Fishin'

I'm now half way through my time off and have been working on music literally every day, at least for 4-5 hours a day, sometimes closer to 8 or 9.  This year's time off has been dedicated to mixing the "It's Raining Elvis Fish!" redo album, basically the Robyn Hitchcock cover/tribute album that I recorded back around 2008-2009.  At the time, I pseudo released it but wasn't even remotely happy with the outcome, and so no sooner was it released that I started working on the redo.  It's basically been sitting around ever since.

The story goes like this:  I had just finished fighting endlessly for years on the "Theories for the Opsimath" album, my incredibly over ambitious project that started in 2001 that was supposed to take me to new heights in my supposed music career.  Well, to say that fizzled is putting it mildly; it was a complete disaster since I couldn't get the album mixed in a satisfactory manner, even after working on it endlessly year after year.  For most people, it would have officially been the end of even trying to do anything musical but for me, after a short break, I decided to get back on the horse and try to figure out exactly where I went wrong.

In order to do this, I got the grand idea to record a bunch of cover tunes, namely Robyn Hitchcock songs, since he had been one of the biggest musical influences of my life up until then and I often played many of his songs acoustically.  I had actually toyed with recording some of his songs previously but this new idea gave me the opportunity to record an album's worth.  Most of RH's songs of the earlier days deal with things like crabs, fish, prawns, and silly things of that manner, and so I ended up putting together a bunch of words from the various tracks that I had recorded to create the original title "It's Raining Elvis Fish!" while all the while still sounding very RH-ish.

In hindsight now, it's easy to see why I failed both with "....Opsimath" and "...Fish!"; it was the method in which I went about the whole thing.  At the time, I would have had no idea that was the issue, mind you, and I was also a different person back then, one who wasn't quite so resourceful with seeking out solutions to problems.  When hitting a road block, I tended to simply keep trying the same thing over and over rather than seeking out different solutions.  On top of that, I can be very determined sometimes, not to mention OCD, and therefore I'd get into hideously annoying loops of simply doing the same dumb thing time and time again.  Thank goodness I've changed over the years.

So, in actuality, recording those two albums on the Mackie D8b system that I owned at the time, paired with a Mackie MDR recorder, was a huge part of the problem.  I know now that I simply should have instead dove head first into computer based hard disk recording versus ever buying the Mackie gear, even though it was fairly new at the time and had many years of bugs to be worked through, but I instead would have been a bit of a pioneer in the PT world rather than fighting with gear that simply couldn't really do what I wanted it to do.  I fought with the Mackie systems until 2010 because I had paid an enormous amount of money for them, and then I finally made the switch to ProTools, and I wish I could get those Mackie based years back.  The real kicker on both of these albums, though, was that intense sibilance ruined pretty much every vocal I did and the D8b simply didn't allow enough flexibility to handle fixing it properly.  There were of course other problems as well, such as poor recording techniques, not understanding gain staging, proper mic placement, and the downsides of direct recording with built in delays and reverbs.  All of this contributed to an entire decade lost for me that I can't do much about now.

I at least did finish the "...Fish!" album at the time and did a "release"; "...Opsimath" wasn't so lucky and simply died on the shelf, something I'm hoping to revisit in 2026 at long last.  However, I submitted "...Fish!" for mastering with a local guy I knew and the masters came back with so much of the high end stripped out due to the sibilance that it sounded completely awful.  I also was not pleased with my own mixing nor the stripped down instrumentation that I did on the album.  I was trying to do something unique at the time but instead I ended up with a pretty inferior product that gratefully has faded from existence.  In short, if you happen to have an old copy for some reason, please burn it immediately.

And so, upon its release, I knew I could do better...and I had all these new ideas as well for filling out the instrumentation.  Hence, the redo was born, and I moved the data over to ProTools and started tinkering with it over the next decade.  The album today barely has any resemblance to the former and I'd dare say that it's excellent, in fact it'll probably be my best mix to date.

I had planned to do the preliminary mixing of "...Fish!" for one song a day of the 13 song album over my Xmas break.  Things went so well that I pushed it to 2 songs a day, and then even did one day of 3 songs in a day.  The mixing went the smoothest ever for me, and I think I finally at very long last have a flow down, plus I know now how to make things sound "normal" and/or full.  It's been a long journey, let me tell you.

I still have 7 days left of time off so I'm returning to the Defrost Nixon mixes, particularly the one's that I'm having difficulty with.  I'm basically mixing 4 projects at once and strangely it's going well.  Maybe I've finally turned a corner; one can only hope.

Getting Ready for Time Off

I'm slowing gearing up for my Xmas 2 weeks off, time I greatly look forward to.  This year has been incredibly stressful and busy beyond belief and I'd love to have some relaxation time.  Unfortunately, I'm not taking an actual vacation but I will be mixing daily, trying to play a bit of catch up in general.  It'll just be great to only focus on music for awhile, something that I truly do look forward to.

The Defrost Nixon mixes are coming along quite well.  I went over the parts I recorded last weekend and I think everything is a 'go'.  I will say that there are still some flaws in my setup that I need to look into further but I'm at least able to work with the sounds I got last week.  I'm a little annoyed with myself that I used the SM57 for "Semaphore"; personally, I haven't had a tremendous amount of luck with that mic, and/or I'm not doing the best placement of it.  In general, I have more luck running the U87ai with a Royer R122, and my recording for "Marooned" went much better with that arrangement.  In both cases, though, I'm heavily relying on the direct signal to carry me through which wouldn't be my preference in general.

I'm hoping to have half the album wrangled by this coming weekend.  "Wrangled" means that the main sound and overall idea of the mix is there, and it also means that there could be endless tweaks for days after but they're to smaller details, just getting everything as right as possible.  I also worked more on the newer versions of the "Mirror Land" EP and those are nearly complete as well.  I think I've gone through about 7 iterations of those mixes this year, each time changing them due to some new technique or idea that I had just learned about.  In the end, though, I think it's all for the best although it's taken all year to get these done.  They've been a great sounding board for learning, though, and that was the intent all along.

This Saturday, my first official day off, I'm going to start working on the "It's Raining Elvis Fish!" mixes.  My days will be filled with doing at least one "...Fish!" song per day, then making tweaks to "Mirror Land" and Defrost Nixon as needed, and then trying to also fit in "Petty Cash" and my original 3 Song Acoustic EP.  Sounds busy, huh?  Yeah, it will be but I seriously need to play catch up here, plus it's good for challenging myself with what I've learned.  The 2 latter releases are quite simple and short in nature so they're not that heavy of a lift.

One thing I DO know is that anyone that tells you that making and mixing music is easy is completely insane :)  I mean, there's no way that one person can learn how to do all of these things in a short amount of time.  In fact, it's been an incredibly long process for me to simply get to a point where things actually sound good or decent.  However, the only way to progress is to accept your ability at any given time and then keep pushing your own boundaries.  That's been my approach, at least.  The other option is to of course pay someone to do it for you, but you're taking them at their word that they know what they're doing, and in this world you never really know.

The project that got moved to next year is unfortunately the "Wrecking Ball" album.  Had I stayed on task, that's what I'd be working on right now, hence my needing to play catch up.  I've come to terms with this, though, and I feel confident that I can get the above 4 items done by the end of January.  I've also made a decision, a big one, to try and do the mastering myself via some plugin's that I've recently acquired and find to be pretty amazing (and cheap).  Then, I'm going to opt to print a smaller number of CD's since I can't justify the price of the methodology I had been following, so I'm hoping to reduce my costs greatly, enough that I can actually put things out quicker, cheaper, and w/o a ton of major concern about what I'm going to do with it, etc.  And, of course, I still want to create some merchandise but I simply haven't had the time.  I'm hoping to find some help in 2025.  One can only hope.

Marooned

As planned, today was all about the redo of the main guitar on "Marooned (Not Lost)".  I thought it would be the easier of the two; turns out it was harder and/or took longer.  I literally spent all afternoon trying to get the right sound, right microphones, right microphone placement, etc.   I didn't physically get around to doing the actual recording until about 7pm, of which I then did my usual 3 takes and edited the part.

I always feel bad for my neighbors when I do this because it's bad enough that they have to deal with the noise of the electric guitar thundering away, but even worse they have to hear me start and stop the same part over and over for hours as I'm testing things out.  I'm sure at least one neighbor is out there thinking, "Geez...is that the only part he can play or somethin'?!"

As much as it was a bit trying, it was a good day and weekend overall and I actually learned quite a bit about mic placement.  I've been wanting to toy with this for awhile now but I'm usually in a rush so I just default to my old standbys.  This weekend, though, I used both microphone pairings and mic placement that I've never used before and I found it kind of fascinating.  It's amazing the difference you get from just moving a mic literally a couple millimeters.

All in all, I think I got what I set out to accomplish on both tracks.  They sound a bit different, of course, but close enough that I don't think it'll be any major adjustment for me, and both now seem to play much better in mono as I had hoped.  Part of the secret seemed to be capturing the direct signal so that I could blend it on top of the mic'd signals, thus creating a clearer tone that cuts through better.  I ended up running those direct signals through the Eleven Lite plugin, one I've never used before, and I must say that it worked perfectly in comparison to the other weird distortion and overdrive pedal plugin's that I usually reach for.  I don't know if the Eleven Lite is a ProTools offering or if I have it because I physically own an Eleven unit; not sure.  Regardless, though, it has a very real sounding overdrive to it that I particularly like so I'm sure I'll be using it quite a bit going forward.

The downside is that I have a couple more electric guitar parts to lay down before I think this album's recording is done, at least instrumentally.  I still harmonies to record as well.  However, I think I'll try to lay down those last guitar parts maybe on Tuesday night and see how it goes.  I'm eager to get this wrapped up so I can move on to other projects.

Redos

This weekend is all about redoing the main guitars on 2 songs from the Defrost Nixon album, namely "Marooned (Not Lost)" and "Semaphore on all Fours".  These are the only two tracks that I've really been struggling with the main guitars on when it comes to the mono mixes.  After doing a bit of research, I found that "Marooned" is one of the tracks way back when that I had made the poor choice to attempt to record the guitars in stereo, meaning splitting the output from a delay and/or reverb pedal and then shooting it to two different amps...in the same room, mind you.  You can probably imagine what that gets you...a literal mess of sound and phase.

"Semaphore" on the other hand has a very strange main guitar part that more or less needs a bit of delay, and then it needs to played in a very specific manner.  I think what I had recorded would have been fine if only I had also recorded a direct signal pre-pedal.  That's where I shot myself in the foot.  Because I don't have that work with, it also just fades into a mess of phase via the mono mix.

I've not historically had very good luck when trying to rerecord main guitars.  In fact, I would say that I've been batting around a 60% failure rate; possibly higher.  It usually stems from not being able to exactly replicate the same sound, and because of that the rerecorded part is more or less useless to me.  Knowing this, I went into today fully prepared to spend a ton of time just making sure that I've got a workable sound and tone before ever actually laying down a real track.

It took me over 2 hours to finally get to a point where I felt I had a decent sound to record.  Then, the actual recording began which I only intended to do 3 takes, my usual amount, but ended up doing 5.  I was having issues with the beginning of the track so I recorded about 5 more takes of just the first 30 seconds or so.  It gave me enough to work with where I could compile something together.

Overall, I think it worked.  I never actually celebrate until I hear something the next day since there have been countless times that I think I have what I want and then hear it the next day, wondering what the hell I was thinking.  So, I guess I'll reserve judgement until tomorrow at least.  I will say that what I got this time around seems to be cutting through as hoped in the mono mix and much to my surprise doesn't deviate that much from the original.  It also doesn't have the annoying grindy noise that the original had, something I think more or less came from a bit of unwanted distortion from the preamp back then.

I'll be working on "Marooned" tomorrow.  I expect that one to be slightly easier but I also need to work on the refrain guitars, possibly the last guitar parts that I need to record.  It would great to put this behind me at long last although it has been kind of fun to work on.