slowburn

mp3 preview mix of the first three slowburn songs

These are the first three songs of the slowburn album. Let me know what you think of them, they are about 95% done.

There won’t be any updates for three weeks while I’m off for a vacation to New Zealand. I’ll start writing again when I get back to San Francisco and we’ll finish this thing up by Dec. 31st…

Hvarf/Heim by Sigur Rós, 2007

Vespertine by Bjork, 2001

White Chalk by PJ Harvey, 2007

Bestiary by Robert Rich, 2001

1999 by Prince, 1983

Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants by Stevie Wonder, 1979

Aja by Steely Dan, 1977

The good news is I’ve been making a lot of progress. First, I went through every instrument track of every song and time aligned them, which was, uh, time consuming but was something I’d been wanting to fix for a long time. I felt a little bit like BT (who is notorious for bitching about MIDI timing and quantizing each and every sequenced sound down to the sample level) doing this, but Logic’s weird/buggy delay compensation coupled with the sequenced-within-the-Nord-Modular method with which all parts were recorded meant that timing wise, within a given track the timing was great, but the different tracks were all over the place compared to each other. Pad tracks in particular needed to be adjusted back in time a bit to compensate for their slow attack, since their sequences were triggered at the exact same time as other sharp percussive sounds, which doesn’t sound right (unless you are intentionally trying to make it not sound right). Some of the drum machines weren’t at the same offset as the Nord. And different tracks recorded at different times just had weird timing offsets relative to each other, most likely due to Logic recording quirks. Anyway, it is now all lined up fairly meticulously and the various instrument tracks are tight and locked in relation to each other.

I have also finished up the first pass of volume automation on all the tracks. With the previous mixes, I would set the volume level of an instrument at a constant value throughout the song. For these new mixes, I divide the parts of the songs into sections and set the volumes for each part separately for each section, depending on which part I want to emphasize, whether I want that section to be quiet or loud in general, whether or not there are drums pounding away at the same time, etc.

The mixes are sounding great, so now I get to go back and do the same thing and automate effects parameters so that the chorus effect will be a little wetter during the peaks, the delays last longer at the end of a little riff, the stereo field spreads during key moments, etc. At the same time I’m trying to keep the big picture in mind so that every song doesn’t use the same tricks, and the overall album has ebbs and flows in the same way that individual sections of the songs do. So some songs will be wider, some will have more effects or wetter effects, some will have things EQed tightly and sound separated and sparse while others will be wider and sound a little sloppier. If doing minute timing adjustments made me feel like BT, spending hours tweaking a dB here and there in the mixes conjures up images of Steely Dan holed away in their LA studio for weeks and months at a time trying to record and mix one snare sound. What I’m saying, basically, is that yes I’m spending way too much time and effort on all this, but hey, other people at other times have spent even more time and effort on their music, and some of them ended up with some pretty good albums. So that makes it all okay. Or something.

Anyway, the biggest problem at this point is that doing anything takes a lot of time. Just creating a new mix of the album requires adjusting and bouncing the individual parts that have been changed, then adjusting and bouncing the whole song, then adjusting and bouncing the whole album mix, then converting and/or burning that so it can be listened to, and then listening to it. With the album clocking in at around an hour, and bounces needing to be done in real time due to my otherwise awesome UAD plugins, it can take a whole day just to implement just one or two small changes in each song and then listen to the result. A lot of that time is spent staring at a progress bar.

Which brings us to… oh yeah, the bad news. I won’t be done by Saturday when I leave for New Zealand like I had planned. I will most definitely still finish this thing up by the end of the year (damn it!), but I’ve just flat out run out of time to finish it by the end of this week. And seeing as this project has already taken up so much of my time, and I’ve already been so self indulgent with it up to this point, I really don’t see the point in half assing it now. This will be a full ass album, folks. No compromises. So, I’ll have to finish things up when I get back in early December…

What’s left to do? The effects automation I mentioned, some more work with designing and tweaking reverbs, re-recording a few parts I don’t like, adding a few extra special noises here and there, and a lot more work on the drums. Actually the drums are the elephant in the studio, I’ve been doing a great job of inventing excuses to work on anything but them. I have basic parts that I did with the Electribe ESX, now I need to re-record them with some variations using the actual 808/909/606 machines and then add filter / delay / distortion / flanger / etc effects to mimic the way they are played in our live sets. I also need to finish tweaking the arrangement of “tea&toast” and commit myself to a vision for it, since I keep changing it around.

So yeah, that’s the bad news: more excuses why I’m not done yet. But, like I said before, I am making a ton of progress. So… the other good news is that I will at least have the first few songs in an almost done state before I leave, effects and drums and all, and I’ll put them up here before I fly away. Hopefully those of you following this will give it a listen while I’m gone and let me know what you think when I get back.

This past week I’ve also been doing some, uh, research into, uh, playing live music at Burning Man. Since, uh, the music on this album was, uh, originally written and performed at Burning Man. This, uh, research has in no way impeded progress with regards to the recording of the album and, uh, any insinuation of such could be considered libel and would be handled accordingly by the, uh, submodern legal team. So don’t, uh, insinuate that it had anything to do with the schedule slip please. Uh, thanks.

Seriously though, guys, those Steely Dan albums do sound fantastic…

Planetary Unfolding by Michael Stearns, 1985