i set out friday afternoon to sit down with darian and work out the final mix for the demo. i expected this to take 1-2 hours, darian expected about 3, and it took about 3 and a half for everything including bouncing (pro tools term for exporting a finished song into a file on your hard drive) and burning the disc. so as usual it took longer than expected but it’s done!

a lot of it was just playing with levels and EQ. hi hat is too loud there, bring the harmony part up, let’s fatten up the guitar there, these kinds of things. the whole first mix was pretty crispy sounding (a lot of high end boost during mastering) so we fixed that. tweaked this great violin line we added to the end of ‘questions.’ tweaked the eq and ebow stuff on the ‘king forever’ intro. just a lot of little changes of this nature. but now it is done and it sounds great! i’m very happy with the result.

and now it is on to the next step: mailing the demo to a producer. there is one particular producer i’ve had in mind since this whole thing started – his name is Ed Cash, and i don’t know if you’ve heard of him, but he’s kind of a big deal (which you can tell because i capitalized his name). he does fantastic production work with a lot of big name artists and he is my ‘shot in the dark’ if you will, seeing as me randomly contacting him in this way will be something like cold calling coca-cola for a job. so my expectations are low, but i figure if i really want to do this thing i lose nothing by aiming high. he would be my number one choice out of anyone to produce the final album so why not see if he’s interested?

so look out, Ed – here i come.