From ccmacdon@rogers.com Wed Jan 20 14:59:24 2010
Subject:Shameless self-promotion, but I don't do this often!!!!

Hello to everyone,

This is a little bit of shameless self-promotion.. so forgive me.. I just wanted everyone to know that my band 11STEPS has just released an entirely original CD. After playing together as a cover band for several years, we decided to take a monumental leap and begin writing, arranging, recording, and producing the 12 songs that make up this original CD.. It has been a monumental undertaking as and we have had to replace both our singer and our drummer along the way.. After all this effort, the CD has finally just been released, and it is currently available for purchase or digital download on CDBABY:

www.cdbaby.com/cd/11STEPS (previews are available on all the songs)

you can also visit our myspace page and listen to a number of the tunes in their entirety:

www.myspace.com/11stepsband

I've been a player for many years, and this project is a bit of a shift for me, a shift from focusing on my own playing, to focusing entirely on the song-writing, including lyric writing, and arranging etc.. I have in fact written, or co-written, 10 of 12 songs that appear on the CD.

The CD itself is a rather eclectic mix of tunes in the classic rock style, but with surprising variations.. we have a couple of anthem-ish rock tunes, and some bluesy tunes, and even a couple with a Santana flavour.. Despite the fact that I am primarily an organ player, there's only a couple songs that I would suggest are really organ-oriented. I played various keyboards on the CD and used my real Hammond B3/147 leslie, along with a bunch of Virtual Soft Synths, including MTron Pro, Pianoteq, Lounge Lizard etc.. to create all the sounds.

I've just loaded one of the organ oriented songs on to our myspace playlist.. if you're interested, give "40 Days" a listen.. Let me know what you think.. It's even got an organ solo..;-)

One other song you might find interesting is the song called "Picking Hopes".. It's one of the Santana inspired latin tunes, and I used the softsynth VB3 to create what I think is an absolutely outstanding overdriven hammond sound.. Unfortunately this isn't available on myspace at this time, but if you want to give it a listen you can simply download it from CDBABY (at a cost of a mere 99 cents)..

Hope you all take the time to give the music a listen, hope you can all see your way to supporting your fellow organ player with a download or two... (after all I have to pay for this darn CD)..

Thanks very much for your patience and support!! Feedback is very welcome!!

Craig