A Find

I had another good day of mixing, working mainly on "Effects of Connection...", cleaning the tom tracks and other odds and ends.  Cleaning tom tracks has got to be the most mundane task of all recording tasks, and it's enough to make you want to gouge your eyes out after awhile.  Because of this, I pretty much never do more than 2 tracks of this nature in a day because I don't think frankly I could handle it.

"Effects..." is coming along well but I won't get too excited until I listen to what I've got on my stereo.  I think I've got a good mix going, though, so I guess we'll see.  If I have what I think I have, I may be able to wrap up this EP sooner than later.  I've said it before but I'll say it again...I love the Focal monitors, and they're truly night and day from what I had before.

I then had it on my agenda to revisit an older song of mine that I couldn't remember if I had actually recorded it last year.  After a bit of digging, sure enough, I did start the recording and decided to give it a listen.  I quickly applied some of the reverbs and EQ that I've been working on as of late and I felt like the song sounded pretty solid, at least as a starting point.  Now, what I'm going to do with this track is a completely different question...

It was then that I found a folder called "Live Acoustic" on my Mac.  Now, I've seen this folder before, mind you, but I always thought it contained the live acoustic tracks from my handheld recorder that I threw together one year as a so called Christmas Gift to some friends.  Upon going into the folder, though, it wasn't that at all...it was a series of 7 tracks that I recorded via ProTools in my basement using good microphones...AND all live.

So, I quickly applied some of my modern mixing approach to the track and I nearly fell out of my chair because...well...it sounded damn good!  I was in complete shock.  I barely even remember recording these tracks, to be honest, but I remember driving around in my car listening to them back in MN for a brief time.  I doubt I ever let anyone else listen to them, or maybe two people may have heard them at the most...not sure.  They were probably done not long after I switched to ProTools, especially based on how I had the sessions setup, and quite possibly to familiarize myself with using it.  So, after hearing one of these songs sounding fairly stellar, I went to the next one...and the next one...and the next one.  It was then that I asked myself, why have I not used/released these tracks?!  The thing that really got me was that they're live tracks, albeit live acoustic, mind you, and they still sound pretty great overall.

I'm going to bounce these songs to a flash drive this week and give them a whirl on my stereo as well.  If they sound as good as I think they do, and that's only with about 1-2 hours of fiddling with the whole lot, I may just release them as downloads on my Bandcamp.  Needless to say, I'm hopefully going to have somewhere between 2-4 mini releases fairly soon.

Next week I'm going to plunge head first into blueprinting the new Jazz Machine album tracks.  I probably won't solely work on these during my week off but I'd like to get as far with them as possible.  3 of the tracks are demos that I did right when I was finishing up "...Miss You Most..." so they've been sitting around for a little while.  I also stumbled upon a demo for a song idea, in a completely different folder, mind you, that's based around some loops that sound very Joachim Cooder-ish and hence I named it as such.  In revisiting it today, I'm pondering if I could use this on the new Jazz Machine album.  It's not what I originally intended, mind you, but could be doable, and if so it would be quite different.  I guess we'll see.