West-Coast Stubbornness

Well, fantastic. I put the album online last Friday and a few people have heard it. Feedback from my friends has generally been good; so far no one has felt the need to tell me they didn't like it. There doesn't seem to be a clear-cut best song, as the nine people who've mentioned theirs to me have picked six different songs. Which is too bad in that I don't feel confident in heavily promoting a single from it, but good in the sense that it means I've done solid, consistent work. As I get better on future releases I can just try to up this average quality.

Speaking of which, I'm writing for the next album, which I fantasize I can be finished with by the end of February. Being able to produce an album's worth of material from scratch in three months would be a great turnaround time. That way I could do three a year, and if I can complete thirty-plus songs that I'm proud of, you'd think there'd be a dozen in there that anyone would be proud of, that would stand up to a proper commercial release (with some professional remixing).

Even if this is just an informal release, I'd like to try to promote it a bit, at least to get a sense of how good it really is and how far I still have to go. My promotional goal for this one is really just to get on a few people's musical radar who don't already know me personally. And to make some industry contacts, at least find some people I can annoy again when I'm done the next one. I also want to contact some of the artists that inspired me while making this last one, with no specific goal except that if one of them happened to like my stuff it would be gratifying. So I suppose promoting this album is about letting some people know I'm throwing my hat in the ring, and testing the strength of my material. We'll see what comes of it!

Traditional/Not Traditional

I have finished my first draft masters for the album, and told the (dozen or so) people that want to listen to it that it will be done by Friday. I have yet to really test the songs on other sound systems, but listening to them on headphones is quite gratifying. I've never spent any time learning the mastering process so the last couple days have been great for me. I don't usually think of mastering as a dramatic process but I think I've dramatically improved on the sound of the mixes; this was the missing link in my record-making chain.

One neat thing I've done is used EQ matching to try and reshape the overall tonal balance of my songs to a professionally recorded one. I grabbed four songs from the sample CDs I'd uploaded previously and tried matching the lead album track EQ to them. They were "The Suburbs" by Arcade Fire, "Nowhere Lullaby" by Built to Spill, "Losing My Religion" by REM, and "Black Day in December" by Said the Whale.

The Built to Spill track is quieter on the high end, and applied to my mix it sounded a bit dull and muffled. "Losing My Religion", with the bright string instruments, had the opposite problem. The Arcade Fire track had more low bass than the other reference tracks, which didn't make an audible difference to my mix, but it also had a weird curve in the high frequencies. Instead of following the 6 dB per octave curve (like the other three do, at different levels) they start to roll off around 10kHz and continue downward parabolically. When applied to my mix I found it made the mids sound a bit boomy. I found that the Said the Whale track to be clear and bright, but not overly so. I loved how my mixes sounded when matched to this EQ, especially with a bit of tape saturation applied as well. 

So I tried it across the whole album. Since the instrumentation varies considerably, this meant a lot of tweaking, but right now I have an album that sounds much more coherent than anything I've done before. I'll try it on some other systems and probably have to work on the bass, but for now I'm excited.

35 People are Here

I got the mixes to where I thought they were solid on my own, but today I let my immediate family listen to them. It was also the first time I've heard the mixes on a commercial-grade stereo, which was very helpful. Mixing as I do on tiny 3" monitors or Sony MDR-7509HD headphones, judging the bass level and evenness is tough. Fortunately the bass sounded fine on a few of the songs, so I'm hoping I can just replicate those settings on the problematic ones. More a/b testing is required.

On first listen they didn't have many specific concerns about the mixes or the track sequencing, except to redo one vocal line and turn the trombone down, so I think I'm doing okay. I'm getting better at setting the vocal level but melody instruments are still tough for me (check how loud the violin is on this EP I mixed); I think it's that I hate to bury a part I've worked hard on. But as I tweak the mixes I find I'm thinking about them less as "band" recordings and more as voice and guitar recordings that happen to have other instruments to fill out the sound. Because I don't have a band, and when I perform these things I'll likely be doing them solo, so the mixes should be set up so that listeners can at least conceive of them that way.

I haven't actually given much thought to adapting them for performance yet. Instead I'm conceptualizing material for my next album, which may even be another notch softer than this one, and this one's already pretty AAA-friendly. I'd like to try recording the next one very simply, without a click, and with minimal instrumentation. I've learned all kinds of things on this last project all ready and I'm sure when I put it out I'll get all kinds of useful feedback as well. So the next one can only be better!