Jamie

Punching in bass bits tonight.

"Hey, what did you do to the mix on those last tracks?"

"Nothing."

"The bass sounded *way* better. Ballsy, a lot fuller."

"Yeah, I know. What did you do to your bass?"

"Well, I messed with this thing." (Flips switch. Bass sound suddenly gets twenty times bigger.)

"Oh shit. That sounds awesome... But that's not what we did on the preceding nine tracks." (Cues up one of the old tracks. Bass player punches the first verse with the new bass sound. It sounds a million times better than the previous version.)

"Fuck."

"Fuck."

"I'm gonna have to re-track all the bass for the whole album, aren't I?"

"Only if you want it to sound good."

"Fuck."

We got two of the last three sets of bed tracks down last Friday, and it was much less ugly than I expected. We haven't played these songs in a while on account of having wasted a shitload of time trying to get a vocalist up to speed, and we really just hammered six or so songs in that whole six month period, because a) she is the world's slowest song learner, and b) she never really put her back into it.

(Pro tip: When you've been working with somebody for a month and every instinct is screaming "CUT BAIT! THIS IS NOT GONNA WORK!", that instinct is probably correct. I let myself get talked out of moving on this time and ended up throwing months of good time after bad. Gonna try and not do that again.

Pro tip #2: No amount of talent will make up for an inability to consistently find the damn downbeat.)

Anyway, the upshot is that these songs were old and rusty, but for two of them, that turned out not to be a problem. We had such solid tracks from previous rehearsals that it was easy to come back up to speed, and we threw down some good stuff. The only sticking point on one of them was that we really wanted to rush the bridge of "Shadow," but we ironed that out pretty quickly.

The third song, "Inner Circle," was kind of a mess, and mostly that's because we had left too much stuff hanging and uncertain in the arrangement to begin with. There are two sections where the bass goes into a triplet figure while the drums keep a steady beat, and the effect feels like a 6/8 time signature superimposed over a 4/4. The drummer (who I will call Jeff, since that is his name) was pretty uncomfortable with how the triplet figure rubbed against the main groove, so we ended up spending a bunch of time thrashing that out.

We got something that we like, but by then it was late and we were all pretty burned out. Plus we needed some time to live with the new arrangement and decide whether it's a keeper. I think it is, so the plan is to nail that sucker tomorrow.

After that, six million guitar dubs and scheduling vocalists! And it's about time.

(Pro tip #3: Every damn thing takes way longer than I think it will, no matter how often I try to recalibrate.)

I had a friend ask me for music mixing tips recently because he was super frustrated with the process and his results (because it's a super frustrating process). The following lengthy diatribe is adapted from an email I sent him. I thought it would be useful to keep this stuff around for my own reference. I am, after all, staring down another mixing project here in a couple of months...

( Lengthy diatribe in here... )

Related: I have to admit I feel a little bit of dread about mixing my next project. My songwriting partner, D, is a great guy and I am extremely lucky to work with him. However, he has a) very specific ideas about how he wants things to sound, and b) the most peculiar set of vocabulary to describe them. Like when he told me he'd like to hear more clarity in the bass in our music. So I asked him to send me an example of a recording that sounded the way he wanted it to, and he sent me this track wherein the bass was all low subsonic rumble with the highs rolled off and no attack whatsoever--it sounded like a synth. Or the time he told me that he wished we could make a certain part more percussive but that he'd also like to take some of the attack out. Or the time he told me he wanted something to sound more compressed, and, after twenty minutes of wrangling, I figured out that by "more compressed" he meant "less compressed." One time I listened to some music in his car, and he's that asshole who always cranks the bass and the highs and leaves them that way in every rental car I get, so all I can hear is this sizzling shrieky hi-hat while the kick drum evacuates my bowels.

He is also the only person in history ever to say, "Can you make this sound more digital?"

We laugh about this shit together, and I give him a hard time, but he really does have a great ear and the music comes out better. It sure is rough getting there, though. Divided by a common language and all that.