Wednesday was a truly fantastic day. The last week was really one to have permanently wiped from my memory, but Wednesday almost made up for it. For the last week I have been house bound. Seems that the department of motor vehicles doesn't appreciate when you don't appear in court. Seems they then like to mess with your license and registration status, then your insurance company can get in on the act and make things really difficult. Any way you cut it, it's a giant lesson in humility and powerlessness and an opportunity to find new and creative ways to entertain yourself while standing in DMV lines hour after hour that doesn't involve murdering anybody. So I've been house bound for the last week and going on a tour of the local DMV's, city courts, etc. trying to get my poor car free from it's orange boot of civil slavery. Wednesday it all worked out.

Just in the nick of time to be able to drive to...

...The first mixing session on the record. Not exactly the first, but the first of the last. We mixed "Why Cry" with Chris Lord-Alge a few weeks ago, and now we mix all the rest of the songs with Ryan Williams, who recorded/engineered the record. We will mix one song per day, so for the next two weeks we'll be in there.

This is how mixing works: Ryan goes to the studio (a new studio, not where we did the record, one especially for mixing) around 10am. He spends the whole day sorting out the tracks, applying effects, delays, compression etc. Some of the effects were "tracked" or "printed" on the "tape"and can't be changed, and some of them were like placeholder effects that would be done "for real" in the mix.

Was that too many parentheses in that last sentence? I think maybe so. There's probably a legal limit for that, too...

After he has had the full day to get all the sounds, by all, I mean ALL - some songs are nearing 60 plus tracks used; that's alot of sound to sort through - then we come in. Today Dave and I arrived at 6:30pm to listen down. We are really happy with it, sounds just right. Really big, really powerful, and the rhythm section sounds thunderous, which is very important on this song. On "Awake" and "Go On" especially, Chris' bass part really drives the song and so his bass and a solid drum foundation being properly balanced in the mix is essential for it to really really work. Some bands can get away with just maxxing out the guitars, but we're not that kind of band. We are really trying to have all four pieces of the puzzle strong and in context: drums, bass, guitar, and vocal melody. It's sometimes not an easy job.

Ryan really pulled it off, and now we are super excited to get the rest of the songs done. The mood was really positive and organic at the studio and this bodes very well for the rest of the songs' last creative step.

I will try to blog this process as much as I can day by day. I started this whole blog back in the Summer of '04 partially to document the creation and growth of this band, and it's a shame that I decided to stop the blog right at the most interesting part so far - as we were tracking this record last October, but that's how it went down. Things got dramatic and I went into a place that I didn't feel comfortable communicating from. All I could manage was to work daily on the record. Nose to the grindstone. It became all-consuming; I went into single-tasking tunnel-vision mode, and until I could see how this was going to turn out, I felt the need to be silent.

all my problems
they're camouflaged
in these fatigues
I've begun to doubt our breed
of violent peace
yeah