Mixing on DW Album Begins Today!

DW recording update: mixing on my album-in-progress begins today. Exploratory, but serious, first steps – it may take a while for the sound to come together. Sometimes you need to do a couple of mixes of a song to get it right. So I’m going to keep the details of what’s exactly happening to myself for a while, until I feel great about the path. But I wanted to mark the day, nonetheless! For those non-recording-nerds among you, the mix can begin when the recordings of the songs, their various performances and multi-tracked overdubs, are done. Now these parts are going to be mixed together to create finished versions of the songs.

Until now, I’ve been listening to “rough mixes” of this batch of songs, either mixed by me or by my engineer John Rausch. These mixes aren’t intended to be final mixes, but we both have tried hard to make them sound great. So by now I’ve probably got a serious case of “demo-itis” – that tendency to love the first version you hear of a song more than any subsequent one.

Demo-itis is probably worth a whole post, maybe I’ll come back to it.

It’s amazing how different a track can sound when a great mix engineer takes a swing at it. The mixer works without the artist for a day or a half a day, only consulting the sounds on the record, rather than the artist’s opinions or intentions. So the artist can’t watch over the mixer’s shoulder, back-seat driving. Sometimes it’s a huge surprise when you hear the results. Delightful or, less often, dismaying. Occasional bafflement, more often confirmation.

More than sometimes the song turns out exactly as I hoped. So I’m looking forward to a season of surprises, I’m sure a bunch will be good ones.