Edit, Edit, Edit.

Editing sound waves is simultaneously boring and absorbing- and frustrating. You want to do it quickly but the program says 'no' and you have to plod though it all. 

However, it makes a massive difference and once you've done one part of the song and heard how much better it sounds, you have to finish it, and you can't rush on to something else.

I have also found out that I know even less about EQ than I thought I did. I can't bear the idea of Youtube tutorials (how can it work when every song is so different?) so I'm doing it by trial and error. One sound and position in the mix of the bass guitar made my ears actually hurt. I always knew bass was a weapon!

Gradually, the stock of finished songs is piling up. The computer is on the verge of crashing all the time and I'm having to remember to back things up regularly, although I can remember so much about each song that I could re-create them if I had to. 

My voice sounds better than it did six months ago (I'm not sure if that's a winter/summer thing, a health thing, or whether it's a sudden release of stress) but I'm re-vocalising songs that I thought already had decent vocals on. Sometimes it sounds a bit 'sine-wavey' but that's quite good for adding a reverb on. The sound engineer at The Shackleton Arms said I'd got a perfect vocal timbre for adding effects to; I think it was a compliment, but a sound engineer in a studio that I was recording in recently said he thought it probably wasn't. And that's why I record at home in my kitchen- it's horrible being undermined!

As songs pass the finish line, I start to wonder if they will fit together as an album and whether I should have recorded different songs. I might do another couple this week just to see what they feel like.

Meanwhile I've got a dodgy tummy, probably from eating Christmas Twiglets whose marmite spots look alarmingly out of focus. They still taste nice, though, so it's hard to throw them away and they are a good editing snack!