As Intimated….

So, as I intimated might be the case, I’ve finally managed to miss the month of May in terms of getting a Journal entry up here.

I have, though, been working towards – and meeting – a more serious deadline at the end of last month: I’ve now managed to do mixes for all of the pieces set for the next solo album.

As you’ll all know, this set of recordings has been under way for a long, long time and it’s really quite something to have arrived at a stage where they *could* be in a releasable state.

It’s been interesting to come back to all these songs for the mixing. Since they’ve been recorded over such protracted period (and in fits and starts) I haven’t held a definite memory of each one throughout the process and therefore haven’t really known what’s coming as I loaded each one up. There were *lots* of things which I’d completely forgotten about, many of them given cryptic (or no) names which didn’t really reveal much of a clue as to their nature in advance of hearing them.

In  way this meant that I didn’t feel particularly precious towards any of the parts and so was fairly liberated in re-imagining what each piece should be made up of in its final form. In other words, fast decisions at the end of a long and painstaking progress. There’s been a degree of instantaneity of response in these mixing sessions which has made them very much of The Now.

Mixing’s one of the things which has changed the most in the entire recording process over the years. When I began making records it was very much a question of simply balancing the tracks which had been laid down. Reverb was restricted to (probably only one) Plate Echo and delay to tape machines. By the time VdGG was fully under way quite a lot more outboard effects were available. But because the resulting mix was going down to a single 1/4” tape it was still very much happening in real time and became in itself something of a performance. The more complicated the moves that needed to be made then the more pairs of hands were needed to make them.

That’s something which has disappeared over the years. First, automated desks came in, so that minute adjustments could be made, accurately and repeatedly. These days the advent of computer recording means that the moves can be made in software land as well as onboard desks. Often modern mixes are made “In the Box” – entirely within the computer.

I must say that I still miss something of the mix-as-performance, the feeling that This One is (and is going to be) the definitive version. Of course, I appreciate the fact that one can go back and adjust things and wouldn’t *really* want to go back to that Analogue path in toto…but I still try, at least in part, to act on impulse.

So as I’ve said I’ve now got *some* versions done of each track. It’s likely that over the coming weeks they’ll all be tweaked or, indeed, completely reworked. But another plateau of achievement in the process has been reached and, for all that a degree of thought, consideration, work remains, the end of the project is now in sight.