Mastering
July 14th, 2008 by GregThere’s a quote by French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau “Patience is bitter, but the fruit is sweet” which has been very fitting to the process of releasing our debut album. The album which we began tracking in late 2006 and finished mixing close to a year ago is one step closer to being on the shelves of stores and scattered throughout the net. The album is finally mastered! And the fruit of our labour is oh so sweet.
We enlisted Don Bartley to do the job. He’s quite good at the mystical art of mastering albums. He’s mastered a lot of albums. So it was a pretty easy day for us. Don did most of the work. We just sat back and enjoyed hearing the mixes come to life with extra presence and punch. There are moments on the album which when polished up feel like a warm hug and then moments that smack you around the face and leave you crying like a little girl on the ground. We made the decision to keep a lot of the dynamics in the mix, to keep it breathing a bit. There were also a few anomalies that we needed to fix up. One was this low rumble whenever Andrew was singing in one of the slow songs. The assumption was it was vibrations picked up off the mic stand. Don fixed this with some magic eye looking application which is a graphical representation the energy of certain frequencies. Gotta love technology. There were also some clicks of me turning pedals on and off at a point of a song. It’s the catch of tracking nearly everything live. You end up with some unique “performance related” sounds in the mix. We did end up keeping in some little surprises but you’ll have to find them for yourself when the album is out.
Much discussion was had about the word “shod” which is part of the title of a song on the album Ghosts Shod in Steel Shoes. Turns out that shod is the past tense and a past participle of shoe. I did not know that. And to be unshod is to be barefoot perhaps. With the track listing written out we realised how long some of our song titles are, which is diametrically opposed to Pearl Jam’s Ten which consists of mostly one word song titles.
The tracks came up well and the challenge of sorting out segues and the gaps between each track was next. It’s always a tricky thing as the mastering studio feels like a bit of an artificial listening environment. A few transitions were quite easy and natural, some required a bit of agonising but you want to get these things right so there was a purpose to us being pedantic.
Overall, we were really happy with the flow of the album. It’s so satisfying to hear it done. Now to focus energies on all the other jobs that need to get done and things that need to be in place for the release of it. Thank you all for being patient - it’s great to finally be able to say it is not far off now! We hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed creating.
Tags: Album