The Live Record is Finished

It has been a very long six weeks. As I have mentioned in prior postings, I have been hard at work producing my band, Tung N' Groove's promotional CD, which I recorded live at a recent gig.

Now, the recording isn't the only thing that has been occupying my waking hours, but I would think that it is likely one of the more exciting endeavors I have been recently involved in.

The last time I wrote an entry about the recording, I was ranting about a critical mistake I had made in the recording process, rendering the bass drum track unusable. In order to save the recording, I employed a technique called sample replacement, essentially replacing all the bass drum hits with pre-recorded samples. It was an awfully long process, since I did it manually, and took me almost 20 hours to complete. In other words, three full work days.

I spent nearly the same amount of time into editing the audio. This can mean a great many things in the audio production world, but for the most part -- in this recording -- it meant stripping out unnecessary audio regions. This usually means background noise, hums, clicks, and undesirable frequencies can be filtered out before they cause a problem. This in effect can clean up the audio you hear in the end result.

Once the heavy lifting was completed, I began mixing the recording. I explained the process in an earlier post, though it's a little more involved that "making every instrument find its' place in the mix". Entire volumes have been written about the subject, and I hate to bore my readers with theory. In layman's terms: "I just turn the knobs until it sounds good to me."

What sound advice. It's like saying the strategy to winning a hockey game is to score more goals than your opponent.

It took some time, but last weekend, I finally managed to have the album mixed. I promptly moved the project into the mastering phase, where I put the finishing touches on the album. It actually took me two attempts, but I think I got it to a point where I can be happy.

So how does it sound? Have a listen for yourself.