The "Land" is Mirrored at Last

I'm happy to report that the "Mirror Land" EP is basically done!  Now, I say "basically" because I do have some more minor changes to make but they're all things that are part of the process.  In other words, the core of the mix is done and hardened, and actually it sounds pretty damn good.  I'm definitely getting better at this.

I would suspect that I'll be ready to completely lock down this EP at long last maybe by the end of next weekend.  That means that it might go out for mastering the following week, and then I could post it about a week later and also put in the order for the CD's.  Talk about a monkey off of my back.  I'd say we're looking at a release date of about one month from now.  I can't tell you how ecstatic about this I am.  It's been waaaaay too long in the making and waaaaay too much work on my part.  I don't even want to guess at the number of hours.  However, I went into both of these EP's with the goal of coming out a stronger mixing and recording engineer and I think that is indeed happening for I've learned a ton over the past 6-7 months.

I spent a decent part of today actually re-recording the electric guitar part on the title track.  I did this because there were some deep issues with the original takes that I simply couldn't ignore.  Plus, it's a super simple part, only on the refrains, so it seemed dumb to not do it.  I also added just a tad of hand percussion to the refrain as well because it felt to me like it needed just a little something extra to keep the beat.

This gave me an opportunity to do my first recording with my new Benson Earhart.  I pulled out my Rick 360 and initially started playing every Tom Petty riff that was lingering in my head, and then I started tweaking knobs and got down to business.  At first, I was really kind of frustrated since the part was not recording correctly.  And then, duh...  I figured out what the issue was via muting some tracks by accident.  I was actually routing the output of the track to another buss which was not turned on!  Hah, hah.  Yeah, that'll get ya every time!  That's the downside of recording this late into the process.  As soon as I figured that out, I was like...ah...there's the sound I'm looking for!  And so, the maiden voyage went pretty well.  I will say that the Rick sounded amazing through that amp, especially playing the Petty stuff.  I was definitely having a bit of a Mike Campbell moment.

I haven't had much time to do anything else but I do believe I'll finally get heads down into the Defrost Nixon mixes this coming week.  I'm actually looking forward to it.  Figuring out how to mix drums more efficiently will be a bit of a learning curve but I dare say that it might just be my last major hurdle to get over.  I'll be simply over the moon if the DN stuff gets mixed in a fairly easy and fast manner.  At this point in time, I'm so incredibly eager to start working on new recordings and ideas but I've got quite a ways to go first.

4th of July

I had a pretty good weekend of working on various mixes and such.  I decided after having multiple problems with the vocals (but the same recurring theme) on the "Mirror Land" EP that it was best to simply put time aside last week and try to get to the bottom of the issue.  I think this mentality paid off.

I learned a few new things about parallel processing, specifically on vocals, and it more or less corrected most of the issues.  I decided to first play around with the "Petty Cash" songs since they were "new" to me (never thought I'd say THAT since they're from around 1999) and tried to work out how to make my vocals sound the way I'm hoping.  Some of the techniques I read about online really helped, specifically in parallel processing the vocals, and I found that this approach simply seems to be way more forgiving in the output rather than trying to tweak one EQ just perfectly.  I then transferred what I had learned over to the "Mirror Land" EP and, what do you know, that worked but threw a lot of stuff off again.  Big shock.

I spent a huge amount of the 4 day weekend reworking these tracks, specifically "Optimism" which had multiple problems going on.  After many hours of tinkering, I think I walked away with more or less what I want.  "Only With You" is very close but needs just a bit more work.  "Mirror Land" the song was also greatly reworked but I still have some elements to fight with there, mainly in the Mono mix check.  I don't know why this particular song has been such a beast.

In the middle of all of this, my brand new Benson Earhart (see pic in upper right corner) that had been more or less on order for about 3 years showed up.  I honestly just thought it would be another amp equivalent to my Savage Schatten that I'd simply use for playing out.  Upon plugging it in the first time, I had an experience similar to Marty McFly from "Back to the Future", where the amp didn't physically blow me away but certainly mentally.  I mean, oh my god...  THIS is the real deal!  After all these decades of searching, wow...this thing simply blew my mind.  The resonance, tone, sound, and the response from the amp (and I barely even had the volume up), etc....just amazing.  I do love my Savage amps but I cannot tell a lie...the Earhart is far superior but also far more expensive.  If you can afford one, however, I can't say enough about it, and I'm thoroughly excited to record with it.  Wow.