As my Christmas and New Years holidays come to a close, and I go back to work, I sort of gleaned a lot out of the week. To start it off, I was excited about a song that I was working on. The song started out of being inspired from noodling on my guitar synthesizer, which obviously fleshed itself out. It was an exciting start to the song. One thing led to another and a song was born. I got the guitars, lead and vocals down. I even made a string arrangement to add to song. The vocal harmonies seemed fantastic, and I thought that the vocal effects were chilling. Everything seemed to fit.

So what went wrong? The mix… that’s what.

I spent the past few days working on the mix trying to get things right, only to be disappointed in the end. It sounded limp and lifeless. Other than the vocals, there was nothing to get excited about. It was a total letdown. I felt like I lost a few days out of this.

However, instead of feeling like I lost my entire holidays over this, I may as well learn something out of this mix, so it won’t feel like a total waste.

The first thing I learned was not to rely on a set of drum samples just because they sampled a famous drummers kit. What may have been good for his band, is not necessarily good for a mix in other people’s work. I couldn’t get the type of oomph I needed for song, no matter how hard I tried. And the cymbals were only recorded through the overheads all at once. I couldn’t separate them. Nothing worked on it. I should have been smart enough early on in the mix to switch kits for something that I knew I could work with.

I also learned how well they didn’t mix with the bass guitar either. I loved how the bass guitar sounded as it was and it was more prominent in the song than other parts. The drums are supposed to reinforce the bass. These didn’t seem like they were part of the same song, let along reinforcement.

My next mistake was trying to compensate with levels. I pushed everything to point where it was pushing the buss compressor to the point where everything was mushy. Now nothing sounded right.

To make matters worse, I thought I could  cover things up by applying my tape emulation setting in Ozone. That was nothing more than an exercise in turd polishing. Let’s face it. If it sounds bad, then nothing will make it good. What was I thinking.

So, where do I go from here? I think I am probably going to give this song a bit of a rest for now so I can plan my strategy for the next time I mix it. If anything, I have other song ideas that I would like to work on for now. I can’t brood over this song. There were a lot of things I got out of writing the song as well, such as programming some real nice drum lines and some real cool harmonies. If anything, I could apply them to other song ideas. So, really, nothing was wasted. If it wasn’t for the reflections of this bad mix, I probably wouldn’t have anything to think about for my next mixes to make them better.

Joelle is right… I am turning into a grumpy old fart. Well, I am because I can’t believe how much time I waste trying to find the perfect sounds and settings and all the things that are messing with making music. I already grumped out about playing guitar. However, despite all of my grumpiness, I feel that I have become a better person for it. I’m starting to hear music.

However, there’s another thing that got in my way of music: Convolution Reverbs. Or, should I say convoluted?

Heck, why does wanting to have some ambience in my sound have to be so complicated? What happened to just dialing in a space like we used to be able to do with old hardware reverbs like my Ibanez SD1000? Heck, I could dial in a type, decay and density, along with a few other parameters, and get instant results. I find myself spending way too much time looking for the right space, time and other garbage that I lose time on the music itself. Sure, if I’m looking for medium sized wood room and know that it is there, I may dial it up and move on. However, for most ambiences, I can get away with a simple algorithmic reverb that I can make sound thick or thin to my liking. What do I care if it sounded like a plate or a hall if the track sounds like music? Or even more so, would you know or care if I stuck in a delay before the reverb and made it sound like an airplane hangar or bat cave? Do you know the difference between the various concert hall impulse responses? Do you know what an impulse response it? Do you care? I really don’t anymore.

Give me a simple reverb. If I can dial a great sound out of it without having to think of whether it sounds like a room or a hall or a plate, then what else do I really need? Like I said already, I want to make music. I don’t feel like being a programmer for certain rooms. I just want to plug in and play, and if it doesn’t sound like music, I’ll tweak it.

Okay, I’ve been a grumpy ol’ fart long enough… I need to make some music (yes, I programmed this to go up while I am sleeping – grumpy ol’ farts need their sleep too).

These days, I’m starting to thing that the more plug-ins I get for Logic, the worse off I am when it comes down to actually trying to make music. I find that I wind up playing more with the plug-ins, trying to find the “perfect” sound out of it, only to find that there is no perfect sound. There’s nothing magical that is going to become my inspiration for a song. I wind up with these plug-ins with interfaces that seems to resemble the console of a Boeing 747, and I find that I can’t do anything with them. Perhaps, you can call me old fashioned, having come from a hardware background, but I like a synthesizer plug-in to look like a synthesizer. Perhaps, that’s why I can use Propellerhead’s Reason very well. Everything looks familiar, right down to the hooking up cables in the back. I don’t need to think… I just make music with it.

Then there’s guitar… I can’t believe how I let myself get ruined by technology when it came to playing my guitar. All of these software amplifier plug-ins with hundreds of amps, cabinets, microphones, and stomp boxes. Heck, at first I thought i was in wonderland. I was playing for days with all of that virtual equipment. Was I making music with it? No! Heck, I was too busy trying to find the perfect amplifier setup. Well, I never found that perfect setup, because I was looking for that imperfect sound. The software amps sounded too perfect. What it was missing was the feeling that went with the sound. Sure, no one can tell the difference when your listening to it in a recording (and I made a couple of them). However, the challenge for me was getting it down into that recording stage. There was just something missing when I was playing my guitar through it. In fact, there were many things missing. There were things like tonality changes as you play, as well as feedback from the speakers.

Nonetheless, I gave up on software amplifiers and have gone back to hardware when recording guitar. Sure, it’s through a POD HD, and a tube-pre. You can argue with me that it is not an amplifier. However, it gives me both the tonality changes with my playing and it gives me feedback. To me, that’s what an amp does and when I record with it, I can now feel it. I know that recording it through my POD HD is final when it hits the computer, but who cares. I can never think of a time when I recorded my guitar through software that I needed to change my amplifier. If anything, it helps me to commit to a sound, as well as a song. The past few songs have been done this way, and I haven’t regretted it. I have less types of amplifier tones, but I find that I use very few tones as it is.

If anything, I want to play music, rather than feel like I have to be a programmer to make music. Freeing myself from this techno-yoke has allowed me to do just that, and I feel much better for it. I find that I am writing music these days. I’m willing to go as far as to believe that half of my stagnation was because i was ruined by technology.  That’s a place I don’t want to go back to. Playing music makes me feel good. Having my computer play most of it doesn’t make me feel good.