A few weeks after tracking 12 new songs for the next Ovipositor record, Colin and I went back to New Improved Recordings in Oakland the other day to mix the album with engineer and studio owner Eli Crews.
[Geek Alert] Compared to recording, mixing is a long, focused and sometimes tedious process, essentially taking the rough tracks and going after each element, every bit of sound that was recorded. In our case, that was 12 different drum tracks, two bass and two guitar tracks, scratch vocals, and a couple of tracks fed by stereo room mics. That was all captured during the recording session a few weeks ago, and Colin had since added some new layers of guitar and vocals, which he recorded at home and added to the session tracks for mixing. Earlier this week, we went through each track adding effects and stereo positioning, and mixing everything into clean, cohesive sounding songs fit for public consumption. Well…as fit for public consumption as Ovipositor can be.
Because we mixed as much of the record as possible in one day (as opposed to a well-funded mixing process in which entire days are spend working on a single track at a time), Eli opted against using all the really dope outboard gear he’s got at NIR, and we went with effects plug-ins to achieve the sounds we wanted. I love the sound of analog effects, and there’s something really studio-romantic about spending hours twiddling knobs to dial reverb, compression, etc., and I would have loved to use that stuff. But Eli’s got a full complement of Universal Audio effects in the studio computer, and that stuff sounds great, plus, unlike analog effects, the digital stuff is so easy to use quickly so we got through most of the record in about 10 hours.
There are still three songs that need to be mixed, but Colin’s doing those himself at his home studio in the next week or two, then we’ll send the record off to be mastered and replicated to CD. It’ll still be a while before we’ll have it “ready for market” (Colin’s an old-school screen printer and designer, and has a scheme to do up 100 limited edition custom packages), but come October, we should have something to offer. In the meantime, I’ve got a baby and a nursing mother to attend to, I could use some time in front of the drum machine, and Colin’s got some other stuff going on, so Ovipositor will be taking a couple of months off. Look for us to break out again at the Li Po Lounge in Chinatown, SF (or similar dive-y venue) as the winter holidays approach.