About this project

UPDATE: WE MADE IT!!!!!
We are in shock. We made our goal in a day! That is ridiculous, thank you so much everyone.

We figure the $2000 will cover the mastering and duplication, and now we have a really great opportunity to potentially put some MARKETING into this, something that we'd never thought we'd get the chance to do with this record. So please continue to support us if you choose! We plan on writing a lot more postcards.

THANK YOU GUYS SO MUCH, we are so overwhelmed by the support, it is really encouraging.

----------------Original Message----------------

Dear Kickstarter and Smiles Friends,

The Smiles is an indie rock quartet comprised of four college students from a university in Los Angeles, CA. Though we like to think that we play beach rock (or tropical grunge), individually, none of us grew up on the Pacific. Collectively, we are from Baltimore, Maryland, Austin, Texas, and Palm Desert, California. After a year of playing together, we have solidified a unique and accessible style, carried by some pretty good songs.

We have already finished recording our first 6-song EP, Hermosa, thanks to the generosity of a good friend who believed in us and recorded it for free. However, student musicians may be the poorest of the musician genus (kingdom, species); therefore, we currently have insufficient funds to properly master and distribute it independently (and we also do want to pay our friend). As of right now, the only people who have heard all of our music are the people who come to our shows, and we are ready for a much wider audience. By releasing this EP, we are launching our career, and we have high hopes.

By our calculations, we need to raise $2,000 to cover the mastering and distribution. For those who don't know what mastering is, let us offer a quick explanation. Mastering uses tools like equalization and compression to make a group of recordings sound the best they can be together, and over different types of speakers. All professional albums are mastered. It is not cheap. After we get it mastered, we also need to produce physical copies of the EP and distribute them, which is the rest of the cost.

So we need to raise $2000 to make this all happen! If you help us, you get cool things! Like the first pressings of our first EP ever! That's cool, you can say you knew us before anyone else did and have an original Smiles EP. We can also do cool things like come play a show for you! (Even if you live somewhere far, if the price is right, we will definitely do it.) But if we don't reach our goal, nobody pays anything. And we can't really release our record, and that makes us not smile.

Please help us out, and thanks so much for giving us your time! For now, you can listen to some of our un-mastered songs on our Facebook!

Love,
The Smiles

www.facebook.com/thesmilesmusic