I've been hard at work with close to no breaks, although I did take almost a week off due to visiting family in Arizona. I think I needed to step away for a bit anyhow but there were other goals at hand, making the trip out to AZ a fulfilling one in general. It sounds like I'll be making more trips soon since my father is apparently planning on moving to an assisted living home, something that was news to us and that he dropped into casual conversation. This means we need to more or less get anything out of his house that we'd want, such as family photos, etc. You can imagine the "fun" that awaits...aye. I don't even know what exactly is in that house, at this point.
I spent almost all of January mixing my vocals. I know, you're probably thinking, huh?! Well, I found a hole in my process and I had to basically go back to the root and figure out what I was doing wrong. I knew it would take some time but I felt it was a good trade considering I was going to be doing the same thing over and over for the next 6+ months so I might as well get a better handle on what I'm doing right and wrong before taking those dives.
I believe I ended up getting out of it what I needed. I watched a lot of YouTube videos online about mixing vocals and found that most of them don't help me but actually do damage, at least when it comes to my voice. I've had an extreme sibilance issue for quite some time and it's amazing how the smallest EQ tweak can bring that to the forefront. By doing a deep dive on this, I more or less started understanding where I'm going wrong but also started brainstorming on how to work around it. There's a very fine line between removing sibilance and making a vocal sound dead and lifeless, and it's not an easy dance to do.
As of last night's listening, the title track "Mirror Land" is pretty much ready to go. "Optimism" still has issues, and I don't yet know how but I somehow introduced another issue that I'm hoping to work through today. I also started tinkering with "Only With You" and I'm doing it very carefully since I'd rather not blow on the track too hard and make the whole thing fall over. I'm actually fairly optimistic that I'm finally, at very long last, nearing the end for this EP. It's been one hell of a learning process, I'll tell ya.
The "Petty Cash" EP is moving along very well. Most of the music is done and I'm just fighting with the vocals at this point, especially since the older the recording the more the sibilance. As I think I may have already mentioned, I have this other weird occurrence on these recordings of tape hiss...and that's weird since this was done on digital tape. I guess the deal is that I recorded this stuff (keep in mind this was ages ago and my first recordings) at too low of a level so the noise floor is super high, creating the hiss, probably along with the mixing board not being the greatest. I'm doing some fancy editing here and there to try and contain it since you can't really strip it out entirely. I'm also confident that I'll have this EP wrapped up fairly soon as well.
I've finally started deep diving on mixing the Defrost Nixon material. Previously, I did all the setup work...and that's really what takes the majority of the time usually. Now, I'm trying to take those mixes and whip 'em into shape for final mixes. So far, it's not been too bad but I'm of course having some issues here and there. One thing I've certainly learned is that hearing an issue isn't a problem; the challenge is figuring "what" the issue is, and that's much harder than you'd think. It's not always super obvious.
That's my mixing update for now. I need to update my other 2 blogs as well but I'm not sure when I'll have time. I'll hopefully get to those soon.