Be part of the magic and participate in making Phat Man Dee's latest CD! The first song "Virgil and Kae" was released on February 19, 2022 and the next song "Easy to Say" shall be released March 27, 2022! There is no record label backing this financially at all. Creative Life Support Records will distribute and promote, but ManDee is paying for absolutely everything out of pocket. So she is humbly inviting you into her process to make this CD happen.
Thank you for considering helping me finish this CD!!! To catch you up, so far I have 5 songs recorded and I have spent about $6000 out of pocket making it happen, I spend $75 an hour in Heid Studios to record, each session is about 6 hours, and we have done 2 sessions there so far. I pay the musicians about $175 for a half day of recording each. Each song has up to 7 musicians on it. I spent a couple thousand on arrangements - the sheet music, the scores, the parts, I hired Reggie Watkins to do "Virgil and Kae" and I hired Julian Victor Hinton to do "A Thousand Miles Away" and "Bigger Smile". I co wrote "Easy to Say" with Jeff Franzel and paid him to help me make a demo and workshop that tune as well. The musicians I hired were top notch, Roger Humphries, Dr James Johnson, Deanna Witkowski, Tony Campbell, and Chris Hemingway, just to name the biggest names... I also fed them cuz hungry musicians can't play. I pay $150 per tune to be mastered, and vocal production was not a small expense, as I also hired Mr Hinton to help produce my vocals, he zooms in to give me in-studio coaching, plus vocal track post production, which is separate from the mixing and mastering process of each tune which is not cheap but also worth every penny.
I don't have a record label backing this financially at all. I am working with CLS Records to distribute and promote, but I am paying for absolutely everything out of pocket. And to be frank, my pockets are empty now and I have about $1000 left in the bank and that won't cover any more full days of recording. I do have some amazing gigs coming up, a couple weddings and I teach private students, and I work as a coach for the We Rock Workshop program, but truthfully, no one ever got rich being a jazz singer and vocal coach in Pittsburgh, PA. If they did it happened when they left. And I chose to stay because I love this town and I love our music family. So... I humbly am inviting you into my process and if you help me make this CD happen, I promise to make the best CD I could ever make.
Yours in song, ManDee
