A Plan

My Saturday night listening was pretty positive so I was mildly excited.  It's always a good feeling when things are working as you'd hoped.

Sunday was spent...wait for it...basically reopening the lid on the "Mirror Land" EP tracks and starting over yet again.  Yes, this is probably the 5th time I'm starting over on the mixes, although admittedly it's not completely from scratch.  I've picked up so many new mixing techniques in the last year, trying to fill in some gaping holes in my work, that I knew I was pretty much going to have to start again when the time came.  Mixing is kind of like a Jenga puzzle; if you move one block, well, pretty much everything is out of whack again anyhow so starting over just made the most sense.

It actually took me 2 hours per song to get everything rerouted, setup, labeled, played around with, etc., in the first two mixes.  I certainly knew going into it that these mixes wouldn't exactly come out the other side "done" but the goal here is to make things cleaner, clearer, and fatter than before.  In listening to the tracks later that evening, I accomplished it in most arenas while overdoing it in some others.  I guess it's to be expected.

I was actually blown away by the vocal sound on "Optimism".  Wow.  I need to write down how I got this tone because it's pretty interesting, and this was the main track that I was fighting with the vocal on for months and months.  I feel like I might be onto something here with these settings, albeit a bit bizarre.

"Only With You" ended up being a bit overdone with the new compressor, basically squashing the heck out of the acoustics and giving the track way too much high end.  It's funny how these frequencies affect your ear, literally to the point of annoyance so that's all your brain focuses on.  The vocal on this track continues to give me issues but I'm going to try and borrow some of the techniques from "Optimism" to see if I can finally wrangle it in.

I also did another mix of "As Evening Brings Tears" for the radio edit version, trying to tame the bass slightly, something I should have done with the original mix.  The song is definitely brighter now, which is good, and once the bass is sitting a bit better I think it'll be ready to roll.  I'm arguing with myself if I need to lower the kick drum (the answer is probably 'yes').

It's now the middle of September but I'm going to try, and provided I stay on it it should be doable, to get the 2 EP's and most if not all of Defrost Nixon done by 12/31.  It'll be a ton of work but that's my goal.  If nothing else, I want these 2 lingering EP's off of my back at long last.  Wouldn't that be nice.