datamusicata

I wanted to let you all know what happened on Monday. Due to some clerical mismanagement, the domain name was inadvertently suspended. I noticed it on Tuesday morning and took care of it immediately. I hope that it didn’t cause any of you any anxiety. We were back up in a couple of hours and have taken care to make certain that that never happens again.

I have been working on the Traces of the Old Road CD. It began with a the simple idea of resequencing the CD, as I mentioned before and the next time I looked up, I was rerecording parts of and remixing the seventh song. So I have stopped as of today, and the CD will be remastered on Monday and sent off to manufacturing on Tuesday to be ready for a September 11, 2008 release date.

I am going to do a re-release party for it, probably at Kulak’s Woodshed in North Hollywood, where I shot the two hour concert DVD, which I just got back from them. I’ll start the editing in a few weeks. I wanted to talk about remixing a little today.

What I did with Traces, was to listen to the original release and decide what things I really did not like about it and fix them. Then it turned into me deciding to re-do everything and then I stepped back from that and decided that I would simply stop.

The thing about recording, particularly when you have your own studio, is that you can always go and fix something, re-do something, remix something. And the fact of the matter is, that as artists, you are never going to be satisfied with what you have done. You always want to make it better. You always think, when you are done, that this isn’t exactly what you had in mind.

Artistic projects take on a life of their own. They go where they are going to go. I CAN say that this new sequence seems to pull the CD together in a way that it wasn’t before. Beginning with the storm and then the song, Last Day of Summer, followed by a reprise of the storm and the rain, which leads right into “When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez” , the Dylan song, Just Like Thom Thumb’s Blues, simply sets up the whole CD.

And when we come to Stop This Rain (cut 8) on what I refer to as side two (I like to do an instrumental in the very middle of a recording to delineate the two sides of the project. This is obviously a hold over from when I made vinyl albums and we had only twenty mintues or so for each side.) it is a thematic continuation of the perspective that has been maintained throughout the CD.

The most wonderful part is that I didn’t consciously put all the songs in an order that would work lyrically. I was looking for which piece of music naturally led into the next piece of music. But now I see the lyric connection and find it very rewarding. Just not consciously intended, tho all the songs were created for that CD, so that accounts for some of the continuity.

But when remixing, you have to take into account how the CD sounded before and how the songs that are not being remixed sound along side the songs that are being remixed. You need to maintain a sonic integrity or the CD will sound like a badly produced compilation.

You must give special attention to the eq, echo’s and stereo placement. All those things are subliminal, but contribute to the overall continuity.

In any event, I invite you to revisit some of your older projects and see if you could actually maintain their integrity and improve on what you did before. It is an exercise both humbling and extremely rewarding.