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.