I know, I know, it’s been a while since we last posted, blah, blah, blah…
We have finished our primary recording activities, I say primary because there are a couple of vocal tracks to do and other bits and pieces spring to mind now and again while we go through the cleanup process.  I ‘ll speak to that in a minute, but first I wanted to touch on the overall shape of the record. 

We had originally planned to record 20 songs, which grew to 21.   With everyone taking as long as it has, we decided to drop one for sure and maybe come back to another one that we have been planning but haven’t been able to pull off yet.    It’s a complicated piece and we did a kick-ass demo of it but haven’t got our heads around recording it.
So we now have 19 songs, and we are in clean up mode.   Clean up is when we go through all the songs track by track and look for glitches (digital noise, or other
unexpected noise on a track) as well as timing and tuning errors and what not.   We also organize the mass of tracks and do some general housekeeping on levels and removing any EQ’s or processing we put on the tracks during the recording.  Often I will do a quick "rough mix" of a song so I can listen in the car and make sure that all the structural elements are in place and also to work on lyrics and flow.

Ed and I split up the songs, He’ll do cleanup at the mother ship studio, Bad Vision, while I work at my satellite studio, The Nether Regions which has replaced my Big Nowhere location. I’ve been there for a couple of years, but since we have been doing most of the work at Bad Vision, I’m still not settled at The Nether Regions (or settled in my Nether Regions for that matter.)

While i am cleaning the songs I am also going in and completing all the sequence work which I have mostly done in FL Studio (some is in Ableton Live.)   While it is fundamentally possible to ReWire FL Studio to Sonar I find it doesn’t work the way I want to and so it’s just annoying.   What I do instead is take a rough mix of the tracks from Sonar, maybe broken down into stems of drums, guitar, bass and vocals and then import those into FL Studio.  Then I can adjust any of the stuff I have in FL Studio, which might include soft synths, drum loops, sequences and samples, or all of the above.   I also do a lot of processing of these sounds directly there.    Once I have tweaked to my heart’s content, then I export all the sounds out of FL Studio as separate tracks, or groups of tracks which are then imported into Sonar.  It’s an extra couple of steps to do it this way, and I am edging away from using FL Studio and doing more stuff in Live or directly in Sonar, but I have because so accustomed to the workflow in FL Studio that it’s hard to adjust.

Doing this is time consuming, but also somewhat fulfilling because all the little flaws, or timing issues or what not that we have lived with in the ghost sequence tracks we recorded with can be cleaned up.   Sometimes it’s just a matter of polishing them off, other times it may require some deeper surgical procedures but in either case it’s very satisfying.

We have a couple of shows in the next month or so, which means rehearsal as we haven’t played as a band much in the past year while we’ve been recording, so some of the studio work will slow down a little.  My hope is that we are through all the cleanup and mixing in the next 3 or 4 weeks.   

We really will need to manage our mixing time better then we have in the past as we have a tendency to work a mix to death.   I want to keep the energy up and just bang out mixes.  Ideally I’m thinking a session per song.  Once everything has been through that process, we listen, make notes, final adjustments and then complete.