To recap... I have worked my *ss off the past two years, doing everything I can to play catch up on how to mix, arrange, etc. when it comes to original songs. This may seem odd considering my age, how long I've been trying this, and so on but it was very necessary, and whereas it has created countless delays on projects, they have all been carefully made choices due to a variety of factors. The most obvious one is that as I turn some page in learning how to mix, depending upon how major of a learning curve was just made, it then begs the question if you need to go back and alter your in-progress mixes. Again, these aren't choices that are taken lightly.
I really have a "slope" in life, as I put it, meaning the "importance curve". For example, when learning to do anything, you'll make minor progress and major progress, and it simply comes down to how greatly this progress effects whatever you're doing. For example, bringing it back to recording, if you record a cheap acoustic guitar with a cheap microphone you'll get X output; if you then bump up to a good mic, you're output quality may go up, say, 30%? But, if you upgrade to a good mic and a better guitar, you may get 50% - get the idea? Such is how I have been making choices with mixing, and if I learn something that I feel is high on the curve, I opt to go back and redo my work. The goal eventually is that all that major progress will be inherent knowledge and I'll only be left with minor steps forward which won't warrant redos. I don't know if this makes sense or not but that's the biggest reason for all the delays, mainly that I learned something new that really shook me to the core and I couldn't ignore changing the in-progress stuff.
Coming back to this past week, partly why I wanted to get back to recording something new was a) to do recording again, where I could try out some of my newer techniques and methods to see if things record/sound better, and b) it seemed like the perfect time to put some of my newer mixing knowledge to the test with a clean slate. I therefore decided this week would be about recording the "Yet I Tried for You" EP which has been in the works for a few years but I refer to it as "new material" versus things that, say, I wrote 20+ years ago. It'll also be the first "new" vocal work I put out in ages, again versus material I wrote when I was young.
The result? Well, it almost brought me to tears, frankly. I think I may have FINALLY arrived...and what a f***ed up journey it's been, let me tell ya. In looking back, I think I have made every single mistake a person could make in trying to record their own music. Seriously. I was going over some of it last night and even I was astounded by how many dumb decisions I have made at times, whether in how I went about recording, what mics I used, what gear I bought (and sometimes was greatly led astray by it), what gear I was recording on, how I was trying to arrange things, and so on. To finally at very long last hear something come together both quickly and easily, and that also sounds professional...it's just beyond words. In fact, I was working on a riff part yesterday and had a moment when I couldn't even get my head around the fact that I was listening to my song! It sounded so good that I had a momentary lapse and thought I was listening to a pro band's release. Wow.
Sure, things have been greatly delayed but I'm personally okay with it given how things have gone. I've turned enough corners now that I think I need to just close the book on "Mirror Land", the Defrost Nixon album, etc. They are what they are...because at this point I'd probably re-record the whole thing and clearly I don't want to do that (again, that curve I was talking about...it's just not worth it). If things go well, and I think they will, the new "Yet I Tried for You" EP should be ready for release just after the first of the year, and that too would be a new record for me in turn around time. I'm really excited to share this one with everyone.