I always caution students not to second-guess themselves on tests, not to go back and change their answers once they’ve recorded them. “When in doubt,” one of my grade-school teachers used to say, “your first impression is usually right.”

I think the same is true about editing a documentary. You work on it for a long time by yourself, and then you start showing it to people to get their reactions. If three or four of them agree on something, you probably should change it. You make those changes and show it to more people. Eventually they start suggesting things you tried and discarded a year earlier. That’s when it’s time to stop. Making any further changes would be second-guessing, erasing right answers and writing in wrong ones.

So, Troubadour Blues is done for now. It’s been as long as 127 minutes, and now it’s down to 89 minutes. Aside from some cutaways here and there, there isn’t anything I can add or take out to make it a better film. It’s so tight that it squeaks. Time to move on to the myriad other tasks that confront an independent filmmaker on the lowest of low budgets.

The trouble with being a one-man band, a solo act — and this applies to many of the musicians in the film as well as to me — is that you have many hats to wear, but only one head. I can only do one thing at a time. When I’m editing, I can’t be thinking about the DVD cover. When I’m writing a proposal for funding, I can’t be lining up press contacts and setting up screenings. It’s a very inefficient way to work. As my consultant Peter Broderick told me, you can make a movie by yourself, but to distribute it, you need a team. And a team has to be paid. So now, I take off my editor hat and put on my producer hat.

I can’t even say how much it will cost to finish the film, because I don’t have rights to all the music yet. For the title song, I am using Mark Erelli’s album cut of “Troubadour Blues” from his record Hillbilly Pilgrim. This involves two sets of rights: “sync rights,” to use a pre-existing recording in a film or TV show, and “publishing rights” to the words and music, the song itself. Mark owns his own master recordings, so I’m only dealing with one person, not a record company.

The rest of the music in the film is recorded live and performed by the artists who wrote it, so I’m only dealing with publishing rights. I’m on friendly terms with most of the artists, and they are generally supportive, but you never know. Most of the artists own their own publishing (they haven’t sold it to a third party, like the way the Beatles song catalogue came to be owned by Michael Jackson and Sony), so it’s a relatively simple matter to contact them for permission. This is not the case with rights to big hit songs, which are in the hands of corporate entities that won’t even return e-mails or phonecalls. I had to eliminate two short scenes from my film, in fact, because they involved people playing Beatles songs.

To get this ball rolling, I have to do a music cue sheet — a detailed list of all the music in the film, with beginning and ending times. This is to derive a formula for each songwriter’s percentage of the total music in the film. My friend Troy Campbell, who does music clearances as part of his livelihood, has agreed to show me the ropes. Next time I will know how to do this myself.

In any event, I did not make a movie about singer-songwriters in order to rip them off for the rights to their songs. So, this becomes part of the completion budget for the film, the money I have to spend before I can screen it publicly or sell DVDs. It is the most important part — I can put the film out without fancy audio and video remastering, I can put it in a cardboard sleeve rather than a deluxe package, but I can’t release it without permission to use the music.

I’ll be spending the rest of the summer writing a business plan for distribution of the film. Right now, I’m trying to figure out how to place a value on the film in its current state, determining a dollar value for the thousands of hours of time I’ve invested and the money I’ve spent on gas, airfare, hotels, rental cars, tape, supplies, equipment and who knows what else. Getting estimates from mastering labs, audio engineers, entertainment lawyers, publicists and insurance companies. Everything it takes to get Troubadour Blues out of my basement and in front of an audience.

As I detailed in an earlier post, I’m trying to develop an alternatative circuit for screening of this documentary and future music-related films. I want to work with the little network of supportive music venues around the country, places like the Blue Door in Oklahoma City, Ashland Coffee and Tea in Virginia, the Nameless Coffeehouse in Boston. This makes more sense to me than competing for attention with thousands of other independently made films at festivals and art-house cinemas . If your core audience is people who love music, then the way to reach them is through the places they’re already going to hear music.

I’ll be trying to raise some money, so if you know anybody in a position to invest in a worthwhile project, send them my way. Now that I’ve put away my editor hat, I’ll be blogging here more frequently with news about the film and the world of traveling singer-songwriters. So, stay tuned.