Mediocre is coming out again!

We just finished mixing Mediocre, it will be posted shortly. This mix was pretty simple to do, not a ton of effects used. When I went crazy on it the other day, luckily the program crashed due to a rogue reverb plugin, so when I redid the mix it was much simpler and much better. Just a bit of delay and a plate reverb (breverb audiomidi edition- got it for $5 the other day!), a little eq, some compression, some filtering, bing bang boom.

Since I got my new laptop (a 2 year old IBM T60) last week it has been much easier to mix, with a lot of it being done in dressing rooms, in the van on a ride to a gig, etc.

Paid his Passage is next, we did some fun background vocal sessions Friday night.

Enjoy the music!- Mark

My New Ears

I just picked up some new studio monitors. I had to give Mark's back... as I was borrowing them for the past nine months and he needed them to mix our stuff. Until two days ago, he was mixing everything on headphones (that's the genius of Mark).

Good monitors are very important as they reveal all the musical inadequacies of the tracks, such as my out-of-time shaker on one of the latest tracks... Oof! that was embarrassing, so I'll be promptly deleting that track when enter the basement musical lair this evening. I will be rerecording all the vocal tracks for Mediocre this evening and we'll hopefully have that song back out for you shortly.

So back to the monitors... good monitors also help us mix the songs properly so there isn't too much bass, or drums, etc.  Every song is a learning experience as far as mixing goes.  Quite often, parts I thought would be fantastic and really creative often become painfully unflattering and borderline strident at best after entering the overall mix.  Occasionally there are some nice surprises which originate as mistakes or impromptu performances and work perfectly.

Now again, I must admit I'm a true greenhorn in a studio environment. I'd always left the engineering up to other people, but as budgets tighten and available time diminishes, I must take the lead on some of these tasks... which sometimes incur disastrous results but often reveal that I'm not as dumb as I thought I was.

Jeff

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"Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead." - Henry Chinaski