About TortoiseClimbing™

Who We Are

Established

David Goettee officially established TortoiseClimbing™ in 1993, as part of privately releasing the first cassette album, Solo Collection, to friends and family.

Original mission/goals were more hobby-like:

• Produce nice recordings:
• For friends and family)

Updated Mission/Vision/Values

Over the years, various events brought about evolutions of our mission/goads. A major one is after 2018, more time became available for advancing TortoiseClimbing™, leading to a structural transition to a privately held, small family business. The transition from analogue to digital occurred, making numerous new capabilities available. We embrace a number of these capabilities internally for processing our products. We are located in Maryland, south of Washington, DC, and work with a number of professionals creating our recordings, companion histories, narration serializations, and audiobooks. Our current mission, vision and values are:

Mission:

• Produce exceptional quality music recordings, for public release;
• Produce indepth companion history publications, and
• Audio narrations of the publications.

Vision

Provide customers with great listening and reading pleasure, accompanied by intellectually fulfilling publications, eBooks and audio.

Provide detailed background information on existing products, artists, forthcoming products, and links to the sources where our products can be purchased, are found on our website.

Values

• Go the extra mile to ensure outstanding quality products, recordings, companion histories and audio narrations,
• Provide intellectually motivating products,
• Provide deeper insights into otherwise “normal” facts.

Name

Our name of TortoiseClimbing™ embodies a combination of concepts:

1. Perseverence - The well known story from Aesop's Fables about the Tortoise's perseverence, illustrates how perseverence enabled the Tortoise to prevail in the race with the Hare;


2. Creating Our Own Opportunity - The concept of perseverence is adapted/melded with my father's professional experience. After many years of struggling to support his family as an employed professional, he had the opportunity to establish his own business, which enabled him to create a better life for our family. We chose to create TortoiseClimbing™ following the pattern of that example;


3. Making it work - The name conveys the concept of perseverence, like in the story of the Tortoise, but also the importance of working to make the business a success. Making this business venture successful is a continuing effort of climbing toward better achieving our goals, to provide quality nostalgic recorded music, narrations, and written products.

Components/subsidiaries of TortoiseClimbing™

We currently consist of 3 subsidiaries focused on different responsibilities:

TortoiseClimbing Audio™ uses cutting edge recording technology and talent to beautifully record outstanding quality recordings, including audiobooks;

TortoiseClimbing Publishing™ provides carefully researched and footnoted histories, providing insights into influences behind the songs; and

TortoiseClimbing WebServices™ built and maintains this website, as a valuable part of our marketing program.

Products

Music Recordings

Hymns and Songs of My Mother

This is an extensive album of nostalgic traditional hymns and songs that were favorites of my parents. These have disappeared from the weekly liturgies of most churches. This album is available for streaming, purchase, download and ordering a CD. See Hymns and Songs.

Other Recordings

In 2023-24 we also:

• Released the restored and mastered the version of The Crucifixion recorded when David was in high school. See Crucifixion. (We are exploring other tools for further enhancing its sound quality); and
• Released a mini-EP of 2 versions of the original song, "Welcome Home."

Back Catalogue

We are preparing for release, updates of songs from our back catalogue, some previously privately released. We have the sonically very high quality master analogue tapes for all our earlier recordings. Those are converted to audiophile digital, enabling us to upgrade to meet our evolved mission by:

• Post production processing;
• Augmenting accompaniments;
• Remixing; and
• Remastering those early recordings.

The upgraded recordings will be publically released for digital downloads, (possibly also as CDs for delivery by mail), and via streaming services. A plan is to make the upgraded version of our private back catalogue publically available for the 1^st time.

In addition to publicly releasing songs from our private back catalogue, going forward we have a long list of candidate notalgic love songs, from which we will be choosing new recordings for a series of EPs and possibly albums.

Companion Products

In addition to producing nostalgic, high-quality recordings of both religious hymns and secular love songs, we produce companion indepth, thought-provoking histories of the times when the songs were written. These will be available as:

• eBooks (digital epub format for download);
• Audio narrations (advance releases of chapters from eBooks); and
• As audiobooks.

Serialized Narrations and Audiobooks

We will produce serialized narrations in advance of the audiobooks, and they will be available as digital downloads. They will also be made available via aggregators to streaming services.

Contact us via our contact page. Let us know your thoughts and preferences. We'd love hearing from you!

Roots

For insights into the roots from which TortoiseClimbing™ grew, see Our Roots.

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