More recording neepery

[catsittingstill]

So the past week I've really been making an effort to get to the mixing and keep my nose to the grindstone.  I have 8 songs done to the point where they went on my iPod to be listened to on walks and in the car to try to get the sound quality even and similar to other albums that I like.  I have four more whose vocals need to be redone because of that crackle problem I had with the Zoom H4n (remember; set it to 48 K sample rate when you're using it as a USB interface!).  And I have eight more songs that need to be recorded pretty much from scratch.

I have access to the padded room at Carson Newman as of about two weeks ago, so I knew I would be recording this morning.  Yesterday I set up the Zoom at home and practiced vocals for Cedarglass and Wise Hands, and laid down a scratch track for Oak And Ash and practiced recording to it.  It wasn't going very well--I have a hard time starting on time and confidently, even with a count-in, and I felt like I wasn't matching the timing for Cedarglass and I could hear that I was getting a weird sort of vocal buzz on the highest note in Wise Hands every single time.

But it went much better this morning.  Maybe I squeezed all the mistakes out yesterday (well, most of them; it's not like I didn't make mistakes this morning, but I didn't have the five false starts in a row phenomenon) and started fresh with good "stuff" today.  And it was yesterday's practicing that convinced me I couldn't record vocals for two songs (not those two songs) without some kind of rest in between, which was why I was even prepared to record Oak and Ash, which has a mandolin part I could lay down three versions of while I was resting my throat.  And then I got through Wise Hands with, I think, enough good high notes that I can clone them and make something presentable.

I think I should start practicing recording earlier in the week.  This past couple of weeks has been all about the mixing, though, trying to get caught up.

And now I need to mix Cedarglass, Oak And Ash, and Wise Hands.  And make some tweaks on the other eight mixes.

Comments

[laughingrat]

It sounds like an arduous process, kind of a mix of boring and interesting to actually get through.

[catsittingstill]

Kind of a mix, yeah.

It's not that the mixing is boring--it's that it involves so many nerve wracking decisions, like "is this track good enough or should I re-record it? *Can* I do any better? If not, should I cut this song from the album and replace it with something easier? Or nothing at all?"

And when I've vetted my tracks, there's still lots of little nitpicky things like editing out my mistakes (usually by patching across from a track where I did that part right, but sometimes by skootching a syllable forward or backward in time twenty milliseconds or so to make it line up better with the other tracks)--and then every place I cut something it can end up with a little audible bump if I didn't do it right so I have to listen carefully through every change I made, in every track...

It is possible to spend literally days mixing a single 2 1/2 minute song.

And to top it all off, I'm not even sure my ears are all that good, so I could be missing important stuff. So I end up feeling insecure about my musicianship, my performing ability, *and* my sound engineer chops all at once.

But it's not usually boring. Frustrating sometimes....