Hymns from the Piano

Well, on my last post I said I’d hopefully have something exciting to share with you and I do! Hopefully if you click above, you'll hear a short sampling from the CD I’ve been working on for awhile now. It is a compilation of 23 hymns performed by me. All the piano arrangements are my very own creations. It is a very peaceful CD that encompasses many of the older, more traditional hymns of the church.

I am selling this as a fundraiser for the 60 mile, 3-Day for the Cure Breast Cancer walk that I’ll be doing in Boston. The selling price is $15 and all the profits will go into my walk account to help me reach the $2300 minimum requirement to participate. Any profits from sales after I reach this goal will be donated to charity, I’m just not sure which ones will benefit next.

The cover art for the CD is a copy of an original painting done by me. It is of the church that I have attended since I was in first grade. I’ve also been the organist there on and off since 1987! I owe special thanks to my pastor, Bruce Lucas for taking the photograph I based my painting on.

Putting together a CD is much harder than I thought. I did my first CD’s right before Christmas of 2009 and it was amazing what all had to be done. This time around, I was much better prepared for all the steps, but that didn’t mean that they were much easier. For this CD, since I was recording my own arrangements, I decided that I’d just sit down at the piano with the hymn in front of me and improvise. Sometimes these improvisations worked out well and the result is what you can hear on the finished CD. Other times, I’d would hit a rough note, the phone would ring, or the dogs would bark and I’d have to start the recording all over again. I cant even tell you how many hours I spent recording to get the 48 minutes of material on the CD! Beyond the music, I wanted to design the cover myself. I’ve wanted to try to paint the church for years and now that we have a new front porch the time was right for me to give it a try. The painting was actually the easiest part of the entire process for me. It just turned out really well without a lot of struggles. Trying to design the labels that go onto the actual CD was a huge struggle this time. I kept trying to get the entire church on the label but then there wasn’t any room for the playlist. I finally used just the church steeple for the label and then everything fit on and I like how it turned out.

The CD booklet was a bit of a struggle just to get things the proper dimensions for the case. The booklet opens up and has the playlist, copyright info and also some special thank you notes.

After all of that was put together and ready to go then I had to do the entire production of all the elements. The booklets needed to be copied then trimmed down to the proper size. The CD labels needed to be printed out (and I cant find CD labels that I can run through a copy machine, so all of these were printed from my printer at home!). The CD’s had to be burned which is not hard, just very time consuming when doing them one by one from my laptop. Finally, after stuffing everything into the jewel case, the project is ready to go!

Its no wonder I’ve been exhausted and had a headache this past week! I’m hopeful that my hard work will pay off and sales will be good.