“SECRETS” featured on THE TURKISH AMERICAN HOUR 07/15/2006 The Turkish American Hour is a show that presents Turks and their cultures to audiences in the Washington DC Metropolitan Area as well as audiences worldwide via the internet. Thanks to the producer of the show, my song “Secrets” from Popular Lane was aired as a background song for the first time on TV! Here’s the link to their official website: www.turkishamericanhour.org

AN ENCORE AT GROG & TANKARD and MORE… 06/23/2006 The manager of the venue, as well as my friends, asked me to return to Grog & Tankard for a second show, which took place on June 15th, 2006. It was announced as an encore, but I shuffled the set from the first concert for a brand new collection of songs. In the first week of June, I had written a new song called ‘Friends of Fun’, which I performed live at my second concert. This show was on a Thursday night and this time I went through the entire set without taking a break. As I had gained the experience of doing a show at Grog & Tankard before, I started the show with a calm mind and didn’t get as nervous as I did before. Hence, my songs sounded much more confident and expressive. In the last week of June the plans for the second album have started to roll. If everything falls in place, we should be able to start recording in November 2006. Popular Lane gave us a more realistic perspective on timing and while November seems so far away right now, it is simply a plausible and achievable goal that I had to set in order to get the planning process started.

ALPER LIVE ON THE 05/05!!! 05/12/2006 On May 5th, 2006 I finally had my release party/concert at Grog and Tankard in Georgetown, Washington DC. Thanks to our good friends the news about the concert spread pretty quickly and a lot of them left their sombreros (for the ‘Cinco’ parties) at home to come and see the concert. The set that I played included a variety of songs from Popular Lane, a few songs that I’m planning on putting onto the next album, a few additional unreleased songs and a couple of covers from Billy Joel and Lionel Ritchie. The concert started late and it went well past midnight as I went for another round of songs after a short break. The stage setup was simple but effective with one spotlight, my synthesizer and two microphones. Now that I’ve explained the technicalities of the concert, let me tell you that it was a fantastic feeling to be on stage and to be performing the songs in front of a live crowd. Due to my friends’ and my own anticipation for this event, there should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that I was indeed nervous at first, but after a couple of songs, I felt comfort in the reaction of this enthusiastic crowd! They were dancing, clapping, singing along and truly making me comfortable on stage. I told them – as I will share with you in this blog as well – that it felt like I was having a second birthday celebration! Check out the pictures from the concert!

Going Live: On the Radio 03/05/2006 Throughout the month of February the marketing and promotion of Popular Lane has been in full force. For the first time, local DJs got to hear Popular Lane and the feedback that I received so far has been incredible! It is such a great feeling to hear others play and sing along with songs on Popular Lane. Another highlight of the past few weeks was the first broadcast of the songs Scratch and Popular Lane on the online radio station "Symphony on a Chip" hosted by DJ Platinum Nat. If you're not hooked on this channel yet, check it out! Look for it on www.live365.com and have the cool electronica, pop and dance sounds blasting through your speakers! Plans for the first concert are also well on track. The location/venue is set, but we're still in talks about the format and the date. Once we have a specific date, we will post it on Popular Lane and I will have more details in this blog section.

Clicks in 2006 01/13/2006 In the past couple of weeks, I bundled my seasons greetings to friends and family with a side note that I had released my new CD. While we're in the midst of planning the release party and getting the word out to everyone, let me put the past few months into a personal perspective: This CD is a milestone for me and the beginning of a dream that started when I first grabbed a pencil and paper in front of my piano 12 years ago. Selim and I worked very diligently during the summer months and past the fall of 2005. Although we had delays for a couple of months, we still managed to go Live in 2005 with Popular Lane. It's an accomplishment that seemed out of sight in the first few months of last year, approachable in the spring, at times discouraging during the summer, realistic in the fall and just a couple of hours and minutes away in December 2005. The infant year has already started with great news as the distribution process is in full swing and Popular Lane is popping up for sale on a multitude of distribution websites such as Tower Records, CDBaby, Best Buy, etc. The homepage for Popular Lane is up and running and we will have updates about the release party coming soon.

Strategy for Distribution and Promotion 12/14/2005 IT'S HERE!!! My CDs have finally arrived and they’re ready for sale. We can finally start planning for the release party. Before we haste into timeless euphoria, let's look at the new game plan: we'll need a wide distribution, availability of the CD for order through the internet as well as digital downloads on various online music stores. Selim is now working frantically to get all the right connections working. With the holidays coming up it's going to be delayed yet again by a couple of weeks until we'll have the CD in stores. In the meantime we can start scouting different places to hold the release party. We're going to have a short set where I'll play a few of the songs from the album as well as some unreleased ones and maybe even a song or two from the next album. Hehe, yes, the next album is already a go and the songs are being selected. We are not going to start recording this second album until probably later in 2006.

Green light: push the tempo! 11/07/2005 We listened to the final version on Bose, Harman/Kardon, Aiwa, Sony, Monsoon, and several other systems to hear the sound quality of the CD through different channels. The bass of Popular Lane was too heavy on all of the tests, so I changed the type of bass on my synthesizer and recorded it again. Although it still has a very deep bass, it's no longer set to damage your audio system as it did with the previous version. With the golden master pressed we are ready for production! It will take a couple of weeks for the initial batch of CDs to be pressed and delivered. All we can do now is sit and wait for our CDs to arrive.

6th gear: Production is heating up in November 2005 11/03/2005 It’s November and we are about to send the CD in for mass production. We worked on several minor adjustments such as volume, balancing, fading in and out, noise reduction, mastering, etc before we burned it onto a golden master CD. To match the theme of the character that I played on the cover picture and the type of electronic pop that I have produced, I turned the track numbers on the back cover to degrees of heat. It looked cold since the degrees ranged from one to ten. :) When we added the colors, it made more sense as it went along with the rising heat. We debated whether we should use higher degrees instead of track numbers, but the final decision was to keep it simple and stick with the track numbers from 1 to 10.

Lego©, Rubrik©, and Miami Vice© 09/18/2005 After several brain storming sessions, we finally came up with a cover design that represents Popular Lane. Selim and I were discussing how the tremendously innovative pop era of the 1980s have influenced my songwriting and the memories lead us back to the days when the new art deco in Miami was all the rage. Using blocks for the cover soon turned from a simple idea into being part of the final design. Placing the title of the album and my name onto this picture wasn’t a walk in the park either. We created several versions with different colors and designs, but in the end, we decided that in the case of the name of the album, bigger is indeed better. We increased the size of the title until it went across the cover and as the background was complicated enough, we decided to go with a simple, undramatic text. Chocolate brown, certainly my favorite color over the past couple of years, blended well with the colors of the picture and we decided that the right corner was the right corner. It is what it is, if it wasn't...:-)

You've got the champagne, now what? 08/30/2005 While we were checking sounds, volumes and balances we were gearing up for another step of the process. The design of the cover and back were tasks that were still ahead of us. A crucial moment prior to the design process was the decision on the exact number of songs that would make it onto the album. Of the initial list of 14 songs that I had selected we cut two within the first month. During the editing process we cut another two songs and today we finally reached an agreement on the ten songs that will be on this album. As the titles themselves don't mean anything without the songs behind them, I won't release the names of the 10 songs until they're available as complete songs. I may release some or all of the other four tracks that we cut from this album sometime in the future, but they definitely won't be on 'Popular Lane'. Over the past couple of months we were also going back and forth on the title of the album. The darts we were shooting hit either ‘Hollywood enough’ or ‘Popular Lane’, so we were debating whether we should go for a coin toss. :) Ultimately a decision had to be made on this day so we put aside the darts, coins and dice (that's what a fun studio is all about!) and I insisted on naming the album after my personal favorite track, 'Popular Lane'.

'Hollywood enough' already? No, it's not ready yet 08/22/2005 ‘Hollywood enough’ is the one song that has gone through the most radical changes within this editing process. I started writing this song in 2002 and it was among the first couple of dance/electonic pop songs that I did after I updated my synthesizer with the new Korg Triton©. A couple of weeks ago, I let the system replay the song as I was walking away from the studio, and I realized that it was too hasty, so I needed to slow it down. When I slowed it down from a 140 BPM to a 130 BPM my voice was more comfortable as well and I didn't feel like I was rushing through the lyrics. The slower version made the organs sound choppy, so I replaced them with strings and added the guitar track to have a full range of sound. With a complete re-write of the lyrics and a multi-layered voice, the song is done and ready now.

Yield sign ahead: Ain't happening in September 2005 08/13/2005 Upon return from a short summer break, the Road to Popular Lane is ready to give another update on what’s been going on over the past couple of weeks: At the beginning of August we had our first version burned onto a CD and listened to it through several audio systems to check the quality of the sound. The multi-layered voices seemed to be working better than a single voice, so we had to go back and record the voice tracks for ‘Celebrate’ once again. Given this time-consuming task, our plans to finish production of Popular Lane in September had to be indefinitely postponed. Now it's a race against time; we're putting as much focus and intensity as we can onto this project so that we can beat the clock and still manage to release my CD in 2005. With a few more mountains of work still ahead of us, hold on tight, because it's going to be a close call, but stay tuned to 'Road to Popular Lane' to get the latest updates.

Sizzlin' 100 degrees 07/25/2005 July is a hot and humid month in Washington, DC. The machines and minds behind Popular Lane were also hot and undoubtedly competing with the heat outside. As a very productive month comes to an end, we have our sights on the month of September for finishing the recording of Popular Lane. Here’s what happened this month: Selim, my manager, co-producer and technical editor dove into the details of every melody and pointed out areas of improvement and parts that needed to be produced again. I went back to the editing process on my synthesizer and spent a few days on editing tones and melodies. Once I was done, we resumed our recording sessions in the studio. We’re almost ready to burn the first version of Popular Lane and we’re going to go back to make adjustments upon listening to the end result of our first version.

Re-writing lyrics, intros and outros 06/20/2005 It's been two weeks since my last entry. So "what's been cookin'?" you may be wondering. I've continued working on the songs as well as on some of the lyrics. It's been a battle of man versus technology as completing the songs that I had started is a much more challenging task than going through the first writing process. I know that this is only the beginning of this task, but I guess it's a 'necessary evil' before the release of an album. ;) I went back and forth about the lyrics for two songs. For the songs ‘Aqualicious’ and ‘Platinum’ I had short lines of lyrics, but in the end I decided not to use them. I determined that it would sound better without any lyrics at all. Besides these two changes, I also had to re-write the second part of the lyrics for ‘Hollywood enough’. Now that I have established complete versions for the songs on my Korg Triton©, we are ready to start the next step of the process: recording and editing the songs.

Let's get these hands dirty! 06/05/2005 For the past few years I have been writing and producing my own songs and have been performing occasionally at smaller events. I finally made the commitment to sit down and work on an album. It has to get done this year! We're going Live in 2005, baby! I know it will take a ton of effort and time but the end result will be all worth it. The road ahead of me is rough, occasionally dirty (or maybe just un-paved), and definitely on a challenging upward angle. I need to get into the game of this production and stay on course to put out my best effort. Tomorrow we'll start the breakdown of the songs that will be considered for this album. The project is called "Hollywood enough" for the title of the first song that will definitely be on this album. In order to get started I had to finish the first versions of 14 songs that I want to put onto my first album. There are a couple of songs that I started almost three years ago, but I didn’t have endings to them. I had either left it open with a loop or it came to an abrupt stop. I finally sat down and re-arranged these older songs to make them complete. For example: the song ‘Secrets’ was unfinished, so I re-played each individual instrument to make a distinct ending.