I Hear that Train a Comin'

It's been awhile since I've posted for a couple of reasons, mainly because I was feeling a bit lousy last week and haven't been doing much work.  I also had other tasks that I had to take care of over the past two weekends so it's been slow going, trying to get back into the swing of things.

I did finally place the order for the "The Effects of Connection" CD's.  Getting the artwork approved this time was super simple since I had made decent notes from my last order.  I'm thinking the CD's will be shipped to me sometime this week.  I'm super happy with how the artwork turned out.

I did spend a bit of time this weekend working on both the "Mirror Land" mixes and "Petty Cash".  The latter is the first EP that I ever put together which consists of simplified cover versions of two Tom Petty songs and "Ring of Fire" ala Johnny Cash.  A friend of mine asked and requested that I remix it so I've been plugging away at it here and there.  It's actually coming together quite nicely and should be done fairly soon.

The other thing I've been working on is getting some t-shirts created on Threadless.  I've had an idea about doing this for a few years now but I'm finally trying to get it started.  It's looking like I'm going to have two different stores, basically one for music related items and the other for everything else.  I'll announce more details about it once it's ready to go since I'm still more or less dabbling at this point.

That's really about all I've got to report at the moment.  My focus right now is pretty much on wrapping up "Mirror Land" asap including the artwork, finishing "Petty Cash", and then continuing my work on the Defrost Nixon album.  My day job related work has been a bit on the harsh side lately so my productivity has definitely slowed a bit but hopefully the train starts moving at full speed again. 

Finishing Up Recording Week

Well, another recording week has come to a close.  It's been both exciting and exhausting, really, with three songs that have had outstanding issues that have been rather challenging to both diagnose and remedy.  I'm not sure that I'm out of the woods on any of them, mind you, but I feel like I'm at least walking away with a plan of action.  Apart from that, I've now touched every song and tried to "finish" them off from a recording perspective.

This past week has been a combination of preliminary mixing, fixing minor recorded bits, and adding new bits to fill things in.  I'm super stoked about some of the guitar sounds I got this week - my goodness.  It's really taken these recordings to a whole new level.  My fairly recent acquisition Fender Mod Shop Jaguar has been amazing paired with an Earthquaker Zoar, OCDGe, and Jam Pedals Dyna-ssor all via a Savage Schatten.  I've never sounded this good before, in my opinion, and I got just the perfect tone from that combo that reminded me immediately of the self titled album by the Cars.

I also learned two incredibly valuable techniques this past week that are once again raising my game a bit.  First up, I finally got around to really using Auto Align 2 on older tracks.  I had many tracks that I just couldn't get power out of; I used Auto Align 2 and voila!  They're much, much clearer.  Ah...the joy of eliminating phase issues, my goodness.  I've now used it on tracks where I thought there was no possible way there could be any phase issue and yet it still sounded better post using it

The other thing, and it's probably a bit of another 'duh' moment, but I learned via a conversation with a friend how to more effectively use parallel processing via either a buss or simply by copying a track more than once.  The latter literally never occurred to me.  I've known about double bussing, if you will, for awhile but I never really got too in depth with cranking up the double buss with a massive amount of compression or contrary EQ.  It did amazing wonders on a couple of tracks and took it from sounding fairly thin to quite huge.  Wow.

The Defrost Nixon album is nowhere near done, mind you, but it's on its way at long last.  I'm setting a tentative release date of 9/1 for it.  I got most of the major recording done and now I just have odds and ends like harmonies, etc., to work on.  I think given everything I've learned in the past couple of years it'll probably end up being my best work yet but I guess we'll see.