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.