Wrapping up an album is always a weird feeling. You kind of get so attached to the work that it's sometimes hard to imagine NOT working on it anymore, and yet on the other hand it can also be a relief to not have to tinker with it any more. I guess it depends upon the project, and for me specifically it tends to be about how long the project has been sitting in the computer, waiting for completion.
I will say up front that the "jazz machine" album has been the most satisfying and fun album that I've ever worked on. This is partly due to some of the albums that I've recorded being complete disasters, though. For example, the still officially unreleased "...Opsimath" album nearly killed me and even though I need to get back to doing more tinkering on that one, I shudder at the mere thought. The recording of TFTO versus "jazz machine" have been pretty much night and day. It occurred to me this weekend that recording didn't really become anywhere near "fun" until about 2012 when things started making more sense, I felt more confident about what I was doing, and so on. Recording is a lot trickier than one would initially think. It seems from afar that it would be all about the technical aspects; in reality, it's much more about the practical, although the technical certainly weighs in there as well. It's more about HOW to put an album together versus the act of physically doing it. You can physically record all you want and in the most perfect manner possible but if you don't know how to put the songs together on an album, you're still left with something not that great that barely resembles what we think of as "songs". That's just one of the lessons I had to learn the hard way and very few articles about recording ever seem to address. I believe it's basically putting your music producer's hat on...or finding one for yourself.
I'd say I'm about 2 weeks out from an official first listen of the album straight through. I got a ton of odds and ends done this weekend which left me feeling very confident about meeting my August 8th deadline. Then, upon re-listening to "Tonight, You Reached Me", I finally realized that the drum just isn't working and needs to be scrapped/redone. This isn't a total shock to me but I guess I've been slightly in denial of it. It's one of those weird things that each time I hear the track, initially I can't get my ear to follow the drum correctly with the rest of the music. Then, if I listen to it a second or third time, it sounds more normal and so I blow it off, thinking it was just me the first time around. Last night, though, it hit me that I simply need to fix it. It's not the end of the world and I spent about an hour investigating it late last night but any time I'm working with drum patterns I get a little nervous since they tend to be the most resource intensive parts.
Other than that, I'm really liking what I've got on this record and once completely done, it'll be a bit sad to say goodbye to it. The good news, though, is that the next one is already in progress in my head. Funny how that is.
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