Pre-Mixing Report

Fellow Travelers,

I have been working on pre-mixes of the songs listed on this site. Things are coming along quite nicely. I'm very happy with the new Ahab mix (okay - I was a bit over zealous on the orchestral deep bass track and need to back it down). As Billy gently put it in an email to me:

"I'm not sure if it's my sound system but the bass on both mixes sounded a little hot. I could be wrong, I'll try to listen on another system but I just wanted to mention it to you. Did you bump-up the bass at all? "

I think I'm finished with "A Song for Starbuck" because I don't want to burden it with too much instrumentation. As Pete put it in one of his emails to me:

"hey Tony....it works for me is the best way I can put it. Can you take it into a whole other direction and add layers of guitar or various "colors" of orchestration? Absolutely....but it's a very simple and direct song and i think that both of those qualities would be wastefully compromised if you did that. I like it as is. Not all songs need an array of leads or little melodic trinkets to make them sound complete. And oftentime, within the context of everything else, an arrangement such as this one can be a welcomed change."

I agree with Pete. I'm trying to be very careful not to put too much stuff in the pot, so to speak.

Billy's guitar work is perfect for this song. He's also given me several versions of his guitar work on "Ishmael and the Sea". I'm currently cutting and pasting them - oh and reversing them, of course! So much fun! "Ishmael is a tough song for me because I want it to be very open and uncluttered. So we'll see what happens.

I'm going to ask Scott Harris to play keyboards on "Elijah", as my fairly pathetic piano part just doesn't cut it.

Queequeg is giving me headaches, for some reason- not the song, mind you, but the export and transfer of files to Billy's FTP site. For some reason when he receives the drum tracks (right out of Garageband, by the way), they import in fragments. Who knows? I'll have to check to see what's going on tonight when I export them once again.