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.
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