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.