the last few days have indeed been a flurry of all kinds of activity. started doing mixing of some of the songs. the first day was total dismay (as usual) because i keep subconsciously expecting perfection out of these things and that is not their purpose. if i could do them perfect at home i’d have no need to do any pro recordings, and i really just needed to let go of them to some extent and be okay mentally with the fact that i’m letting some people hear versions of songs that aren’t perfect and are indeed rough in many ways. this is very difficult for me to do. it was bethany that sort of sat me down and said all this to me which has been very helpful in a change of mindset.

so round two with mixing, either due to the change of mindset or just songs i happened to like the sound of better, was very positive. i went through like 6 songs in a row and didn’t think any changes needed to be made, which was very encouraging. then i went back and tweaked a few spots here and there and that was that.

and then of course, we had the technical issues.

the other day i realized that with all for god alone, every time i tried to record vocals it would sound fine during recording, but on playback it was delayed somehow – like the voice didn’t match up with the rest of the instruments. this, like most computer issues, made no sense at all and there was no basis to even begin to know what might be going wrong. so i started guessing and kept coming up blank. it took me a couple days of thinking about it and trying stuff to get it figured out. eventually i realized it was only that song and no others, which probably meant it was a problem with that session specifically instead of any of my hardware, which was a relief. so i basically just rebuilt the song from its existing pieces in a new session and that seemed to fix it. still no idea as to the cause, but my best guess is that it had something to do with the bitrate conversions from 16 to 24 bit. who knows.

so after that fix i finally finished vocals for that song and we live, which were the last two i hadn’t touched.

i’ve also mixed everything at least one time through on real speakers instead of headphones, and today took my first stab at self-harmony in great. seems to have come out pretty good for the first try.

so here is my optimist’s schedule:
monday – check mix of all songs again, do more harmony
tuesday – harmony and mixdowns
wednesday – mastering
thursday – done

gotta see if mastering wednesday is an option. then i can start getting feedback and go from there.