Perhaps

It's been yet another interesting week and weekend.  I did do a bit of mixing and I must say that I consistently feel like I take one step forward and then perhaps 2 1/2 steps backward.  The second guessing drives me a bit crazy, and I'm constantly asking myself why something doesn't work as I intended it to.  Also, there are just a ton of frequencies that I cannot hear well in my monitors and headphones so there always seems to be a slight surprise when listening to something on my stereo.  If mixing isn't the most frustrating part of music, then I don't know what is.

In other news, and I certainly don't mean to name drop, but I finally got around to Skyping with Marty Willson-Piper about a possible collaboration.  He's one of two ex-lead guitarist's for the band the Church, a band that I heavily grew up with right alongside others such as R.E.M., Dumptruck, the Dream Syndicate, etc.  Interestingly, apart from R.E.M., I would say that the Church's work is basically how I learned to play guitar, and I played/practiced their early songs literally for years, sometimes still.  Marty in particular has always been a bit of a guitar hero for me and I especially liked his solo work which partly gave me the idea of not being constrained to one genre, along with another favorite of mine, Wire.  I learned a few years ago that Marty was offering his services to people like myself in order to create and craft better albums, book studio time, etc., and so it's been on my agenda for quite some time to dip my toe in the water.

He's an incredibly easy guy to talk to, and in fact we chatted for just over 2 hours.  I think this will be a good fit for me since the things that he offers are right up my alley.  Overall, I'm just trying to fill in the gaps of being able to create music faster and more efficiently, using better techniques, and so on.  His biggest advice right off the bat was to actually give my music to someone who specializes in mixing rather than trying to do it myself, and, well, I don't disagree.  I know it's a big limitation of mine, trying to do it on my own, but I have so much material lying around that there's no way I could really afford to always hire someone.  Plus, some of these older and, say, shabbier or more questionable recordings, probably aren't worth sending out, and so hence I keep dabbling in this mixing arena.  In any event, I need to do some pondering about how exactly I want to collaborate but I do think this is something that will happen in the near future.

I feel like I made a bit of headway on the 4 mixes that I'm actively working on but they're still not quite there.  Strangely, now I feel like "Optimism" is the best sounding one, and all along it's been the worst.  Funny how that happens.  Ah, the joys of mixing.  I know I'll be doing a bit of re-recording on some of these songs but I just haven't been playing enough as of late to even consider attempting it.

Lastly, I got my new business cards in the mail.  I will openly say that the trim line is definitely NOT where it's supposed to be so it threw my spacing off a bit.  I'm sure no one else will notice but, well, I noticed right away.  Of course, this scares the living hell out of me in regards to what my CD's are going to look like which should be shipping sometime this coming week.  Shivers...

Onward?!

I'm happy to report that the CD order is finally complete and will be printed in the next week.  The ETA for shipping is 8/23 so I'd imagine I'll be receiving them about 5-7 days later.  On one hand, this is a huge relief...while on the other hand who the hell knows what it's going to look like.  If nothing else, at least it's over (or at least it better be over) and I can move onward finally.  I will say that this whole start-to-finish CD project has been quite the learning curve, especially doing every single piece of it alone.  Now, if I can only shorten the whole thing by about 60%.  Hmm.

In other news, I also finally printed business cards.  Yes!  I'm actually knocking off tasks from my extremely long list.  I've had that one on my list at least for 3 years so I'm pleased to have that done.

It's neither here nor there, mind you, but I will say that trying to get a home remodel done while you're trying to a) mix b) write c) practice and d) basically do anything creative is pretty much impossible.  The remodel began the second week of June and looks like it will continue for at least the next month, although we're definitely over the hump at this point with the noisiest and most distracting work behind us.  It's been quite the experience, however.  If you're ever considering a remodel of the interior of your home, I'd highly suggest you prepare for all of your creative tasks to come to a screeching halt.

I'm hoping to dive head first into some mixing this week, basically trying to promise myself to get a handle on "Mirror Land" especially ASAP.  At the same time, I realized this weekend that I'm just really itching to work on something musically (not mixing) and so I think I've made the decision to finally return to the Caution Children project, basically the moniker that I chose to use ages ago for my more electronic based work.  I wrote a series of songs back around 1994, almost all entirely in my head, and they've been sitting pretty much ever since.  I started recording some of them in the late 2000's but got distracted, didn't like how it was going, etc., and so I haven't touched them since.  I went over those tracks this weekend and was pleasantly surprised.  Why start on something electronic now?  Well, it's easier than working with microphones and all of that, and like I said I'm really itching to work on something creative without it being too terribly difficult.  Perhaps this one will come to light yet.  In the meantime, I have a bunch of prep to do for the new Jazz Machine so that one should start ramping up in the next few months as well.

That's my news for now.  With a little bit of luck, maybe I can get "Mirror Land" and off of my list fairly soon as well.  Here's to hoping...

Who Would Have Thought That...?

You may have noticed that I haven't had a post in awhile.  This was not forgetfulness but actually intentional, so intentional that it simply kept getting put on hold day after day and then week and week.

Allow me to explain.  I've been trying to get these CD's of "I Miss You Most at Nighttime" out for literally months now and I'm about at my wits end.  First, if you're following along, that is, I uncovered issue after issue with my masters.  Now, that's not on the mastering lab at all...it's on me, simply for being new to this whole new process.  I will fully say that Greg over at Rare Form Mastering has been incredibly kind to me and has never balked once about my asking for a redo, nor has he charged me for it, and we're talking after months of this.  So, yes, major kudos to RFM for being both kind AND patient.

So, I finally got the master the way I wanted it.  I mean, what the hell, right?  Then, it just so happened that I made the stupid decision to switch stereos in the middle of wrapping this up, and so when listening to the final master the bass sounded very off, and thus my paranoia once again went through the roof.  Just what I needed.  Ah, but, I did get over it, made a few tweaks on the system, and finally calmed down (thank goodness).

All that was left was the artwork and the actual printing.  I waited until 8/2 to place the order for the CD's.  You'd think that placing the order would be the big part; um, no.  In fact, every day since then, I have had countless email exchanges with the CD duplicator/printer, trying to get the artwork to sit correctly in their templates.  As much as the person that I've been talking to has been pleasant enough I can't say that he's been too terribly helpful.  In fact, every question I've had so far has pretty much been met with the same answer, "Well, I'm not a designer, I don't know.  But I can get you one for $65 an hour."  The funny part is that I've never once asked an actual "design" question.  Instead, they've all been about their template, their expectations, and so on.  I did get the feeling early on, though, that this whole thing is overly vague and complicated in order to pay their designer $65 an hour.  So far, I'm resisting.

Thus, this has been a sort of sick and twisted game thus far.  They took my money on 8/2 but I have yet to even have this thing in motion, and even worse, I've spent almost every night making tweaks, sometimes sitting an additional 2+ hours at the computer after doing a full day's work on the computer for my actual job.  It's been a real blast so far and I've pretty much garnered that, no matter how many tweaks I make on this, it's still going to be one of those things where I finally submit it and who knows what the hell I'm going to get in return.  Yes, great stuff.

The world has gone mad, as Marillion once sang, and I think I'm losing it along with it.  My hopes were that I'd simply wait to make this post until I had good news but, well, to much time has passed.  Who knew that releasing one album on CD was so damned difficult?  I guess I should have (sigh).