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...