I make records that I want to hear. Or at least, that’s the ambition. As things go, sometimes I do revisit a track and remix (rebottle!) it. This one came up recently a few different ways, and I decided to spend a little time fine-tuning the mix and remastering it.
Nerdly notes!
The basic track was done “live” in Mike Stevens’ Lost Monkey Studio, during the October 2017 firestorms. Many of my friends and fam had to evacuate, and some of them lost their homes. In the midst of that, I composed and recorded this song. There was a third verse, but it seemed unnecessary on reflection, so I cut it before including the song on my CONTENT album. Just last week I remixed it, and bounced an instrumental mix.
We didn’t use a click-track (metronome) when we tracked the basics. Just me and Mikey, him on a drum kit, me on acoustic guitar. I don’t sniff snobbishly at click-tracks, in fact I use them often. But when it’s possible to make a recording without one, I opt for that. Because it’s cool to let the tempo breathe, for some songs. This one’s pretty steady (Mike is a GREAT drummer), and the tempo does shift subtly in places. As intended. It’s rock n’ roll, baby.
The first overdub, Mikey did right after we cut the basic. He played tambourine, and he nailed it, so beautifully. Thing is, a tambourine part is hard to do. Then it’s hard to place the tambo in the mix. Tambourines notoriously sound either too loud or too quiet, in a mix. Now I got it right where I want it.
Next, I played a guitar solo. 8 bars. I have nerded often about my FAVORITE 8-bar rock guitar solo, Mick Ronson in the original Ian Hunter recording of Once Bitten, Twice Shy. I don’t pretend to have reached such heights. But my solo in this track is one of my favorite 8-bar pentatonic scale outbursts. I played my trusty “Oates” Tele-beast, which I use on pretty much all of my recordings. We tossed it through Mike’s vintage Fender Champ, dimed out. “Dimed” means everything’s on 10. Not that there are a lot of knobs, on an old Champ. Volume and tone controls on 10. Everything the amp can put out. It sounds, to use the appropriate term, Gnarly. We wanted gnarls. Oh did we get them. I added some tape-echo and light compression to finish.
Thankfully, MOST of my releases don’t call me to remix/rebottle. I’ll probably never touch I Can See It Now again, or Am I Not Alien?, or most of the others I’ve made since I started this solo adventure. But I’ll do it when I feel inspired to.
Last nerd-note – I’m confident in mastering my own tracks, now. This is new. For many of my songs, I have turned to some great mastering engineers. They did great work. You can find their names in the credits for my releases in Bandcamp, if you are curious. I learned much from each of them, and finally figured out a way to do this step myself.
Mastering is funny. Anyone who has made records probably knows, it can take your track and finalize it gorgeously, so you go “Wow! It sounds like a record now!” Or, alternately, it can wreck the whole thing, leaving you sad and howling, “Whaaaat happened to our record?!” So you learn by doing.
I wanted to learn this final step, and I did. THANKS to all the aforementioned mastering engineers and producers whom I have had the privilege to work with. I’m NOT going to master other folks’ records. I don’t want that responsibility, and I have no ambition to be in that field, which is populated with geniuses. But I DO know what I want my records to sound like. Each one different; Each song follows its own rules. And I’m glad to have finally demystified this step, for myself. Baby 🙂
Live in Bandcamp now, goes live in all the streaming services July 31. Pre-save in Spotify or Apple Music if you do that sort of thing.
All love,
Eric
