cool phone call

well, if anyone has been following the slow and agonizing drama that is my band's excursion into the realm of self-released recordings, you may remember that we secured the services of neil kernon to mix our first cd. for those of you playing along at home, you'll find neil kernon under the "producers" heading for bands as diverse as queensryche (he mixed and produced rage for order), hall and oates (all their big, famous albums of the early 80's) and even one of cannibal corpse's more recent outings, among many others - RAM can chime in here any time, he got a chance to meet the man and hang briefly with us when we came up to chicago in july.

well, things went pretty well, but not perfectly, mainly due to time constraints (we tried to do 2 weeks worth of work in 5 days), so it was an intense and draining experience that left me really shaken for a while (the mix didn't turn out the way i had forseen it should, and for a while i was pretty disappointed).

anyway, the point of all this was that neil called me on monday and just shot the breeze for about twenty minutes. that was totally cool - just get a private call from someone with the kind of credentials and experience like neil's and just shoot the breeze for a while on his nickel.

he's paid us some pretty high compliments in the past too - he's said to us that, while he mixes anybody who can afford him, he only is willing to produce about 5% of the acts that approach him for production. he told us that he liked us enough that he would produce us if we ever asked him to. that's pretty cool, imo.

in fact, one of the purposes of his call was to fill us in on how his schedule was looking into the new year, since he knows we have another cd to mix, and he's expressed interest in doing it.

all in all, he's a great guy who's taught me more just by watching him in 5 intense days about mixing than i learned the previous 8 years that i was trying to do it on my own.

just thought i'd share that with you guys. btw, his website is www.auslander.net. check it out, he's a very cool guy.

EDIT(JT): btw, he's mixed and produced some recordings done by our very own michael manring that were very cool.

 

yeah, maybe some of it will rub off. at least, that's what we're hoping.

 

don't be, we had to buy his friendship.

 

i know we said we would try to get them out by christmas, but for once our deadlines have to be pushed back and it's not because we're slack . the mastering engineer is still not finished with the mastering, so we don't have the master yet. i've heard the date "this friday" bandied about so we may have the master then.

all the cd replication places are closed from around now until the first week or so of january, so that's going to be the earliest we can get this ball bouncing. the only other potential hold up is going to find someone who can put together our cd liner notes. we have 2 people experienced in quark who have expressed interest in helping us out, we just have to schedule things.

once the cd gets to the replication house, it will be 3 weeks or so until the shrinkwrapped cds are sitting in my living room. w00t.

 

it was, along the lines of "the pacific ocean sure is wet".

i spent the better part of 5 years being the only tracking and mixing engineer for those songs - i knew/know each instrument's track intimately. to just sorta hand it over to a stranger was pretty hard. very hard.

 

sorta prog-rock in the vein of the 70's and early 80's rush and yes, with a bit of heavier metal influence tossed in in spots.

here's a link to one of our songs that i mixed (the mixes aren't perfect)...

http://lordonly.net/Mp3s/Fear-LordOnly.mp3

the link in my sig is to a 12 minute instrumental that is also a pretty good benchmark of our music.

 

no shoulder rubbing was needed.

my knees still hurt, though. j/k.

 

well, i feel a bit less ... disappointed, but still not terribly happy.

to elaborate, the drums sound great, the bass, most specifically the fretless that i play on half the songs, sounds very "sanitized" - i had a lot of grind and aggression in the tone, and it sorta got eq'ed away, seemingly, and the most aggregious problem was that there were multiple tracks of guitars on every song with the intention that the double tracks would be panned out to make them sound huge, but since the mixing board that we mixed on (ssl 4000) didn't have automated panning, all the guitars got stacked in the middle. so there are sections in the mix where there are 6 or 7 centered guitars fighting with the bass. considering i wrote much of the music on this cd with the bass in mind, it's sort of bass ackwards, if you catch my drift. still, though, the song mixes sound pretty good on their own merits, i can live and even listen to it now, and we have all discussed the possiblities of getting it remixed in the future when the finances are right - there are also some errors in the mix, where tracks were backing tracks were faded out too soon, especially in the instrumental, some of the stuff is painfully obvious there.

yeah, no doubt. we all learned this lesson. next time we'll make sure that the time is there to do the job right. good luck with your recording.