Somethin'

I had a good first weekend back with music related tasks.  I spent today going over about half the tracks that I was working on over a month ago, basically figuring out where I left off and what was left to do.  As previously noted, I would like more than anything to get the "Effects of Connection" EP and the "Mirror Land" EP off my back by EOY.

I decided to only tackle one at a time and I do know that I was working heavily on "Effects..." before I was forced to take a break.  I cracked open that track, made the adjustments based on my notes from the last time I had listened, and then of course did a couple more minor tweaks.  I spent a lot of the weekend just playing around with the short delays on main vocals so I decided to apply a bit of what I had learned.

Next, I cracked open "Two Step", even though I had previously thought of it as done and complete.  Since learning about high shelving plus the delay/vocal thing, I figured what the hell, I might as well tinker.  I actually spent over an hour on this track because I was having difficulty with it sounding decent in mono, and I'm not sure how much I had worked that aspect of it beforehand.  By the time I was done, I thought, oh god, I just made it probably 10 times worse.  Oh well, if so...simply revert to the previous version.  Nothing to lose.

I also opened the radio edit of "As Evening Brings Tears" to see where that was at.  I had a few previous notes of what to change and then again made a few additional tweaks.

Lastly, I decided to start poking around the "It's Raining Elvis Fish!" tracks for whatever reason, the redux mixes that I never finished.  I opened "Queen Elvis" and I dare say that my jaw hit the floor.  Why?  Well, first off, it was a rather old mix but the way I had it setup in the session was contrary pretty much to everything I do today.  So, what was the issue?  The issue was...it sounded brilliant as is.  I mean, completely brilliant.  Was this the first time I was listening since buying the Focals?  Not sure.  And so, I did add a few minor tweaks and high shelving, some busses, that sort of thing, but opted not to mess with the reverbs really at all even though everything is running through one Plate verb which is pretty much unheard of for me.  Still, it sounded brilliant...so don't mess with it.  Big gulp.

I then opened up a variety of other sessions but didn't do any actual mixing.  I figured it was time to poke around and such.  I also worked slightly on the new Caution Children track, trying to get the session setup correctly and begin dabbling with the arrangement.  Every time I opened another track, I tried dabbling with the vocal delay thing, just to get more exposure to it.  I must say that it works freakin' brilliantly and I highly recommend it although the high shelving is really what I was missing for the past X number of years in my mixes, dare I say decades.

The thing that really blew me away, though, is that most of the "It's Raining Elvis Fish!" songs sounded pretty good, and they only need a tweak or new track here and there.  What I mean to say is I could TOTALLY finish this now without it being a huge ordeal.  Wait...did I just say that out loud?!  What AM I thinking??!  You have to understand, folks, that I have never felt this way about any of my stuff, so this simply means I AM getting better at mixing.  I now have proof!  Oh my gosh...I could actually start being productive after all!

I just got done listening to the 4 bounced tracks and every one of them sounded pretty much ready to go.  I wrote down a couple of tweaks on each but we're talking super minor things, nothing to fret over.  I'm a bit stunned.  You mean..."Effects..." might really come out this year yet?!  Well, hopefully this small bit of confidence doesn't spark some other new health disaster.  Aye.

Well...New Plans

I should never comment about plans out loud because every time I do everything goes astray in a matter of days.  This time, they really went astray, and if you remember that eye issue that I had been complaining about for quite some time...well, it ended up being yet another detached retina, this one worse than the last, and therefore yet another more intense surgery.  I'm still recovering two plus weeks later and that eye is still pretty much useless, although I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it does improve.

Today was the first day that I've fired up Pro Tools probably since my last entry in this blog.  I have yet to really look at what I was working on over a month ago, and of course I certainly do need to do that, but instead I started digging around in my back log to see what was lingering.

It's weird because most of the time that I was unable to do anything post surgery I kept thinking about electronic music.  In fact, I had even sort of convinced myself that I should start working on something new in that genre.  Today, though, I might have come to my senses.  I decided to dig through the Caution Children files and try to figure out just how far along those tracks are.

As a refresher, the main core of the Caution Children songs were written in 1993-95.  Yes, you read that correctly (sigh).  I started actually working on these recordings sometime towards the late 2000's although one of the tracks was done in the late 90's on my old ADAT system.  The rest were done on the Mackie D8b and so you can probably imagine the difference in sound in some of these tracks.  In going over them today, I was kind of surprised to see that they're not that far from complete.  Hmm.  There's also a brand new demoed track that I really like the feel of which is very Thomas Dolby, in my opinion, and so that makes a total of 6 songs.  I'd imagine 10 would round out the album and I've already got 2 more that haven't been started.  The remaining 2 songs might just fill my itch for writing something new in an electronic vein.  Double hmm.

Yeah, I don't know, I guess we'll see what happens.  I obviously need to get back on the mix path with the songs I was working on but it would be nice to actually work on something new and different.  At times like this, you've got to keep your spirits up and keep moving forward, even if I am working with only one eye at the moment.

I also played a bit more with super short delays on vocals.  I had been thinking about this quite a bit, especially after hearing a couple of my favorite albums this past week and realizing that the same technique was probably used.  In playing around with it a bit more, I realized that I can probably be much more liberal with it than previously thought.  I'm always learning new stuff, that's for certain.