Wednesday, April 1, 2009

The ‘Splosion Continues

Tonight turned out to be a very productive night for me as far as mixing goes. I did another round of mixes of almost every song on the album. I’ve been using an iterative methodology for song development, and it has served me well so far. Here’s the basic strategy:

1. Put together a mix of the song, to the best of my abilities
2. Load it onto the iPod
3. Listen to it a bunch of times, taking notes along the way about things that I think could be improved upon.
4. Go back into cubase and make the changes that my notes suggest
5. goto 2

I find that listening to the songs on the iPod, outside of the context of the mixing “studio” gives me a lot of insight that I don’t often get while “in the zone”. Turns out that sitting in front of the computer for a few hours at a time tends to dull your senses somehow. Having the songs on an iPod lets me listen to the songs anywhere, and also I can hear them up against other artists songs.

For me, I think the most fun part about this process is finding and fixing the technical glitches. I should probably call them performance glitches, seeing as how the technology actually had no part of it. For example, one of the things I fixed today were a couple of flubbed drum fills on Girl # 134. Throughout the song, there are about 10 drum fills. Three of them were pretty clumsy. Not terrible, just not as smooth as the others. A trick I recently discovered involves transplanting “working” parts over to the “damaged” parts. Works like a charm, but sometimes the grafts don’t fit quite perfectly, so I need to do a little stretching or reorganizing. I’ve gotten good enough at it that I can do it pretty quickly, and it also sounds very convincing. I also did a little lyrical fixing in The Friend That I once Knew. One of the common problems I find in our songs is that the vocal performances won’t match perfectly. On a lot of the songs, Bill and/or I lay down multiple takes. On “Friend”, I have two takes that play simultaneously. I find that the difference in performances makes for an interesting sound. However, there were a few lines that I just sang a little differently. I have created a technique to cut up the individual sounds and words so that I can line them all up visually, allowing the performance to be changed to sync up perfectly. It’s kind of weird, and something that just wouldn’t be possible using the type of equipment that we used when recording our first album. It’s wild.

Anyhow, there was a laundry list of little technical fixes that I got done, including tightening up the very final deedles on “Rockville”. The thing I like about the fixes is that they are very subtle. It’s not like there’s a glaring patch over the recorded work. In fact, if I did my job right, you’d never even notice it was done.

The punch line to all of this is that I think I have finished all of the technical fixes for the entire album. Of course, I’ll need to go through another iteration of listening, but I’m feeling confident that I’ve captured them all. I’ll leave room for a couple sneaky ones that may have slipped through the cracks, but it’s really come a long way.

In other news, I listened to the entire “album” in one sitting today. In fact, I was sitting out by the pool and tore through the whole album. Mixing issues aside, I think it’s a really solid album. There isn’t a song on there that I’m not proud of.

Oh, I also broke down and swapped out my vocals for Bills on “Let Me Be Your Guitar Playah”. Tough pill to swallow, to be sure, as that song is shaping up to be one of my favorite songs on the album, if not THE favorite song. Still, it sounds really good with Bill’s vocal, so it’s not like it’s a total loss. Hah!!

I’ve got another trip planned soon, and I will use my travel time to listen to the songs and write another todo list for my next iteration.

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