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.
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