Re-Engineering the Mix

Hey Everybody!

DUCK here with some of the latest.  It's really not too exciting, unless of course you're a nerd.  If you're a nerd then just keep reading, and you may need some time to clam down.  If you're not a nerd, then...well...just keep reading.  Reading, much like eating your vegetables and regular sexual activity are all healthy things.

Jester and I thought we were ready to start working on synth/loops/samples and guitar solos when we popped the tracks excitedly into our cars and exclaimed, "What happened!?"  To the mix that is.  The songs sounded rather awesome on YouTube (you can still hear them up there), and otherwise on our computers, and especially inside of iTunes (with and without the super-imposed EQ).  Somehow, when not being played on a computer, and on a real stereo such as in our cars, poop was flung at our faces from the speakers.  Well...  Something just had to be done.  What ensued were several weeks of trial and error in entirely re-engineering the mix of the tracks.  It seemed endless, but we're really glad that we ended up having the time available to learn where we went wrong and to fix it.

Turns out, I may not have understood audio production as well as maybe I had originally thought.  Simple is the way to go, apparently.  Ha!  Who'd of thought, eh?  We started by ripping down the mix of everything that didn't need to be there.  Lots of extra guitars and plug-ins that I thought we needed.  Turns out we didn't need all that extra stuff, so we took it out of there.  Next we sat down and decided if we liked some of the sounds we recorded months ago.  Then came the fun part.  We changed the electric guitar sound, which took several weeks of amp changes, microphone changes, and "what do we do about the ground noise?" changes.  Next came the drums.  We liked our overhead sound with the cymbals, and we liked the toms.  The kick and the snare just weren't cutting it though, so we replaced them with meatier, heavier sounding drums.  That process was actually quicker than the guitars, believe it or not.  We tried re-doing the toms, too, but it ended up being negligible, so we've stuck with the original toms.

How is it now, you ask?  We're happier.  Happier for sure.  I've made homemade burned copies of the 12-song disc we're calling "Asylum Denied" for the moment, and we'll do some more stereo testing, but I think we've got it.  This week I will proudly start working on the synth/loops/samples as Jester stereo tests the mix a bit more and funnels in some ideas about the synth/loops/samples.  It's nice that we're still making some progress.  Slow.  But still forward.

Cheers!

DUCK