Another Night of Mixing
Well, I'm doing my third entire remix of…um…the new album by Roger Joseph Manning. (That's a pseudonym, but as always, a close approximation, at least that I came up with under a minute). I also did drums on this album.
The drums, I think, are pretty good. I worked very hard on them, and I'm proud.
The mix is another story. Theoretically, I'm a pretty competent audio engineer. I've done some work. This album isn't among it. My initial mixes sounded excellent, I though. But they were the wrong style for Roger, who is one of my musical heros. LOGIC AUDIO STOP STEALING MY FUCKING USER INTERFACE FOCUS I JUST DELETED TWO TRACKS WHEN I HIT BACKSPACE IN MY BLOG PROGRAM. I certainly respect his style, but I just can't do it. It's a spectacular failure on my part, considering the hundreds of hours I've put into the project.
The biggest part of the problem is that Roger is about 8,000 miles away from me. If we were in the same room, the project would have been done months ago, and wouldn't have sucked.
I can't complain about the tools-I've got zillions of great recording gadgets. I'm running over 300 effects on the mix, including tons of multi-band compressors, and several convolution reverbs. And it still blows.
Part of my research here (at school) is in telepresencing -- creating the feeling that people are in the same room who are not. I'm going to use some of that research to try and put Roger, his own engineer, and myself all in a virtual room, where we can see and hear each other (not with webcams) and mix together. I'll be lucky if that works at all.
It's 3 AM, and I'm finishing up. Roger has been super-nice about the whole thing, and never told me anything sucked. He's a great guy. Wish I was a great engineer.
The drums, I think, are pretty good. I worked very hard on them, and I'm proud.
The mix is another story. Theoretically, I'm a pretty competent audio engineer. I've done some work. This album isn't among it. My initial mixes sounded excellent, I though. But they were the wrong style for Roger, who is one of my musical heros. LOGIC AUDIO STOP STEALING MY FUCKING USER INTERFACE FOCUS I JUST DELETED TWO TRACKS WHEN I HIT BACKSPACE IN MY BLOG PROGRAM. I certainly respect his style, but I just can't do it. It's a spectacular failure on my part, considering the hundreds of hours I've put into the project.
The biggest part of the problem is that Roger is about 8,000 miles away from me. If we were in the same room, the project would have been done months ago, and wouldn't have sucked.
I can't complain about the tools-I've got zillions of great recording gadgets. I'm running over 300 effects on the mix, including tons of multi-band compressors, and several convolution reverbs. And it still blows.
Part of my research here (at school) is in telepresencing -- creating the feeling that people are in the same room who are not. I'm going to use some of that research to try and put Roger, his own engineer, and myself all in a virtual room, where we can see and hear each other (not with webcams) and mix together. I'll be lucky if that works at all.
It's 3 AM, and I'm finishing up. Roger has been super-nice about the whole thing, and never told me anything sucked. He's a great guy. Wish I was a great engineer.