What A Day That Was

Saturday we (sort of) finished up mixing "I Surrender All," the new record from New Creation (formerly referred to as the "Christian Band" in previous blogs).

All in all, it went very well. Ted and Pat spent the majority of time with the clients - Serge and Joyce, who came up from Georgia to supervise mixing - as I was at my day job. Saturday we all worked together, despite my being about 3 hours late. Hey, I'd already worked 75 hours that week!

For the most part, the majority of editing, reamping, etc. was done by the time Serge and Joyce arrived. We did some more with them present and then spent most of our time automating the mixes, making small arrangement changes, and even re-recording some vocals. I even got to do a guest appearance, laying down a keyboard pad for one tune. We really got down to the nitty gritty, as we were dealing with 4 vocalists (plus a "choir" of kids on one song) and electric and acoustic guitars, bass, drums, and keys. The end result sounds pretty good. We ran a very rough master at the end of the day on Saturday and will be farming the final mastering out to George at Skyway. Of course, as soon as the mixes hit the multiband compression and limiter, everything started to stand out a lot more, and Ted has found a few sections that need additional editing. I haven't yet listened to the master since Saturday, but I trust that Ted knows what he's talking about.

I'm not sure how much new work this project will lead to. Pat is getting ready to do some more marketing in Atlanta and he really thinks this record will open up some doors. First we have to assess how we did on this one, formulate a plan for future projects, and get Pat's studio set up with internet access so we can download tracks directly from him. (No more ADAT tapes in the mail! Whew!) Like with any project, we learned a lot, and the next one will be that much better.

In the meantime, once those final masters are done (probably within a week or so) we'll send them off to Georgia and the duplication process will begin. They've already got a bunch of preorders, and we'll get a copy for our Smoke and Mirrors Library.

What's next?

Tonight is guitar overdubs on the new Darvocets record (3 small labels have already offered to put this one out). Tuesday is a quick pre-production meeting with Mike (from Microdot) to talk about some work we're gonna do on a tune by one of his other projects ("House of Blondes," I believe). Wednesday is more Geek Farm. At some point soon we'll be working with Chan Chandler again - we've got 2 or 3 tunes worth of basic tracks down so we'll just keep plugging away. And there's more music to come...