the mysteries of phasing...

OK, so it's been kinda slow going on the updates, but our initial rough mixes were rough enough that we weren't in a hurry to put them all up without a little more work. Plus, we had to drag this out, right? So, today, we present rough mix #2, which was actually the first song we tracked over Memorial Day weekend:

break the curse (rough mix 6/8/09).

This mix is a bit less "rough;" we spent a couple of hours messing with it yesterday. Though the performance is pretty good all around (including most of the scratch vocals), as the first go with our live-in-the-living-room setup, this one came out a bit funny at first. The main problem was boomy, muddy bass; anyone who's recorded in less-than-ideal environments knows all about that. But, when we flipped the phase on the bass track and dropped the low-end EQ on a number of other instruments, things came out sounding quite a bit nicer (we're big believers in subtractive EQ). It's not as tight as we'd like, but at the same time, the overall sound seems to fit the mood of this song well.

This particular track arose as an instrumental quite some time ago; we debuted it at our "Wandern" gallery show, which was in some ways the genesis of our current approach. It started off as an improvisation and later morphed into this thing that some people might actually call a song, though it does stretch the definition a bit. Keep an eye out for chord changes, they're easy to miss!

Ramon plays drums on this one; the guitar drone you hear most of the time is a loop he starts before moving over to the drums. We actually recorded it that way to create the sound in the room we're used to hearing. The lead guitar on the left is James', recorded as discussed before. We also did a bit of reamping on this one, running Clay's keys - recorded direct - through a tube amp for a little roominess; they may need some more, yet...

This reminds us; we didn't give much detail in the last post on the song featured there, "I Propose." But if you're interested in hearing those crazy Grundigs that sound like the legendary Sennheiser 409, check out Ramon's guitar on the left. And somebody tell James his fuzzy tone on the right side complements it nicely; he's not sure about it. For your convenience, here's that song again:

I propose (rough mix 5/29/09).

Keep checking back, there'll be more this week...