AnalogueOldVintage finished!

The day after my last post I went away with my band, All The Fires, on a 6-date mini-tour, so apologies for the gap in progress. However, I’m very proud to announce that the second version of the EP, the one that’s caused me so much trouble over the past few weeks, is finally complete. The wonderful Cally Gibson popped back on Thursday evening to redo one of her parts that had too much crackle to handle and I was ready to go..

I started again with the mixes as wasn’t happy with the ones I’d done previously, so have been working on them since getting back and it’s been a very different process to that which I’m used to. Many little things meant I had to rewind and start again, like a channel playing up, forgetting to mute/unmute something or simply spotting an issue with the balance of instruments, effects or EQ. Having to do everything by hand, even end fades as I decided it was a necessity for the PC to record the audio but should not be allowed to alter it in any way, made the task of mixing feel more like a performance in itself which I had not expected. Some faders sat where they were but moved up and down and I did this all from memory and my knowledge of the songs which I found really enjoyable, especially when I got it all right and knew I’d nailed the mix! Worried about the level of the bass, I mixed on both headphones (beyerdynamic DT250s) and monitors (Tannoy Reveal 6Ds) before finally testing on my hifi. Once happy with a mix I moved on to the next track, knowing that was it and there would be no future tweaking. This isn’t a limitation I’ve ever had to deal with before and I found it extremely hard to get over it and commit to the first mix, but once through the first few I started to trust myself a little more and finished the final track last night. No editing of the audio will take place, not even tidying up the starts/finishes or normalising the levels. For ease of distribution they will be converted to 320 kbps MP3s, as will the DigitalNewModern versions, but I feel they’re as organic and genuine as I could ever have managed and that’s something I’m very happy about.

Today I’ve been putting the Constant Change is Here to Stay package together which includes simple artwork for each version, a README file with all relevant information and a short online questionnaire courtesy of QuickSurveys. This is the artwork which is varied slightly for each version. Tomorrow I’ll be working on finishing the DigitalNewModern mixes and adding them to the package, which I intend to distribute as widely as possible.