Mixing and Fixing

I finally got back from 15 hours in the recording studio mixing and fixing the new album. For the most part the entire time was spent doing this:

That's engineer Jimmy Mac sitting next to me as we listen to the playback and make our adjustments. More about that later.

It's amazing how much things have changed since I played on my first album in 1975. Back then everything was recorded on 2 inch 24 track tape. If you made a mistake, hit wrong note or had your timing off a bit the only way to fix it as to rerecord all or part of the song. "Punching in and out" as it was called was always tricky and there was always the risk that you could punch in the wrong place and accidentally erase something you planned to keep. I can remember many frustrating hours in the studio trying to get it right.

Over the years much of the recording business has gone digital and instead of recording to tape, we now record right into Jim's computer using ProTools recording software. In this photo Jim and my lead singer Tom Moore are looking at the two computer monitors that display the recording information and the various software tools used to make the adjustments.


When we used to mix on tape you had to play the recording back and using the faders and adjustments on the mixing board, make the changes on the fly. If you missed something important, you had to go back and do the whole thing again from scratch. Those days are over.

With the digital recording like we used on this album everything is displayed on the screen. If a note is off pitch, Jim has a software program that will go in a correct the pitch without rerecording it. If the timing is off a bit (which can happen with four guys singing at the same time), it's possible to select a tiny piece of the recording and move it to line up with the other guys. It's pretty amazing and sure a lot easier than the old days.

That's not to say that you can take bad singers and make them sound great. You still have to have a solid foundation before those fancy tools will help, but the little nuisances that we used to have to learn to live with we can now quickly fix. Recordings for a low budget operation like ours used to have a lot of compromises because we just couldn't spend the time and money to fix every little thing. It's not such a problem now.

There's still some work to do. The final CD master has to be completed, and the artwork designed. With any luck we'll have a finished project in October. I'll let you know what happens.