, I could print out the manual myself, but I’d have to go through almost 100 pages worth of expensive ink jet supplies to get it done. Even then, I’d be missing out on the extra instructions included in the help file, and there’s no easy way of printing those out at this time.

I’ll learn my program, have no doubt. It’ll just take twice as long this way. Oh, printed manuals, I do miss thee so.

Filed Under: music, words Tagged With: computer, music, publishing

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Hello, and welcome! My name is Lee Jackson, and I'm the composer of "Grabbag," the theme to the video game Duke Nukem 3D, plus music for Rise of the Triad and Shadow Warrior (the original). I've got four albums out, with tracks on Spotify, Apple Music, Bandcamp, and SoundCloud! Read More…

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Find My Music Via …

  • Lady Tygress' Suite and Other Commissions

  • Duke Nukem Tank Tracks

  • Derivations

  • Calibrations

Follow me on Bandcamp

Follow @leejacksonaudio

Recent Posts

  • “COME GET SOME” the Collaboration Single is Out! 2023-05-26
  • Still Naming That Tune 2023-05-22
  • Name That Tune 2023-05-13
  • New Song – “Pavane” – On Bandcamp 2023-04-09
  • New Music Collaboration In The Works 2023-03-23

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