Don't Trust Computers

I've spent much of the last 2 weeks working on the "Mirror Land" EP mixes in both the evening and the weekends.  I ended up doing a small bit of recording for "Optimism", and after giving it a few days of listens and tweaks, I think it ended up being a good move.  The song now has a ton more power than it had before and doesn't sound quite so flat.  However, the vocals still sounded dull beyond belief.

I therefore had to go back to the drawing board on the vocals, and after doing some deep analysis of some pro recordings and such, I scrapped all of my reverbs and started over.  Thankfully, the results were what I was looking for.  I think I've finally reached the point where I'm just doing small tweaks and such on these mixes and perhaps, just perhaps, I'm headed down the final stretch (could it be??).  I've certainly spent way too long on these three songs...I mean, my goodness.

The real kick in the arse, though is the small stereo glitch in "Tonight, You Reached Me" that I needed to fix.  I've now done about 4-5 re-bounces of this mix, and I've even listened to it intently while it's bouncing, so I know for a damn fact that the "Pigeon" sound is indeed playing in the right ear at the beginning of the song.  And then, once the bounce is complete, the freakin' sound is once again playing in the left ear.  It's like what I'm hearing isn't being bounced down to a file and I cannot for the life of me get my head around this.  It's like there's a ghost in the machine that's insistent that the "Pigeon" needs to be in the left ear!

I even created a brand new track for just the beginning part, did the bounce, and still it was in the wrong ear.  I mean, you just can't make this stuff up.

Finally, I messed around with the output source in the Bounce window, and actually ended up choosing the same option again (the physical output), and this time it worked as intended.  Was it somehow having some sort of issue with this?  I have no clue.  What I HAVE learned, though, is that you definitely need to listen to all of your mixes with headphones, mind you, and make sure that your automation worked as intended, and also that it actually mixed what you intended it to mix.

In short, never trust a computer...ever.

A Couple of Days

It has been a rough couple of days for me.  First, after figuring out the minor glitch in the mastered version of "...Miss You Most...", that was enough to make me a bit fidgety and upset.  Then, to make matters worse, I burned my most recent versions of the "Mirror Land" EP last night and nearly fell out of my chair for it was very bluntly quite awful.

After 24 hours of stressing over it, doubting myself, and so on, I carried on and worked on all three tracks quite a bit today along with my daily LW tasks.  I burned new versions down to disc and some of it's thankfully quite a bit better, and some of it not so much.  I'm having a really hard time getting my vocals to sound normal, and why I don't know, but I think I just figured out that it may actually not be the vocal that's the bigger issue.  I dare say that I think I'm going to re-record the damn guitars on "Optimism" after all, at least in a trial to see if it helps.  I also think the drums aren't really the greatest so I need to work on those as well.  Ugh.  I swear...will I ever get this damn song done?!

Since I was burning stuff to disc anyway, I decided to burn the entire new mix of "Lost Weekend" down and give it a listen, just to see where we're at.  I have to be honest...I was terrified considering how things were going with the EP.  To my surprise, most of these mixes sounded pretty spot on, and I only made a small amount of notes for changes.  I'll go through countless minor changes, mind you, but the overall sound was actually quite good (whew).  The biggest glaring issue I see right now is that my work on the drums for "Interstate Blind" didn't go so well and I think it's back to the drawing board on that one.  I have a sneaky suspicion that I'll be trying to put down a new cleaner drum part and that's no easy feat for a track that's not aligned to the grid, as they say.  As for the new versions of "Pleasure Oasis" and "Ruin", I think I managed to achieve what I set out to do on both accounts (minor pat on the back).  I spent tons of time on both, doing everything I could to make those sound much better than the originals.

I also happened to remember a very funny tidbit about the "Lost Weekend" sessions, and how I didn't remember this a few days ago is beyond me since it's one of the better stories.  Back then, I used to leave my studio room door open and allowed my then two cats to roam freely.  They would often watch me while I recorded and such which I found kind of fun and amusing.  And then, one day, I was working on doing a punch in/out on a track for "Cantina" which was almost wrapped up.  I had a guitar strapped on and was standing in front of a microphone, waiting for the right moment to punch in the correct part, and just then my cat Tallulah wandered in, looked at me, wondered what the hell I was doing, and then promptly leaned her paws against a piece of furniture...except it wasn't a piece of furniture...it was my ADAT recorder.  Because I was playing the song back in record ready mode, she managed to record enable 4 tracks of audio and, um, wiped it out, all with a cute look on her face, having no idea what she had just done.  Needless to say, I had to re-record those tracks (who knows what the original sounded like at this point) and I made a practice of keeping my studio room door closed and designated as a "cat free zone" ever since.

That's it for now.  My mixing week comes to a close tomorrow.  I'm sure it'll be another day of stressing over the "Mirror Land" EP which is still my biggest priority and obstacle.

A Mix Mash

The remixing of "Lost Weekend" has been going very well this week thus far.  I dare say that I'm just about at the place with it that I had hoped to be, which is basically the tracks sound as they should, are laid out, cleaned up, are processed, sitting fairly well in the mix, etc.  It's basically about 3/4 of the way to completion.

On the negative side, I had a bit of a setback today that's making my head spin slightly.  As previously stated, I'm getting ready to submit "I Miss You Most at Nighttime" for CD printing and have been working on the finishing touches of the artwork.  In doing so, I just happened to listen to a bit of it via headphones last night and, low and behold, I heard something that I shouldn't have.  It's pretty small, mind you, but one of the sound "effects" on "Tonight, You Reached Me" played in the wrong ear.  Um...?  How can that even be?!

I therefore did a bit of research on this today and, sure enough, I didn't imagine it...it absolutely plays in the wrong ear, meaning the left side versus the right side.  This caused me to dig through my mixes and try to track it down.  Well, nowhere in any of my mixes is it on the left side.  So, what the hell happened?!

I basically put 2 and 2 together and figured it out and it quite disturbs me.  That particular noise on that song plays on the right side at the beginning of the track but then moves to the left side during the middle of the song via automation.  This can only mean one thing, that the automation failed when I pushed the button and "burned" the mix.  I can only guess that my old machine was out of CPU power or something like that and ProTools crapped out on that particular track.  This means that I 100% have to be waaaaay more careful in the future, and I have now learned, once again the hard way, why they say always listen to your mixes before submitting them.  I simply thought they meant listen to the setup of the mix, which obviously I did; I didn't realize you have to listen to the literal mix due to computer issues.  Ugh.

This means I now need to debate whether I should send off a new version back to the mastering lab and beg their forgiveness for pestering them yet again.  This will also put me at least 2 weeks back on the CD printing.  Fun.  I guess it could be worse.  Before doing anything, however, I'm going to make sure I give the whole album a very close listen via headphones, just in case anything else is amiss.

In other mixing news, the thing that always makes me a bit crazy is how one day you can listen to a mix and think it sounds amazing, and then you listen to it the very next day and you think it's horrible.  I mean, how is that even possible?!  Well, it is, and it's happened to me multiple times and always boggles my mind.  Mixing is tough, I tell ya.