A Couple Comments

I'm more or less done with mixing for the week and have moved onto recording.  Yesterday, I started the lovely process of trying to add harmonies to songs.  It was...er, entertaining, as always.

I've met 2-3 kinds of people:  there are those that seem to be able to harmonize with almost anything immediately and sometimes these folks aren't even musicians.  It's kind of phenomenal.  Then, there are those that can't harmonize to save their lives.  And lastly, there's the in between group of which I'm a member who simply find it a struggle.

Working on harmonies yesterday made me stop multiple times due to laughter at the utter awfulness I was creating.  I don't know why harmonies haven't become natural for me but I'm certainly missing something.  I can do it (obviously) but it takes a lot of work and trial and error, and, well, a bit of laughter.

My other comment is yet another rant about Rickenbackers.  If you ever read this, Rick, please take this to heart...  These damns guitars, as lovely as they are and as difficult as they can be sometimes to play, have literally the WORST ever input jacks.  I mean, my god, I can't tell you how many times I've been burned by this.

So, once again, I decide to add a Rick 12 part, and please note that this is not centric to this particular instrument.  I start recording and I keep hearing this noise that I can't immediately place, and it's literally happening during the recording.  I only intended to do one take of this part and ended up doing three because of this noise, which ended up being smart because I figured it out during take 3...that one of the pickup's was basically going in and out audibly as I was playing.  Why?   The stupid *ss input jack.  These dumb guitars (yes, I said that) have input jacks where basically if you don't play the instrument on a weekly basis, they get temperamental and then don't want to work correctly.  Now, let's be honest...I've owned a lot of instruments in my day and I've never encountered this issue on ANY instrument other than a Rick, and almost every Rick I've owned (again, quite a few) have had this issue in one form or another, some with more severity.  I will say that the '61 Capri that I just sold also had this problem...so at least they've been consistent throughout the decades, apparently.  It really is crap when you're trying to record, let me tell you.  I have to remember in the future to make sure that I "prime" the intended guitar prior to trying to record with it which obviously isn't really easy to do or very realistic always.

I also got to use my new Fender Mod Shop Strat yesterday at long last.  I still swear by the Mod Shop stuff...seriously, watch the used categories on Reverb.com and GuitarCenter.com.  You can get them at a steal and they're seriously amazing instruments.  This particular instrument I created myself and bought new since I was after a particular color and such.  I do have an amazing 2012 American Strat for sale now, by the way.

More harmonies and Strat work on the horizon today with probably another very long day.  Tomorrow, I'll probably start on recording the countless acoustic parts I have on my agenda.  I'm starting to see the end of this project on the near horizon and it only took 15 years :s

The Ol' Wreckin' Ball

Yeah, I've been greatly neglecting my blogs again.  It's mainly because I've been incredibly busy juggling way too many things, as always.  On the plus side, things are going quite well but it is pretty exhausting in general.

I'm off of work this week and this week was slotted for working on the "Wrecking Ball" album earlier in the year.  It's great to finally start getting this album in motion; the downside is that I wish the other 3-4 things were completely wrapped up.  Still, I don't get a full week off that often so I have to choose to use it as wisely as possible and so far it's easy to see why I chose "Wrecking Ball".  I'm basically starting the mixing of these 9 songs even though I don't have the real vocal yet in 6 of them.  Mixing the drums has been going well but is a ton of work (as always).  It's been taking me about 2 to almost 4 hours on some songs just on the drums alone.  After that, the rest of the mix is about an additional 1-2 hours.  Tonight I mixed a drum machine based track and the whole thing took me less than 2 hours, although there are very few instruments on the track admittedly.

Here's the really positive part:  if my life depended upon these songs being mixed in one day each, I COULD actually do that.  In fact, if I had the real vocals on all of them, I'm pretty sure they'd all be listenable in one day and could be fairly printable if need be.  Now, that's like a miracle folks considering that most of my mixes up until now have been taking literally days if not months to get close to a listenable state.  I mean...wow.  I think I've finally turned a very valuable corner.

Now, let's be honest...I'm not going to only spend a day on these per song but I also don't think it'll take me months either.  The Defrost Nixon album has also been going in a very positive manner and I'll be doing some finishing work on that later this week and I don't foresee spending excessive hours on it.  I've basically been working like a dog though, doing two sessions a day, and probably putting in 8-10 hours each day, weekends and holiday included.  It's not exactly relaxation time and when I do get a break I'm usually working on forcing out lyrics so I can record these vocals in the near future.

2025 has so far been going fairly on schedule and has been very positive.  I hope I can maintain this for the rest of the year because I clearly can't keep up this frantic pace forever.  In fact, my hope is that 2026 will allow me to finally slow down, take a breath, and maybe even perhaps take an actual vacation, something I haven't done now in years.  In the meantime, though, I'm working my *ss off on these releases and trying to wrap things up.

I actually mixed two songs today and two yesterday, and I'm hoping to do the last two of this album tomorrow.  This will leave 4 days of recording time which should be a nice change.  More updates soon.

Finally Groovin'

Again, I haven't been very good at logging any entries here, mainly because I felt like a broken record (no pun intended) in regards to what I was working on.  It does start to feel like "Groundhog Day" after awhile when you keep going over and over the same songs time and time again.

I think my deep dive on vocal mixing is finally complete.  I did actually redo the "Mirror Land" vocal structure yet again (I've lost count how many times I've done it at this point) but I'm actually really glad I did because this latest round of changes, as minor as they may have been, really make the clarity considerably better.  I'm actually very pleased with these mixes and I've heard them more times than I can count now between my stereo and both of my cars.  This finally landed on structure has now become my "vocal chain", as they like to say, that I'm using on all other tracks going forward.

Piggy backing on the above, I finally made it through all of the "...Fish!" songs and redid the vocal chain on each onen to this new structure.  I haven't physically listened to them thoroughly but I did hear the ones that I was the most concerned about one day in my car and was amazed by how good they sounded so I'm not too terribly concerned at this point.  Even if I need to make some tweaks (fully expected, mind you), I don't think it'll be anything major or super time consuming.

I spent about half of yesterday finally cracking open the "Wrecking Ball" album, doing an initial mix on the first track which I've had some issues with both the drums and the guitars, and I basically need to make a decision on whether any of the electrics need to be re-recorded.  I spent about 4 hours on it and ended up doing an entire mix whereas my initial intent was really only to focus on the drums.  It's amazing how different things sound once you set it all up and starting tinkering.  The downside but also upside is that I realized that there's simply no way to judge what might need to be re-recorded until I do this entire process on each song, so essentially there's no point in wasting my time right now.  Therefore, I won't get into the "Wrecking Ball" stuff any further until my week off during Memorial Day week and will just wing it, re-recording whatever I think requires it.

This means back to Defrost Nixon!  Yes, I'm now juggling 3 full albums and 2 EP's...all at the same time.  I'm intending to finally close out the 2 EP's over the next 2 weeks, and yes, I'll do some sort of minor celebratory dance once that's done because it's been, well, quite a road to this point.  In the meantime, the next 3 weeks will also be Defrost Nixon heavy mixing time with the intent of having pretty solid mixes by the last week of May.  Then, I'll start mixing "Wrecking Ball" during Memorial Day week, and then after that it'll be time to bounce back to "...Fish!".  Yeah, it's a bit chaotic, I'll admit.  My hope and plan is to have all of the above done by Labor Day.

The good news it that everything is still on track for the year and I am actually feeling strangely confident overall.  I also had and took the opportunity to listen to all of my rough tracks for the upcoming "Beautiful Silence" album, which is more or less the follow up to "Theories for the Opsimath", and I was super pleased with what I've got down already.  I can't wait to be able to focus on this new album for I think it'll be really somethin'.  The "Wrecking Ball" album also seems super promising and quite possibly a dreamy album for me in regards to a harder rock sound.  Even though I'm not quite 'there' yet, I feel like the actual reward from all of this is finally on the horizon, where I can start focusing on bigger and better things.  Wow.