Small Adjustments, Major Impacts...

Back to the recording studio yesterday. We trekked over in a little blue car. Music on the radio. Windows rolled down. Blue sky day. Everything was fine and cool, good vibes all around. Still mixing songs. So close to the finish line. A few little details on songs to be adjusted. Mainly volumes on certain lines in songs, accents on guitars, a mystery extraneous noise, my partner has amazingly sensitive ears. She hears things no-one else can hear. With a little investigation, turns out she is almost always correct. "Something is going on." That is a fantastic good thing if you are trying make an album. Turns out the extraneous noise she heard was a brief flash of "string noise" from my acoustic guitar in one instrumental passage on one song. Not a critical flaw, we lowered the volume ever so slightly so it isn't distracting to the casual listener. That is assuming there will be any casual listeners. So far, it is just us two, and the mixing engineers that we have worked with that have heard these tracks, tracks we recorded many months ago now.  We have lived with these songs, these mixes, played them on many different devices: home stereos, computers, smart phones, in the open air, on high-quality audiophile headphones. We have 10 solid, completed tracks, not sure all of them will make the album, it's a close call. An 8 song album? 9? 10?  There is some back and forth about which tracks are essential to our vision and art. It seems so damn important to us. Trying to make an artistic statement. Every little decision seems important and decisive. What is included reflects on everything else, the same idea holds with what is excluded too. Heading back later this afternoon to finish up. Hopefully it will be our last day of mixing. One last song to review. Then it will be onto mastering. It's a process. Lots of work and attention to every last little detail. It is a little bit of concentrated madness. For sure. We really did "catch lightning in a bottle" when we recorded these songs with our band in January of 2023. Trying to present the music in the best way possible. Small adjustments have major impact. Just by raising a vocal slightly, the whole track suddenly comes alive. It is a strange, and wonderful sonic alchemy. And a lesson. I mean, maybe some of this seems obvious, but it is only obvious once you go through the process. And sometimes it really is all about the process.