mixpost

So, let's never write another tight, rocking song ever again-- it's much easier to track the big, fuzzy, squishy ones. The mixing is really hard with two basses and close-mic'd drums... absolutely no room sound to be found anywhere... and most of the mixing has to be modeled on the "one bass/one guitar" model, even if we have no guitars, because we've got the problem of stereo width weighing on us.

Generally, if you have a 2-guitar setup, you can put one guitar on the left side, one guitar on the right side, and send the bass straight up the middle... none of these instruments are going to step on one another, because they're all in different spots in the mix. The 1-bass/1-guitar deal is different, and much more difficult to make work (especially in a modern context): if you put the guitar to one side and the bass to another, like in early Ramones recordings, you're in danger of... well... sounding like early Ramones recordings. Joel and I don't exactly have this problem, as we both play basses and can suck up a lot of frequency ranges, but panning us right and left always sounds lopsided from section to section, one way or another, and it certainly doesn't sound full. The only band I know of that can pull that off and not sound dated is NoMeansNo, because Rob's bass is so midrangey and distorted he's covering a lot of a guitar's range, so the audio focal point (the mids) tend to be pretty balanced between the bass on one side and the guitar on the other. That's just not the case with ubik.

The bigger, fuzzier, and more echoey songs give me an easy out-- I can be panned out wide with echoes and reverbs and send Joel pretty much up the middle, keeping his low end tight with Tyler's kick drum. Some pretty compelling and lovely mixes are coming from those songs, even in the early stages.

The tighter, rocking songs are much, much harder. They can sound very, very small, with no atmosphere or sense of location... I'm still working on how to get past that. I really don't want to do the "Eric on one side/Joel on the other" approach because it just doesn't come off very well. I'm testing out a few tried and true techniques for opening those songs up (things like Disrepair or Seven Feet Under), but that's another post...

this one's long enough.

This is love...

I was going to post something about how much I hate mixing, but that can wait--

You may or may not know: ubik is just recently back from a studio session, and gearing up to release a 6-song EP pretty soon. Unfortunately, most of the tracks laid down by the studio were just junk: Heavy distortion on all of Michelle's vocals, a poorly set compressor that made Joel a wall of noise and clicks, and my levels were so low that boosting me up with the rest of the band would make an incessant "shhhhhhhh" throughout the whole disc.

Good news is: the drums sound fine, and we can re-record individual stuff as needed.

Now: on to the Love.

I absolutely love the flexibility of being able to track parts and effects with some real consideration as to how they'll fit into the mix. I love laying out the ubik pedalboard at home to overdub External Retraction and thinking "hey, why use the Holy Grail when I have a real spring reverb tank here?" (seriously: I bought that pedal because it came closer to the sound of my real spring reverb than any of the other pedals I tried out). Then I can pan the 'verb signal and dry signal left and right-- an idea I got from Man or Astro Man? While I'm at it, why not double-track the fuzz riff for the doom breakdown in the song?

Mixing will probably be slightly easier, too, with the rough tracks of the ubik ep sounding pretty wonderful right now. Being recorded badly, and being forced to overdub our parts to the original drum track, might be the best thing that ever happened to this recording, production-wise.

...and this is exactly the reason I started m'own blog on the site.

yay! members blogs

You know... my life is awfully ubik-centric. I can walk out of a practice or a show with a thought or a monologue that I think about writing down (and don't). I killed my LJ a while ago because it felt a little... rotten. Luckily, I don't know about any friends with Blogger.com accounts, and I only intend to write band stuff here, anyway, so the messiness of blog communities shouldn't follow me here.

So here it is: my ubik blog. I built pages for the rest of the band, but I have no idea if they want to use them. I can get a little loquacious about music and need an outlet... and this is a decent way to do it, as I'm usually only half functional right before or after a show. Dunno why.