“Uh, it sounds like a record!”
A little update on what’s going on in sunny Sannaland.
I’ve been having a great time seeing the new songs slowly taking shape. Now that they’re almost fully formed, I’ve been playing around with the song order and I seem to have settled on the final track-list. Exciting times!
I’m currently busy recording the last few takes. It’s mostly a process of re-recording some existing tracks that might have some technical imperfections or require a slightly different approach or sound. I recently re-recorded a bass because I realised that my Precision was more appropriate than the Jazz.
Once this process is done, the arduous task of finalising the mixes awaits me.
Production-wise, it’s been a very enthralling learning curve. What’s happened over the past 3-4 months is that the more I learn the more I want to improve the tracks. Then I learn more and the whole process starts again.
For instance, if I’m working on a track and discover a new technique to give more clarity and punch to the bass, I then go back to other similar songs and try to add that little bit of extra magic to those too. I’ve learned many such tricks of late. It’s somewhere between wizardry and craftsmanship. It can be frustrating at times. Just when you think a song is complete and you're near the end of the process, you have to go back to it and start all over. But each of these new discoveries will improve the quality of the mix by 2, maybe 4%. Not a lot you would think, but it all adds up, and it’s a well-known fact that every sound engineer would kill to get that extra 1%!
Passion is prevailing over impatience. Initially I wanted these songs to sound good, then I wanted them to sound great, and now I want them to sound great with an added je ne sais quoi. Not easy, but within reach, so worth pursuing!
I love these songs and how they interact together to form an album, and this makes me more and more ambitious about the whole project.
As Bob Dylan once said to Daniel Lanois while listening to the rough mixes of Neville Brothers’ Yellow Moon album: “Uh, it sounds like a record!”. And that’s all I want for this bunch of songs!
