Tuesday, March 05, 2024

The Frustrations Of Mixing Chefs Duo Tracks

I've got 24 Hours and Records and Tea sounding really good, I think. They are slower than the originals, and have different chords and arrangements: but I do think they sound good. I've left a bit of wonkiness, an imperfect vocal line or two, funny little noises. Perfect is boring.

The conundra are Food and Let's Make Up. I have made the guitars sound great but I can't work out where to place the lead vocal- or indeed, what it should sound like. I'm going to leave them for a couple of days and then listen again. I decided not to make the four of them fit together sonically, but I've treated them as four separate entities. Let's see what a couple of day's ears-rest does.

Then I half killed myself getting a guitar part done for one of my new songs: over and over again, get the sound-wave looking right, get the actual sound nice and round and fat. When the vocal's there, I'll probably decide that the guitar needs to be done again, but it's reached a satisfactory plateau. 

Another one (of my own songs) I tried just beat me. I'm a crap client of my own sound engineering: I repeatedly make mistakes seconds from the end of the song. Rationally I know my playing's getting more fluent each take that I record, and at least I know when to stop for the day. I've been recording in the Offsprogs' room but I think the kitchen's better; the problem is that the fridge seems to be dying and it's making a loud noise which will make doing vocals difficult. I can't unplug it as loads of knitwear is in the freezer part to kill the moth eggs. Normally they go out in the back yard for a frosty few days, but not this year. Amazing to think that climate change deniers think those of us who know it's happening are flat-earthers! This is the Tufton Street opinion, I'm reliably informed by an infiltrator of my acquaintance.

Oh what a life.

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