Mostly I'm just here to say Compound Eye is pretty much done. That's cause for celebration in itself.
I wound up doing a lot more synths and soft-synths. The keyboard I have is marketed primarily as a digital organ and it has some real nice modeling onboard, which is why I felt pretty dumb for using one of the destroyed-by-time-and-magnetic-tape mellotron VSTs I've got, but it's just for three chords in each verse that sort of fade in and right back out. Lots of little things like that in this arrangement. Final track count is 81, lots of those are like, a big bass drum that gets hit exactly once, or a bass part that I had to double-track two measures of because my fingers are not fast enough. Oh, actually, a bunch of those are unrendered stem duplicates & stuff I cut in the eleventh hour, if I delete those we're down to a respectable 66 tracks. Not that it makes a difference.
Wanted to do some washy psychedelic effects but couldn't get anything to sound okay. Tried running everything but vocals & drums through a phaser during the most exciting parts - that was cool, but too much, now it's just the guitar & e. piano going through the phaser, and only set to like 25%. It's basically inaudible, but it helps the bass and drums hit harder on the downbeat, so that was a roundabout path to the thing I was actually trying to accomplish.
This is the second song with backwards reverb on the drums on this album? Both times it's only for like a few transitional bars. There's also some real weird vocal bussing in the bridge, but it sounds a little more mundane than it functions. I messed with doing an artificial octave-down harmony at times but it wasn't as cool as it sounded in my head. There are some moments where the reverb track is a totally different vocal take than the main vocal, so, um, that's... there.
What's next??? I don't know. What's left? What's left is mixing on The Delano, mixing & possibly rerecording on Ripcord, mixing & fixing the intro loop on 3 Word Phrase, awaiting vocals for Knowage, probably a remix and possibly a new clarinet solo for Target. And that's the album, folks. Folks? I am trying to keep myself in the dark as to whether or not anyone is actually reading this, I would be mortified to learn if anyone is actually consuming these tiresome journal entries, but at the same time, the whole point of doing this is to keep myself accountable. Plus I have been on the internet for too long to ever delude myself into the "nobody will ever see this" fallacy.
Tomorrow will be a lot of day-job-style work, I predict, but then I am off from Tuesday to Sunday. I would love to make a big dent in the rest of the album but it will probably not be easy to summon the motivation to dive into the boring end-game mixing stuff for these last 6 or whatever tracks. Right now it's 8pm and I kind of feel like going to sleep.