Last Day

Today was my last day off before having to return to work.  It's always a bit sad in a way but also a bit of a relief since almost 9 days straight of working on music can wear you out a bit.  I got off to an early start today, getting in about 2 hours of mixing time before the US Open Men's Final.  I then watched the match and returned upstairs to do another 2 hours, then ate dinner, and did yet another couple of hours.  It was a long day.

"Usurper", the opening track on the album, was the track to work on today.  This one's been a bit of a problem child for awhile now and I did a lot of various recording during Memorial Day in hopes of trying to finally get it to gel.  In revisiting the track and those parts, I found a bit of a mess since I had recorded stuff all over the place, and I couldn't even get my head around what the heck I was doing only a few short months ago.  The first part of the day was focused on Auto Aligning the parts, then I worked on the drums for quite some time, and then I started working through the various guitar parts.

At the end of the day, it's still nowhere near to being done but I did work through a decent amount of issues and was able to get the track setup for full mixdown.  I need to go through all of these songs this week and start writing down what parts I might want to add, in hopes of knocking the majority of those out maybe next weekend.

Yesterday, I worked on "Our Satellite's Collide" as planned both before and after watching the women's final.  That track is fairly complete and seemed to come together quite well but that wasn't a total surprise.  I figured that one would behave.

I'm also going to go through the "Mirror Land" EP this week in hopes of getting that ready to go as soon as possible.  I really want that one out for mastering as soon as physically possible.  It's simply been sitting around for way too long at this point.

All in all, it was a pretty good week and I learned a ton that I didn't know before this time off started.  I'm excited about the mixes I have in the works and I feel confident that they'll be my best work to date.  I actually can't wait to share them.

Tennis Instead

I accomplished absolutely nothing yesterday, as I figured, and instead favored the Men's Semi Finals over doing anything music related.  I think everyone deserves at least one day off, right?  Damn, I hope so.

I did spend a decent amount of time planning out the rest of the year, meaning what I'd like to get accomplished before 1/1/25, and then when to work on it and for how long, etc.  These sorts of plans are just that - "plans", and usually don't have non-bumpy rides that inevitably push back the dates, overcomplicating everything.  Let's just say that my plans for the remainder of the year are rather aggressive but I'm going to do the best I can with it.

I also mapped out 2025 at a very high level which unfortunately is another pretty aggressive plan in itself, especially since I'm hoping to be doing a house addition in the middle of the year which will likely take at least three months of that timer.  My thought all along was to work incredibly hard this year and next, and then I can slow down a bit afterward but so far that's proving a bit challenging.  I guess we'll see.

On the plus side, I'm seriously thinking that I've been going about mixing all wrong, meaning my overall process for it, and if my theories are correct I should greatly be able to reduce the amount of time it takes to actually mix something.  This would be tremendous, of course, and I actually think I could potentially get things done in a "normal" amount of time rather than the insanely long spans that it has been taking.  This is only a theory at this point, mind you, but I do believe I'm on to something at very long last.  It would be huge if I'm right.

I think I've also decided to retinker the "Mirror Land" EP yet again on the new machine.  The back story here is that 2 of the 3 mixes were basically done and perfect on my old machine but upon opening them and playing them on the new one, I have tracks clipping here and there.  This is highly unusual, mind you, and after speaking with Avid directly and such, it's a bit of a mystery as to why it's happening.  Regardless, my old machine was pegged on memory so I'm thinking that one may have had the issue, in fact, and may not have been registering the sounds correctly, as strange as that is to say.  I'm thinking I'm just going to yet again retool them a bit for the new machine.  If nothing else, they'll be good going forward since I plan to keep this computer for quite awhile.

That's the news from here.  I'm opting not to watch the Women's Final live today and instead will be working, trying to do a bit of catch up.

Marooned...and Sibilance

Yesterday was finally the day to work on "Marooned (Not Lost)", the biggest problem track that I've had on this album, and I of course began by starting over, undoing what garbage I had created in the previous handful of mixes.  This once again proved to be the right solution and I can't overstate how important it is to NOT be afraid to just throw cr*p out that simply isn't working.

I didn't have as much time to work on the song as I had wanted but I completely remixed the drums, worked heavily on the guitars and vocals, and even worked with the scratch keyboard track that I had laid down back in May.  I walked away with a pretty good sounding track, albeit not completely done but definitely on the right road.  This one has now been taken off the "problem track" list.

I do want to mention that sibilance hasn't really been too major of an issue for me anymore.  I completely destroyed two of my albums in the past due to excessive sibilance in my vocals, which is a real drag and mood killer, let me tell you, and I've personally found for me that using multiple de-essers along the vocal chain seems to work wonderfully, each one taking a little bit out at a time.  It depends on the song, of course, and the vocalist, but my voice has had some really harsh "s" sounds ever since my teeth started shifting back in my 30's.  I've learned to control it a lot more when singing and recording, and let me say that takes some true discipline to do, but there are always some strong "s" sounds coming through.  I've tried a few different de-essers along the way but the built-in for ProTools usually works the best, in my opinion.  The goal is to always make sure you're not taking out too much at any point.

If the de-essers don't fix the vocals completely, and I've had that be the case here and there, there are two other powerful tools to use in your arsenal:  one being fades, that is if the "s" is at the beginning or end of a word and is spaced in a manner that you can fade it in a natural sounding way, and the other being the semi newer PT functionality called "clip gain".  I have really played around with clip gain adjustments over the past year and I must say that I love them, and I now use them all the time.  They're really simple to use and quite forgiving, not to mention way more trustworthy than automation.  In fact, I've had enough issues with automation over the years that I use it as little as possible.  I'd much prefer knowing that my mix is "hard coded" to do something rather than rely on automation working during the bounce, and I've had it more than once not work.

With clip gain, the idea is that if you have a really bad sibilant section of a word, at least lower the volume of that exact section so that you're more or less doing a manual de-ess on it.  I've found that it works amazingly well.  It was one of the newer functions added to ProTools quite a few years ago that I found to be super helpful but I had never really worked with it until recently.

I was supposed to work on "Our Satellite's Collide" today but it's going to be tricky since the men's semifinals are on for the US Open.  I'll mix where and when I can but I doubt it's going to be a heavy work day.  Oh well...  I guess I can relax a bit one day of my week off.

Semaphore

Yesterday wasn't too terribly eventful and went more or less as planned.  I watched more tennis than usual, basically because the US Open is winding down and I thought the matches would be really amazing.  Well, I was kind of wrong about that, and apparently the Olympics have been playing havoc on many of the players, making way too many of the matches rather bizarre in nature.  This US Open won't exactly go down in history as amazing.

"Semaphore on All Fours" is one of my personal favorite tracks on the Defrost Nixon album so it's pretty important to me to make it come to life in a great manner.  I'm particularly proud of this track since it was a bit of an experiment, an arty one at that.  I wrote the main song originally but then had this wild idea of adding a French spoken word part at the end of it, more or less combing two songs almost although they flow really wonderfully into one another.  The end result is nearly a 10 minute song.  The question at the time was how in the hell do you do the French speaking part?!  I knew no one that was fluent in French, mind you.  Somehow, through asking a variety of people, I found someone and it went really well overall except that the vocal itself is probably the most sibilant thing I've personally ever recorded, and that's because Ellen (the speaker) was doing her best to enunciate every single syllable.  Me, like a dummy, didn't stop her...or wasn't really thinking at the time how this would wreak havoc on the recording, so it's really my fault, not hers.  I've been fighting with this particular spoken word part pretty much ever since, trying to make it workable.

This track was always one of the best ones that we played in practice but strangely we never played it out.  Kind of a bummer.  In any event, I always have a lot of pride in anything rather arty leaning in my work and so this one really stands out for me.

I didn't actually get to finish what I was working on but then again I haven't really finished any of these songs all week.  If nothing else, though, it's setup and ready to be heavily tinkered with.

I've Gone Superior

I had a pretty good day yesterday, finally a day with no major surprises.  I'm learning a lot this week about how to pull things together, pump things up, and so on.  It's been pretty interesting so far, all the software upgrade issues aside.  By the way, the Avid "work around" for the MIDi latency issue did NOT work for me so that's a real drag.  I'm still waiting to hear back from their support department which has been historically awful, in my opinion.

"Humor for a Lexophile" now sounds pretty good and is setup for final mixdown.  The biggest challenge with it is that there are 2 different drum sets/drummers, and that's a new one for me.  Trying to make the two sound like one or at least make it not incredibly jarring to your ear is a little difficult.  The song took a major turn for the better I think back in May, when I added the new piano part that's become more of the main melody for the verses.  I hadn't originally seen the track going in that direction but it does seem to work pretty well.  Of course, we never played the song in that manner so it's just a very different sound altogether.  Thank goodness I recorded it back in May for doing it now with this MIDi issue would be a real pain in the rump (thanks Avid!).

I also got an email saying that Toontrack is running a discounted price on crossgrading to Superior Drummer, dropping the price by about $80.  That was enough for me to take the plunge since I was debating about it anyway.  From what I had seen and heard about the software, it has a great function in it for doing what Steven Slate's Trigger 2 does and supposedly does it better.  As I keep saying over and over, I'm not a huge fan of Trigger 2 nor of Steven Slate's software in general so this might be a great fit.  Plus, you get all the sounds of Superior Drummer at your disposal versus the small handful that Trigger 2 gives you.  It's a huge install so we'll see how it goes.

I've also been watching tennis here and there where I can.  It's always a struggle trying to stay dialed into anything when you're juggling multiple tasks and such.  It's still great to see what I can of it although the matches so far have been a bit on the disappointing side.  It seems that every time I start watching and getting into it, someone becomes minorly injured and the match is basically over.

Latency...Just Say No

I had a fairly frustrating day yesterday that completely started out on the wrong foot.  Before starting my mixing session on the next track, "Photographs of You", I wanted to quickly lay down a piano part idea from the day before on a different track.  I wasn't able to accomplish this the first time around since my MIDi Controller wasn't working properly.  Now that that issue was resolved, it should be easy, right?

Wrong!  I played the part, albeit poorly, and then listened to it back.  "Hey, wait a minute...  That's not even in time with the music!  I don't play THAT badly!"  Yes, that's right, ProTools had somehow captured the small part completely out of time with where I recorded it.  WTF?!

I did it again, and again, and again, simplifying it as I went along for ease of listening.  Then, I verified it on the MIDi Editor grid and, sure enough, the notes were lagging about 2/16th notes behind.  Seriously, what the hell?!  I PAID for this upgrade?1

This of course got me off on yet another tangent of research, trying different settings, and so on.  In other words, about 2 hours down the toilet...just to find that it's apparently a bug in the 2024.06 PT software.  Nice!  And, where's the fix?!  I did finally find a supposed workaround later last night that I have yet to try today but hopefully it'll work.  I ended up yesterday just changing my settings slightly for the MIDi options screen which simply made the alignment slightly better but still off, but it was at least easier to snap it to grid since it was closer to being correct.  Ah, you've gotta love switching computers and PT versions, I tell ya...

The rest of my day and mixing was slightly tense since I was behind on time.  I got "Photographs..." setup, etc., and at one point sounding pretty clear but then lost it a bit along the way via tinkering.  The track will definitely need more work and lots of leveling but it's at least ready to be tinkered further.  Ah, the fun.

Salesman, Salesman

 I spent day #2 working on "The Worst Salesman Ever", track two from the Defrost Nixon album.  A small tidbit about this one...  I came up with the whole song based around the lyrical idea of a salesman doing anything possible to make a sale, up to and including donating a kidney.  I thought it was a rather funny idea and I got it from watching the series "Lost", where John Locke has a short back story segment about I believe doing sales and failing at it, if I remember correctly (it's been almost a decade, sorry).  I was actually out of work at the time for 6 months due to a layoff and spent many of my day time hours watching "Lost", trying to keep my mind off of the concept that I was out of work.

These sorts of situations are funny because the amount of stress that being unemployed caused me was incredible.  This was after the housing crisis, back in 2009/2010, and therefore countless people were out of work, making the job market pretty tough.  I was going through grueling interview after interview at the time, and it can quickly break your spirits.  "Lost" was my way of escaping from that, and the question remained how much of the series I'd get through before actually getting hired somewhere.  The sad piece was that job hunting was so very time consuming that I pretty much didn't work on music at all, of which in hindsight makes me angry since it was literally the biggest amount of time I have ever had "off".

Anyway, back to "....Salesman"...  I remember getting that lyrical idea, trying to piece it into a refrain, and the next thing I knew I had a new song.  I presented it to the band and we started playing it almost right away and it's really one of the more hit-sy songs on the album, if you will.  I guess all of those hours with "Lost" weren't an actual loss.

I started yesterday as usual fighting with the drums, and I made the mistake of trying to change the Trigger 2 setup in the session which proved to be a rather dumb thing to do.  I'm not a huge fan of Trigger 2, if you haven't already figured that out, and I find it personally pretty hard to work with.  I guess it really depends upon your source material.  If you have a source that's really well recorded and clean, it's probably super easy; my sources, however, are super noisy and the software simply doesn't know what and when to trigger so it's maddening, to be frank.  My recommendation is that once you have Trigger 2 working adequately, don't sneeze for the whole thing will fall apart.  Also, you should note that most people doing demos of this type of software online seem to be working with abnormally clean source material, which is both misleading and annoying.  Don't be fooled.

I ended up reverting an hour and half's work and starting over, and then began the painstaking process of setting up the mix.  At the 3-4 hour mark, I had it whipped together but the clarity in mono wasn't the greatest.  So, after dinner, I went upstairs again and tinkered more, and I think I got it pretty well laid out by the end of that session.  In fact, I think I need to go back to "My Little Jealousy" and do the same thing to that track.

I am going to have to go through the entire song and basically edit each snare hit for the Trigger 2 program since there are quite a few mishits, probably around 20-30.  It's a fairly awful process but will really help in the long run, but that's something to do for another day.

Question - I was recently watching a video about how some people align all their drums apparently in ProTools via Elastic Audio, basically perfecting the hits, timing, etc.  This kind of blew my mind because my thought was why even have a drummer play if you're going to a) change all their timing and hits to be literally on the mark and b) trigger your drum sounds?  It's fascinating to me since so many people will say "real drummers sound SO much better" and yet in post production the common technique seems to be what I just described.  I'm beginning to think that actual drummers and musicians are simply so disconnected from post production that they have no concept of how much their parts are changed and altered.  Something to think about.  For the moment, I'm opting to not alter the playing to this degree but I might change my mind in the future.

Finally Mixing DN

I survived to my usual Labor Day week off - hooray!  Work (day job) has been incredibly chaotic pretty much since April and so it's been quite exhausting, and therefore just surviving up to this point is a bit of an accomplishment.  Of course, the US Open always conflicts with my music schedule during this week so I'm trying to juggle, albeit poorly.

I finally have the Mac Studio pretty much setup and working as expected.  I actually spent almost 2 hours last night diagnosing an issue with my MIDi controller just to find out, after I solved the issue, that I had actually written a note for myself during my previous computer switch in order to prevent this very dilemma.  Ugh.  I'm not always the greatest at reading my own notes, as you can tell.

Day 1 of mixing went pretty well and was fairly long.  I attacked "My Little Jealousy", one of the tracks I was having an issue with mainly on the drums, and I decided to revert my version backward about 4 versions.  I think this was wise and I probably should do this more often, although it is frustrating losing all of that ground, but if you have inherent issues that you created along the way it's probably the easiest way to safely get rid of them.  For the most part, I walked away with a track that's not 100% but at least ready to be tweaked further for eventual final mixdown.  That's really all I'm shooting for this week for every song.

It's nice to finally be working on the Defrost Nixon material which was supposed to be started in early June.  It should be noted that I did not send out "Mirror Land" for mastering yet because for whatever reason my mixes for those three tracks are going in the red on the new Mac Studio, whereas they were not on the Mac Mini.  I've done quite a bit of digging on this and cannot find why that would be.  It's made me question if the Mac Mini was running out of power and simply acting strangely, making me not completely trust those mixes at this point.  I've had a few other weird occurrences as well that I can't explain but after spending a few evenings on it I simply decided to put it aside once again and move forward as planned.

This should be a fairly interesting week.  Given all that I've learned this year with mixing, my hope is to be able to take a song and actually get it to 80%+ in one day.  That would be amazing seeing my history with mixing but that is my hope.  I'll probably be posting daily, just to chronicle this for myself.  I still have high hopes that I'll be able to release 3 full albums and the "Mirror Land" EP by the end of the year, provided this week goes well.