Dear Mixing Diary

This album's taking a lot longer to mix than the other one. It's a bit like altering a garment and then having to alter it again because it doesn't quite fit yet. Yesterday, I had a crisis of confidence and felt that I was creating the most massive turkey the world had ever heard. Today, it's more of a chicken and I hope to have a beautiful egret by the time it's finished!

When you make an album there is always at least one tricky track that feels like it's a dud; you have to work at it, and to that end I'm going to re-sing the vocal and then cluster in the rest of the track around that. The instrumentation had taken over and was fighting the sense of the lyrics.

Then you have another song that tries to be a Favourite Child. You can't have that, so the whole album has to be nudged up to that level. And the sequence of tracks has to work as well, especially with this one because of the storytelling aspect. The problem is that in life, things tend to happen all at once and then not happen at all: there's not a tidy order that makes things proceed in a coherent fashion. It reminds me of being freelance, with the plastic carrier bags by the door: a children's musical, a soundtrack, a songwriting workshop each in separate bags lined up and ready to go when they were needed. Life would be incredibly busy for two or three months and then there would be several months of nothing in which it felt as though everything had ended- then a glut of work again. 

Those punk years really were chaotic. There were no brakes on anything, and no boundaries on what might happen. Trying to tidy it into episodes has involved some heavy-duty editing and a clear understanding (again) that when you reminisce about the past those stories are entirely from a personal perspective, and that other people remember entirely different aspects of the same thing in entirely different ways.

Back to sound, though. Somehow, tiny changes made over the weekend have crystallised out most of the music. I'm now at the automation stage which can be quite tedious, and that's why I'm writing this. The dual concentration between what you see and what you hear plus keeping an eye on what you're metering sound-wise is fatiguing. Also sitting still for such a long time is not good: you start to feel like a scarecrow with poles for arms and a solid rod through your back. Unfortunately bendy housework may be the only solution (said the grubby floor), but an ears-rest is also good because you become a little more objective than you are when you're immersed in the detail of sound.

And I've had a radical haircut in anticipation of a radical operation that I was told was imperative. It was a stage on the way to a complete crop; I thought I'd progress it in a sequence of bearable cuts. Then I found out the radical surgery is not going to happen. It's nice not to have strands of wispy hair getting in the way of everything though, especially when you're taking headphones on and off constantly. Long hair + guitar leads + headphone leads + boom mic stands = stress, stress, stress. And mess, mess, mess. 

OK. Cleaning time.