A Time for Patience

The final mix went out for mastering at the beginning of the week.  A few days later the mastering engineer sent me an email inquiring as to whether we had applied any leveling or compression to the output buss and if we had requested a mix without.  I wasn’t specifically aware of having done so, but I inquired with Nadim, the mix engineer.  As it happens he had applied some very minimally, only to flatten the highest outlying peaks in a couple of spots.  It doesn’t seem to me like this would adversely affect the mastering process, as these peaks would clearly be squashed out of the final mix anyway, but I decided that I’ll just take it as a sign that the mastering engineer is paying attention and I may as well oblige him.  Nadim was on vacation at the time, so I lost a couple days while waiting for him to come back and send out a new version sans dynamics processing on the busses, hence the lack of updates.  I had initially hoped to perhaps have the whole thing ready in time for release after Thanksgiving weekend, but that seems rather unlikely at the moment.  We're now bumping up against some scheduling problems with the mastering guy so all in all this could take quite a bit longer than I initially hoped, which is frustrating because I had pressed to hard to finish the mixing.  I remind myself that the most important thing is quality, so I will exercise patience as necessary.

Since we’re not producing an album in the traditional sense, it hadn’t initially occurred to me that we didn’t have any imagery to associate with the new song when it’s released.  Thankfully I had recently hung out with my friend (and former bandmate) Justin Drobinski, who’s a talented filmmaker and photographer (I highly recommend his recent short, Snowfall at Goat Hill Farm).  He and another friend had expressed interest in working with me at some point on a video.  I wasn’t ready to think about a video, but a few days later I emailed Justin about creating a photograph to go along with the song, the idea being that we could plan to produce a new image for each song as it's released.  We exchanged a few emails back and forth and settled on idea he came up with that I think captures the aloud/allowed imagery of the song in a way that’s literal but not too cheeky, and not so dark as make us out to be more serious than we are.  I’m very interested to see how the visual aspect of the band develops; it’s something that I think is important but haven’t really had much of a chance to think about.

That's really all I've got to talk about at this moment, though I will soon continue profiling some of the songs to be recorded at our next sessions, which begin December 7th.

Thanks for reading.

-Terry