Passion/Aggression Tracklisting

After one year of writing, six weeks of recording and what feels like forever in chaos, the new album Passion/Aggression is finally complete and the results are outstanding.

The tracklisting is as follows:

1) Lovers And Politicians
2) It Felt Like Forever
3) Get It Right
4) Inane Is My Name
5) Short Term Memory
6) Dead On Red
7) Pull Your Fingers Out
8) Compassion
9) Almost There
10) Too Late

Words cannot describe what I currently feel. Still so much more to do. This is only the beginning.

"Finished"

I got an email from my mastering engineer, Lawrence Gill at 4:30am this morning. It says:

“All done mate.

It's an absolutely cracking album man! Great tunes & your vocals are spot-on.

Will post tomorrow.”

So naturally I couldn’t believe it when I read the email. Could my album actually be finished? I don’t remember finishing anything. I remember finding myself into a hazardous mental prison of noise, trying to make sense of all of the songs, wondering what the hell I just got myself into. I remember setting myself a Friday deadline to be post the songs to Fat As Funk Mastering in Somerset. And I remember, at some point, thinking that it was as good as it was going to get and that it would just have to get posted, no matter what. But never 'finished'.

Indeed that’s the only way I could have looked at it. After all, the longer I have to do it; the more time I’ll spend fucking around and I’d still only think that nothing is finished. Worse still, I could potentially ruin something when it might have been right. I was never going to be happy with everything, but “it is as it is”.

At the worst, the only issues I anticipate are that the mastering might pumping from compression or giving off too many frequencies I don’t want, but hopefully my reference material will prevent this from being an issue… I will know tomorrow either way.

I have been stressing out about the album artwork and what I’m going to do for that. With just over a week left on the project, I still haven’t completed the artwork. So I was thinking the easy route to solve this would be to get a hot girl naked on a white background and take pictures of her sucking off a berretta. Problem Solved. I contacted rock model, Lauren Reading (http://www.myspace.com/laurenreading) to do this with me and generally she was quite willing. Until I asked her to do it naked, of course (well I don’t know for sure). As a backup, I asked another model who was also happy to do whatever I wanted… This became obsolete once the photography studios kindly informed me they wanted to do a price mark-up by 50% as I’m only able to book over the weekend.

So I’m already knee-deep in overdraft and credit card debt, but when you need something done so badly, you’re prepared to pay for anything. But in this case, there was still the possibility it might fall through. Then I would have paid £200 for a studio I can’t do anything in. No chance.

Time to re-consider my options. I have had a think and decided to go for something that can be done at home. I won’t say just yet… I need to make sure it’s done properly.

Masters come in tomorrow. Really nervous.

I keep on telling myself we're almost there

Illness can be a blessing, not just because it means you get time off work, but it also means you have more time to do the things you really need to do, like mixing... hurray!!

And guess what? You won't believe this... I've nearly finished!! I know! After all that whining, I got it off my chest, stopped caring so much about minor details and just got on with it (thank God, says anyone reading this).

Well there's nothing like a good deadline before handing it over to the Mastering engineer... I was originally scheduled to finish for today, but realistically I will need tomorrow too (though I am well enough to go back to work too, so I guess I should). So aiming to get it to him before the weekend, though he's about to have a baby, so chances are he won't be looking at the tracks immediately anyway.

I've bounced everything down and had a listen in order to come up with any last minute opinions I might have.

My first, and biggest concern is that all the tracks DO sound very different. Richard's warning of not being too eclectic has backfired on me; only because I didn't heed it. Not a lot I can do about that now, but I might need to change the track-listing order slightly differently to what I originally intended so it can be played beginning-to-end more coherently.

I do feel they work well stand-alone, though. All with the exception of 'Almost There', which is now an awful mix in comparison to the rest of the songs. I mixed this in Vestry Hall a over a year ago now and had no idea how much BASS there was throughout the whole song, generally making everything sound very muffled and messy.

So now I'm entertaining the idea of re-mixing the whole lot tomorrow, from scratch. I have a much better idea of what I'm doing with it now and could probably get a much better sound. Then it's just minor touch-ups.

It now sounds so simple, but I'm sure I'll be pulling my hair out again this time tomorrow... it's not much longer, anyway.

All getting a little bit stressful

A while ago, I mentioned the wise words of Amanda Palmer where she says "Music doesn't need to matter when you don't think about it" (or something to that effect) and while I tried to adhere to those words, I just couldn't do it. The mixes meant everything to me, every waking moment when at work, asleep, taking a crap, it's all I've been capable of thinking of.

When I was forced into a situation this weekend where I wasn't able to do as much as I wanted, I felt I have actually done more. I spent Friday with Peter taking pictures which I hope to be able to put to future use, but then spent the rest of the night at Judith's as I'm hoping to move into the spare room of her house next month. On top of that, I called called into work to do a 5.1 surround check on a game.

Back at home with no sleep, feeling rough as fuck, I struggle to continue mixing. Something I just dread. Made worse by the fact my housemate is ill and therefore I cannot really have any volume to mix with (though probably still driving her mad). In some ways, I hope to catch her cold because it would mean time off work, but that would also backfire as it means my hearing wouldn't be any good.

So rather thank just getting bitter or pissed off, I just thought "Okay, well what CAN I do" and opted to look at the songs that are nearly finished. Well these included 'It Felt Like Forever', 'Compassion' (which I only started mixing on Thursday) and also 'Get It Right' and 'Short Term Memory'. They all felt nearly finished and I was able to tweak them to perfection by listening on my monitors, sending them to my Mission speakers and listening on headphones. If they sounded great on all, then I bounced them down.

Okay, so there's a few things I'm still dissatisfied with, for example some of the breaths on '...Forever' are slightly out of time at the beginning and the mix is quite muddy on 'Short Term...' but when I think about it - what CAN I do? Not a lot. Does it sound absolutely bloody awful? Not really. So I stopped thinking about it and just bounced it down. They're never going to be 100% perfect and I don't have the time to be a perfectionist.

It's only when playing my songs to others that I get really nervous and paranoid (when I'm in the room at the same time), but when I listen on my own, some of it sounds great. I still have two SERIOUS problem child tracks - 'Pull Your Fingers Out' (abysmal chorus vocals) and 'Inane is My Name' (have to mix 18 slightly out of time vocal tracks)... but I'm honestly going to leave them until last. If everything else is sounding good enough (and I reckon I can finish everything else in a day or two) then it'll only be those last songs to worry about and I can stop thinking about the other songs... then hopefully it won't matter.

Fucking me. Fucking you.

It’s rather depressing when you’d rather be scrubbing the bathroom than mixing your tunes. I mean, I’ve done some pretty mean procrastination, but this is just obscured. On the plus side, my bathroom is now shiningly clean, so there’s something to be said for it, at least. One the downside, there is a good three tracks that have some severe mixing to be done, two tracks that still need vocal re-performances and a further 7 that need finishing touches… ohhh, and I’m supposed to be sending this off to be mastered on the 22nd. Not feeling optimistic.

Yeah, I could give myself a bit longer to do them mixes, but I don’t see that inspiring me to work any harder when I also have a full research document, an essay, cover art / photography and a DVD presentation to be done in the final two week… not to mention if any of the tracks come back awful, I have time to rectify them before the September 7th deadline. And with a full time job too? I don’t know how I’ll manage without cancelling sleep.

Last night Judith came over to record “lady vocals” for me – adding a nice little touch on a couple of songs, including It Felt Like Forever. Judith has a very soft-spoken voice that emits innocence to all those who hear it. So getting her to singing in her most breathy, husky voice “’Cause I was too damn busy fucking you” was not her forte. So you’ll have to wait and hear what I got her to do next… Hopefully she’s still speaking to me.

Tonight I will get these vocals mixed and have them out of the way, tomorrow I am meeting with Peter Beicht again for some photographs don’t his style and the weekend I will sit and cry as I try to squeeze blood out of a stone.

Sit tight.

How to get it right... by Rupert Neve

Tonight's post begins with a little story. Not much of a story, I'll be honest, but I wanna tell it.

Once upon a time, there was a horribly rainy July, the rainiest ever recorded. It rained. And rained. And rained. And yet... people still deny Global Warming exists. Funny, isn't it? Still, Gabriel didn't mind the rain that much. He was stuck in his tower (okay, the ground floor), forced to mix 10 songs on an album he already had enough of. If he doesn't finish all songs by a set time, will will not earn his Master's degree and be forced to do day jobs for the rest of his days. So the lack of sun was oddly welcomed. "If no one else was having fun, that's fine by me".

Then the month turned to August and the sun shined. "Too hot for me" thought Gabriel in an awfully English manner, but still plowed along at his mixes, whilst viewing his housemates having fun in the garden.

Could it be? Gabriel lost his love for making music once more? Suddenly he realised why producers and artists hand over their recordings for others to mix. He so longed for someone to take it off his hands and make everything sound amazing. But this was a dream that would not come true. He had to do this himself, and he knew this.

After being overworked and underpaid, Gabriel and his housemate/drummer/part-time guitarist Tim decided it was time for a break and escaped the tower of mixing and venture to a small venue in Shepherd's Bush to see the queen, Amanda Palmer, perform piano and song. To a tiny audience of 200 villagers, Amanda performed Radiohead's "Creep" on a ukulele and then performed many of her own songs on piano. Gabriel was breath taken and exclaimed to himself, "I LOVE MUSIC" then proceeded to spend the weekend mixing more tracks in the fucking hot sun.

Days later, a couple of tracks were nearly finished, "but that's a superficial thought", Gabriel thought to himself. He decided to work on "Get It Right" and nearly cried. "It sounds so muddy... and awful... and muddy". How terribly ironic. Every song Gabriel wrote about making things right, have become the most problematic songs ever?

It wasn't until this morning that Gabriel had an epiphany. By changing the Hardware buffer size to 512 samples, or even to 2048 samples, Gabriel could have LOTS of Neve Plug-ins such as the 1081 EQ or the 33609 compressor. Normally when working with such magic, he was limited to one at a time... but this new trick allowed Gabriel to work with more than one at a time.

So Gabriel worked tirelessly into the night, bouncing not just a few tracks, but EVERY track through the Neve EQs to give it a much brighter sound and depth in the track. Of course, whilst keeping a close eye on Steve Jobs' Apple conference, announcing the new iMacs. Then low and behold, "Get It Right" sounded less muddy, and while a little messy in performance, Gabriel just shrugged to himself and thought "that's okay, it's about making things right, it doesn't need to actually sound right. I'm going to blog about it. In story mode.

And so, with the help of Queen Amanda Palmer, his trusty friend, Tim Langsford, and the almost God-like Rupert Neve, Gabriel felt happier than ever before. But the adventures continue... for another day.

The End.



Beautiful wasn't it? (Next entry will be more sane, I promise)

Mixing Pt 1

Fortunately I seem to be keeping to schedule, for once. My outline plan has been 'Finish writing songs in June, Record in July, Mix in August'.. well it's now the 1st August, I have finished recording all vocals and have begun mixing my tracks.

Frankly the very thought of it is just a mammoth task and even working on (what I believe) the easiest song to mix has shown weaknesses in the mix that I didn't notice before and so I'm automating like a fast automating guy. Actually I don't think 'Dead on Red' is far off but the vocals are heavily distorted, so they need to be rather loud in the mix to be intelligible, but I'm trying to do this without compromising the power of the music.

Likewise, my speakers are good for recording, but not so good for mixing as to get a better bass response, I need to go to my housemate's room upstairs to find out how loud it really is.

Tomorrow I will re-approach it and import a couple of songs (I'm thinking a combination of Deftones / Queens of the Stone Age and PJ Harvey) to the session for some A/B comparisons - which is the method I'll adhere to for all songs.

Hopefully I'll have this one in the bag by Thursday. It's not unrealistic, the hardest part is just beginning and I have begun.