The Deed is Done

Well, I'm overjoyed to report that "I Miss You Most at Nighttime" is done, mixed, and mastered, and overall I'm quite pleased with how it came out.  It's by far my favorite album to listen to that I've done and I think it'll have a good longevity in my playlist, and that's even after having listened to it probably 40+ times just trying to get the mix down.  The mastering process ended up being fairly painless and there was really no real reason for paranoia or anxiety.  This is normal for me, and I just have to go through the process at least once to understand that there really is nothing to fear.

I still need to nail down the artwork and such and then it's ready to be sent off for printing.  For this one, I believe I'm only going to be offering CD's in digipack form and digital downloads.  I have yet to know where exactly the downloads will be but that's certainly on my agenda to figure out over the next 30 days.  I'd expect the album to available in all forms within 30-60 days.

I also spent the weekend setting up the new studio gear, getting everything connected, installed, and so on, and then taking down the old rig.  I'm now on studio gear version 4.0.  The Mac Mini so far is blowing my mind a bit with how fast it is and how much it can do.  Even ProTools itself loads in about 1/3 the time than it did on my old system.

For now, I'm doing a decent amount of patting myself on the back, internal celebrations, etc.  It's been a long time coming and I'm very proud of this album.  Believe it or not, I think I'm going to begin recording the next Jazz Machine album over the holidays, with a potential late 2022 release date.  I'm busy, I tell ya...busy.

Deadline

My 'date' with the mastering lab is this Thursday and so I've been scrambling to make any finishing touches and so on with "I Miss You Most at Nighttime".  I had one track in particular that was really giving me grief and I think I found out last night, by pure spur of the moment bright idea and accident, that it was a self induced issue.  It seems that I followed some advice that I read about online and it actually created an issue where there was none originally.  The solution was simply turning off the EQ plugin.  Duh.  I'm learning new stuff every day.

I also did my "mono check" yesterday in which I found at long last a true blue phase problem!  Phase used to boggle my mind when I'd read about it, and this particular part on a song was something that I kept turning up in volume but it never really seemed to get much louder.  Well, that's where the phase issue came in :)  As soon as I fixed it, I found I could drop the volume by many dB and the passage was now louder than ever.  I do give great credence to the mono check!  It's no joke.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that all goes well with the mastering process.  I've never done this before in this manner so this is all new to me.  I also learned about ISRC's, licensing, and so on.  It's a lot to take in but I think I'm getting it down...I hope.

On the plus side, the album's mix is sounding better than ever.  It DID take me way longer than I had hoped but I think I've got a good result which ultimately is all that matters in the end.

Changes

It's been a fairly busy 6 weeks of mixing but I believe the end is officially on the horizon since I booked space on the calendar for mastering the album on October 14th.  This means I essentially HAVE to be done by then, which I don't think will be an issue since most of the tracks sound pretty good at this point.  I have a few nitpicky details I'm still playing around with and maybe one or two tracks that still need a small amount of love but overall its fairly together at this point.  It's been an interesting experience and I have learned quite a bit.  My hope is that the next mixed album will only take about 4 weeks max.

I also took the plunge and purchased/received my new recording gear.  My system is about 10 years old at this point and my Mac Pro has been chugging for quite some time, constantly running out of memory, starting up very slowly, and so on.  Due to that, I've been fairly limited on plug-in processing power and so my hope is that the new system provides me with a lot more bandwidth and versatility.  My Digi 003, which is what I've been using for an interface, has also shown definite signs of potential failure so it seemed like the right time to switch over to something new, in this instance an Apollo x8 paired with a new M1 chip Mac Mini.    The end result should be good...the bad news is the actual porting over to the new system.  It'll probably take me 2-3 weeks to get everything setup and ready to go.  It's amazing how much software and such needs to be loaded and the trick for me is usually remembering what it all is.

I'm kind of itchin' to get back to actual music creation.  It's hard to switch over to post production in this manner, and you start to forget about the more fun part of actually creating songs and such, which is really what its all about, in my opinion.

I'll hopefully have good news in my next post about the new instrumental album and I'll soon begin putting together the official artwork for the album.  I'm really excited to share this album with everyone and look forward to comments!