lots to update you on, but the rough recordings are hereby declared done.

last week i was going back and trying to clean up a few more vocal spots and adding harmonies (both my own and bethany’s) and whatnot and my recording latency problems came back again….everything i tried to record came out a little off timing-wise and i couldn’t get it figured out. it was frustrating, but then i thought “well, they’re the rough recordings so maybe this just means i should let go of them as is and move on.” so that’s what i did. it was hard, but you have to cut them loose sometime.

so wednesday i went over to my buddy’s place and he did a little mastering work on them – just to get them up to a good volume level for people to listen to, and i learned a little bit about that process and what’s involved and how to correct a few things in my recording process next time around. for example, i was mixing like there was no mastering stage at all; i was trying to get everything as loud as possible in the mix. apparently that is not what you want when you get to mastering because you try to amplify things a bit and you end up getting clipping and distortion when it gets too loud. lesson learned. although i still would like to be able to master at home at some point, so maybe i’ll have to learn more about it and get some good software tools to make that happen.

when you master the whole song it makes everything louder, which is good — but that includes mistakes, so that was tough. it was hard in itself having to sit there and listen to everything on the studio monitors all loud when the mistake parts came on. but it really was a good experience, as hearing all the mistakes and things have helped me come to terms even more with the facts that, a) they’re the rough home recorded versions after all and thus not professional, b) that that is okay, and c) that they aren’t quite as bad as i’ve been thinking of them. all very helpful to take unfounded and unneeded pressure off myself. it’s like going out to throw the baseball with a friend and expecting yourself to consistently throw 95 mph strikes. ridiculous.

so i sent them out on saturday to the circle of folks who are helping to give me feedback and pick out the strongest ones. it’s scary even in that form to let something you made go out into the world…and this isn’t even the world, only like 20 people or something. but i’m excited to be at this point and onto the next stage.

right now the plan is to pick the top 3 according to myself and the feedback i get in the next week or two and then record a more professional demo which i will use as my “shot in the dark” at getting a producer interested in working on the project. but more on that later. also from feedback i’ll be deciding which songs make the cut for the final album and which don’t.

so…in 2 weeks or so when the feedback is collected i’ll be posting again with the final song set. and then….on we go!