Like we had mentioned last week, we’ve got all the raw material for our three songs gathered up and edited. Next up: mixing!
What’s this "mixing" thing? Well, when we finish the recording process, we are typically left with 70+ individual tracks that make up the entire song. That may sound a little excessive, but if you think about it, just one drum set could use 10-12 microphones to capture sound from each it’s pieces (snare top, snare bottom, kick drum inside, kick drum outside, rack tom, floor tom...you get the picture) and one microphone = one track. Also, Ben and I both really love keyboards, so there are a LOT of keys tracks layered on these puppies.
So once we have all 70+ tracks, they need to be massaged into one cohesive song. Enter the mix engineer. This guy gets to take all these separate pieces, edit out what isn’t needed (think the sound of an “S” that was sung too harshly and hurts your ears), boost or cut any frequencies that aren’t quite right, add effects to make them interesting (anything from distortion to reverb to delays), then adjust their levels to produce a balanced, beautiful mix. Sounds simple, right? Right.
Though Ben has experience mixing and really enjoys it, we had originally planned on hiring out this part of the process in order to get someone else’s ears on the songs. Thus, when we returned from the trip, Ben started in on some last edits to get the tracks as polished as possible before we sent all of them off to a mix engineer.
But as he did so, he was having so much fun and it sounded so good that he just kept working and working...until we realized he had just completed one of the mixes himself.
So we switched gears, hired him as the engineer (hah), and now you can hear the songs being played over and over and over (and over and over and over) again from the room where Ben is sitting in front of our computer and speakers, mixing away. It has been a wonderfully maddening process and he is loving the opportunity to experiment, learn new methods, and sonically craft the final versions of these songs we have been working on for over a year now.
Strangely enough, even though we’ve heard these songs a billion times already, it doesn’t lessen how excited we are to share them with you. More soon!
- L
