A few years ago I helped by father-in-law record and produce a CD in his own living room. He, my wife, and his guitar player laid down their tracks live over the course of a couple nights of recording. After we found a couple of people to lay down the bass tracks, we mixed our four tracks down and had the analog tape transferred to digital. Unsophisticated and raw it might have been, but the sound quality was far superior to anything he would have managed to produce in a studio within his price range.
The hard part came after the recording of course; without the support of even the smallest of labels trying to package and distribute a CD is next to impossible. He sold it at his concerts and to his friends and in the end probably covered his costs for making the CDs (not including the outlay for the four-track). A lot has changed in the six years since we did that CD and now there are packages that an individual can purchase with independent studios which get them recording and distribution. It's like the deals that self-published authors are getting with a number of the self publishing book sites.
It means that anybody with a few thousand bucks at their disposal can march into a studio and come out the other side with a CD and at least some distribution and publicity. Maybe not very much, but enough to get you noticed beyond your own circle of friends and acquaintances. Recently the Federal Express driver who delivers a fair number of my review materials asked me if I'd listen to one such disc. It was by a friend of his whom, like my father-in-law, had been kicking around the edges of the music industry for ages.
Aside from that and the title of his disc, Defining Moments, I don't know very much about L.W. Simms (the biography section of his Web-site is under construction). But you don't need to know very much about people to be able to listen and appreciate their music.
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