音色の大冒険

For the Japanese-impaired, tonight I took an adventure through the wide, wide world of tone.

I started mixing "Something More," one of the tracks from the posthumous Optionals album, a few days ago and quickly came to the conclusion that the drum and guitar intro we used to do on the song live just doesn't work on the album. So, something new will have to be created to take its place. Armed with my trusty guitar and my MIDI keyboard controller, along with an army of amp emulations, analog synth emulations, reverbs, delays, and distortion units, I think I'm finally starting to hit on some really interesting ways to generate beautiful noise.

To me, this is one of the most enjoyable parts of mixing a record...

• You've tweaked the drums to perfection...
• You've got the bass thumping, pumping with the kick...
• You've got the guitars sounding appropriately huge, without drowning out the vocalist...
• You've got the vox really popping out of the mix, without slapping you across the face with a nasty dose of overdone high-end...

The mix is 99% there! Now you've got to push it up to 110%. That's when (to borrow a phrase from Mixerman) the science experiments start! Playing around, indulging imagination, plugging all your audio toys into each other in ways you haven't tried before, layering and destroying sounds as you go, sometimes starting all over just to see what may be lurking in a different direction, searching for some elusive sound that really makes the record pop - this is the spice of life my friends. It's the kind of fun where you dig into the task at hand, and 5 minutes later you look up and realize that those 5 minutes were actually about 5 hours.

I don't think I've found the perfect sound for "Something More" yet, but I feel like I'm getting close. I know that when I finally DO find it, it will have been well worth it. It has become clearer to me than ever before that while there is a tremendous difference between the processes of writing a song and producing a recording of that song (and I question whether one person can really effectively do both), both have equally vast amounts of talent, heart, and soul poured into them when they're really done right.

When everything clicks together, and the track comes alive... *magic*