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Interview

Home Studio Hairloss Pt 2

Next month: Medusa

When we last left Riley she had just brought a new soundcard to mix her CD......

The first thing I had to do was draw across the data into a new program that hooked up with my new soundcard. I had to bring each track in one at a time and hope that they would all line up.....fortunately they did! That is where the good luck ended.

Learning a new program took quite a while and files were flying everywhere and getting lost all over the place. I remember backing up all the data and then going to reload it only to find half the files missing. It turns out that the CD burner program shortened all the file names so that when I loaded it all back in, the music program wouldn't recognize it.

The worst thing about it all is that when I put all the 'fabo' effects on what I'd done, it all sounded awful...I mean seriously, mind numbingly, depressingly bad.

Thank God I hadn't spent my money mixing it in a traditional studio. I had no choice but to salvage what I could and start again where I couldn't. Some songs had virtually everything but the lead vocal pulled out from under them. Winnie's conga parts were now unusable except for the odd sampled section which I added to the new percussion beds that I built up. The original arrangement for 'Down the Mother's Track' was totally trashed but I kept Michael Bright's lead guitar and added licks from what he had originally done over the new arrangement.

My Friend Annie originally had sax as the soloing instrument which was replaced by Sigi's clarinet

My new program had such good resolution on the tempo that I thought I would be a fool not to use it, that's one of the reasons why so much was replaced.

Michael Bright played lead guitar on the song 'Down the Mother's Tack'

My Friend Annie

The other major problem was the noise factor. I recorded the whole CD with a $80 PZM mic. My new soundcard was incompatible with this mic so all the new additions where recorded at a low level which gave me headaches with noise. You would not believe the noise level on the original guitar track for Wonderland. The mixing facilities on the card were pretty sophisticated, so I was able to deal with it in the end.

The last hurdle was the mastering. The CD was mastered 5 times. The main issue was certain frequency's that were exaggerated due to the cheep mic fiasco.(Still cant afford a descent Mic!)

In the end, after much pulling of hair and buckets of asprin..it was done. I was finally happy with it. It's now 8 months since that time and I'm very happy with it...it was worth every minute of frustration, doubt and despair.