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2004-08-15 - 2:42 p.m.
music sounds better with you
Mat and Emily just bought their first house together, and they moved in a couple weeks ago. Which also means that Mat has moved the location of his home studio, and so Olympus Mons Studios will be out of operation for I guess a few weeks, so we’re going to take a break from working on my album for a while while he rebuilds the studio (how cool was it that I just figured out a gramatically correct way to write a sentence where the word “while” appears twice consecutively?). The downtime should be good for me, anyway, since I was kind of running out of things to work on by our last recording session or two. We have plenty of material tracked already anyway, it’s just that we’ve recording songs that, for the most part, are still works in progress. So I come with a basic idea, usually starting with the drums and/or melody, and we build around it until it either sounds pretty complete or I run out of ideas. So about half the songs we have either sound more or less complete, as far as the arrangement of instruments goes, or I haven’t finished writing the other parts, the bassline or the melody and whatnot. But since we have recorded so much so far, we decided it was a good idea to schedule in a day to just do rough mixes as our last session before he packed everything up for the move. I was pretty anxious and excited about it, since up until this point, the only recordings I had in my possession were the demos I’d made at home, I didn’t have my own copies of all the stuff we’d done in Mat’s studio, so the only times I got to hear it was when I was in the studio. So I was really looking forward to getting a hard copy of the tracks to take home and listen to and analyze, and give me a sense of how happy I am with what we have so far, and how much more work needs to be done to turn it into a record I want other people to hear. So about a month ago, I went down to Takoma Park to meet Mat for our mixing session. We’ve tracked 12 songs so far, about half of them being pretty complicated affairs with several different instruments, and the other half being in the early stages, with just drums and maybe a bassline tracked so far. We started off doing some of the bare bones ones that had less to mix, just to start with something simple and easy. I think we got 5 or 6 mixed down and recorded to MiniDisc in the first two hours. By the time we got to the more involved songs, even those weren’t that hard. Mat always says that mixing is his favorite part of recording, and I can see why. You really get to hear the fruits of your labor how they’re really going to sound and do things to make it sound better. The stuff we’ve been recording is for the most part pretty cut-and-dry, as far as me wanting each instrument to sound the way it was when we recorded it, so there wasn’t a lot of need for after-effects. But Mat is a wizard with that stuff, so I let him play around with them a bit, sometimes just EQing certain instruments to make them sound fuller, sometimes adding light effects. We put some delay on the snare drum on one song and it had a really cool effect, kind of a scratchy polyrhythmic thing. I don’t know if I’ll end up using that effect on the final mix of the song, but it was fun to mess with. A couple sessions ago, while we were on a roll and tracking a lot of stuff, I decided to break out this weird old demo I have of me playing ukelele. I don’t play guitar at all (pretty much everything on the record is drums and synths), but sometimes I mess around with the uke, and one time I came up with this 3 chord riff, and put enough distortion on it to make it sound like an electric guitar, and recorded it for a few minutes, just playing it over with generic soft/loud dynamics. And for the hell of it, we put the demo and I recorded drums with it. Mat’s assistant engineer Gordon told me the beginning of the song sounded like AC/DC, which seemed completely bizarre until we figured out that he meant the intro to “You Shook Me All Night Long”, which is kind of true. Since it’s kind of a weird, simple song, I wasn’t really concerned with doing anything with it, so when we mixed it down, I let Mat go nuts trying a bunch of different effects. Then, he tried some serious U2-esque delay, and suddenly it was a shoegazer song. It sounded really good. So we mixed it down like that, and I think the song has serious promise now. It sounds totally different from anything else we’ve done, too. Variety is definitely a virtue I am aspiring to for my record. After we were done mixing everything down to MiniDisc, the next step was to take it upstairs to the computer, so transfer it all into files and burn it onto CD. It took about an hour for everything to transfer in real time, so we had some time to kill and hung out. After that, Mat chopped up everything into individual tracks, and I already pretty much had in mind the sequence I wanted it to be on the CD, so we did them in that order and burnt it out. 12 songs, 47 minutes. Holy crap, it’s almost like an album! Not really, though. But we’re getting there. I’d say at least about 8 of those are definite keepers, a couple might be left on the cutting room floor, or might get finished later for another record. But man, I’d say we’re at least 50% of the way to an album. Goddamn. Once the disc was burned, we put it in the CD player in Mat’s living room, to hear it on a different set of speakers and to make sure everything came out alright. And weirdly enough, 3 tracks on the CD came out all distorted. There was a bunch of crunchy noise all over the tracks, like the levels were overloaded. Just those 3 songs, too, the other 9 were completely fine. We checked the computer files and figured out it was on the MiniDisc that the distortion started, but we have no idea how or why. The next day, I realized that those happened to be the last 3 tracks we mixed down to the MiniDisc, so there must have been something that changed right at the end of the mixing session, maybe he changed the levels or something hit some switch without realizing it. Totally weird. Oh well, there’ll be plenty of other chances to do more mixes. But all in all the mixes sound good. It’s just so great to have a hard copy to listen to whenever I want. I’ve been taking little notes on what needs to be changed, what might need to be re-recorded. A couple of the songs aren’t very close to what I’d hoped they’d sound like and might need some serious rethinking, if not total re-recording, but for the most part I’m pretty satisfied with my performances and the mixes. The process of taking these little ideas and turning them into a record takes so long that there’s a part of me that’s very nervous that at some point in the process something’s going to happen or I’ll just lose interest in it and it will never get done. I think I’m pretty much going to feel that way until it’s 100% finished. This just means so much to me, I have to do it. And having these rough mixes makes me confident that it will happen. -al
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