Small update because I don't feel like doing anything really and maybe this'll help me rally some fortitude up and do the things I have to do.
I feel like 11 of the 16 songs are basically ready for mixdown. I've been going through each track lately, attempting to back them up but apparently damaging my backup-backup hard drive in the process. Seeing as it has a lot of other stuff on it, I have not summoned the willpower to move things off of it and attempt recovery. Sigh.
The Ultimatum is pretty much ready. Christmas Car Bomb is basically perfect, I feel like I've put more work into that one over the years through any other. Chemtrail Mist is ready. Calico I feel better about. Bagworm is basically ready too.
The Delano is still a big mixing conundrum, mostly because it's piano-bass-drums alone for most of it and then everything but piano drops out, and THEN a fucking orchestra appears. I'm going to have to make some real decisions about what level is "normalized" for this record, there are a lot of moments of dynamic disparity. Maybe I should study some grunge records.
Ripcord I feel like I'm just at an impasse with. I feel like maybe I should throw everything out and start over. I don't necessarily WANT to, I put a lot of work over the years into getting the drums and bass sounding that tight, but, maybe it's still not tight enough. The demo is pretty flat anyway.
Hansom Cab sounds great, I'm excited for that one. Three Word Phrase just needs a lot of attention in these last moments of production. Knowage is I think ready except for for April's vocals at this point! That feels good.
Compound Eye is the thing that I got really stuck on today. I did the drums with Joms in Chicago in like 2015, live, without a click but it's cool. I want to keep them. I tracked the bass probably a million times since, the most recent one is a good performance but I don't love the tone, or the way it sounds with the drums. I've tried through amps, directly, with and without distortion, digital effects, GOD. Everything.
The star of that song is the keyboard, which is just a Wurlitzer patch that I'm pounding on with my left hand and playing stupid 16th note arpeggios with my right. I can't find the live demo I did at an actual acoustic piano (solo) but I feel like I can't get the keyboard to sit with the bass and drums either??! Wondering if it would be better if it were acoustic piano?? Also my synthesizer has a preset patch in here that is like a stuttery LFO'd electric piano, which I quite like, but I don't think THAT's it either? I've tried to put electric guitars in this song so many times and they've never sounded great, partly because I can't do the same upward-inversions in the verse on guitar as I can do on the keyboard. I recorded some like sawtooth synths to try to accomplish the same thing from a different angle but, ugh. I just don't know. I really like this song. It's no longer exemplary of my abilities but back in the day it was one of the best I had, and I still have some friends who were around back then who would like to hear it finally recorded. Which is humbling.
I just feel like the finish line extended to infinitely far away.
But Countdown comes next and I feel like that's done, which is amazing. And then Target, which, listening to again, I think I can do a little better on, but also I wonder if there's some postprocessing I did when I released that song in 2018, because the working project file I have doesn't sound exactly the same as the Crack First mp3? But it would just be some effects tweaking and automating the level of the bass clarinet solo. And then The Algorithm Intervenes is ready to go, and so is Noise Machine, unless I think I can muster up a better robot voice, which seems like it's always a possibility.
Also tried to record some of the stuff I promised Austin today, finally, but, that's just a whole ton of music, pretty through-composed, but also demanding fingers much faster than mine, especially upright bass fingers. I feel okay about one song. The other is a big challenge. I don't know what will become of that.
Hey everything feels bad!! Who knew! Plus I spent some time on THE INTERNET which only made things worse. Will the internet feel good again? Like, cosmically?