songblog

Adventures in CD Land Part 5

A somewhat eventful week.......

I spent several hours with my old friend and band mate Jeff Rees listening to lots of middle eastern/electro music and seeing what we liked and didn’t like. You may recall Jeff has been playing for many years with Gypsy Caravan, the belly dance troupe started by his wife Paulette. Jeff was a bassist when we met and played together back in the 80’s but he now plays a host of ethnic wind instruments, mostly from the middle east, and hand drums. We were getting together because Jeff wants to expand what he does, he knows about my electronic music interests, and wants to incorporate that into something new with me. Cool!
So we drank some wine and checked out a ton of music and I got a better idea of what he is trying to achieve. I think its right up my alley, different than what I am doing on the CD but still well within my boundaries. It was good, I heard some great new stuff and am enthused about this whole project. Jeff seems to think we can sell come CDs and make some good music along the way, I’m all into that. Tuesday we do some listening back at my shack, so it’s a new beginning, which is great because while being in your own head and having control over everything in your music is wonderful, its not the same thing as working with someone else. And Jeff likes practically next door to me, knows a ton of other musicians and – well, its new and exciting.
Which is exactly not what mixing is. I seem to go thru endless levels of mix anxiety – am I applying the right efx, are the levels really correct, do I actually still like the songs after 1 million listens, am I still satisfied with my vocals…………..its a hot mess.
Let me be more specific: now that I have fallen in love with compression on the drums, I seem to be able to get better drum mixes easier, especially if I am running samples thru Battery. But I start to second guess myself: am I just squashing the life out of everything in the quest to make it “loud”?
I took over some songs I had just mixed to Jeff’s house so I could listen to him on his monitors (those Alesis Monitor Ones, not that good from what I have read but better than my Radio Shack powered ones) and I was pleased it actually sounded OK, and not crappy. So I think, I am heading in the right direction at least. That is, until last night.
I am working on the vocals in a song, and I realize that at one point I should do some trickery with efx to highlight a certain passage. I actually find something that works, using one of those off the wall Ohmboyz plugs, but for the life of me I can’t seem to get it to work just when I want it to work, on this one chorus.
I go thru chopping out the phrase and try and run all the same processing on it but its not the same at all. Then I try a lot of other tricks, none of which work at all. Very, very frustrating and I wasted 45 minutes on it. Finally today when I came up the elevator at work I may have figured out a way to do it, by recording the passage onto another track – I will try that when I get home. But my god it took the heart right out of my mixing for the night. And people do this for a living?
Over all, I am least confident when treating my vocals, I don’t know why but they seem to be the most troublesome. At least with the instruments, I don’t run much in the way of efx on them, except to compress and maybe the reverb. With the vocals……………well, I am tempted to do nothing or everything, I have a hard time just doing a little bit of sweetening. Why is that? Am I secretly afraid of how my voice sounds? Am I afraid it won’t sound “professional” if I don’t have some clever little bits of things done with my vocals? Vexing, vexing.
I have at least gotten the XL7 to work as a controller for mixing. Its pretty easy to assign the 16 rotary knobs for pan or volume, its just a little harder to actually “play” them while the song is running to do a mix. Hopefully I will get used to it at some point, seems a much more natural way to do things, than with the mouse.
The score on the door is: 4 songs mixed or at least sort of mixed, 4 new ones to mix and a couple that were mixed before. And I am less than a month away from when I need to be done, so wish me luck!