it's dangerous to go alone! take this. (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} loss4words) wrote,@ 2009-06-09 17:11:00 |
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finished
Yesterday I got the final mixes back from our producer. I listened through them and everything was exactly what I wanted it to be. The record was Finished. I've been doing this for ten years and I've never finished a record before. This sounds like a pretty strange thing to say for someone who's produced and released three CDs, but it's true.
The question of when a record is 'finished' is not as straight forward as it sounds. In a perfect world where we all have all the studio time that we want, all the equipment that we want, and do everything as perfectly as we'd like first time, this would seem to be a pretty simple idea, but it isn't. Even if you do have all the resources that you need, when do you stop editing? More vocal harmonies? Delay, reverb, chorus? Pan the guitars more, suck the high-end out of that kick drum a bit more? At what point do you sit back and say to yourself, 'I am finished'? It's something that you just feel, when the sound in front of you matches or surpasses what you heard in your head when you went in. That's difficult because the recording process itself always changes songs in itself, as you realise that the ideas you had don't sound like you thought they would, or the technical process finds itself suggesting other parts, extra content, new techniques. What you envisaged may not be anything like what you've ended up deciding to create in the mean time. And that's assuming everything you do goes well - when it doesn't, you're left working around tracking mistakes, poor microphone choices, questionable singing, equipment failure and just not using gear that's good enough to produce the sounds you wanted. When do you stop trying to compensate for the things that went wrong and accept the quality you've ended up with?
I had always thought that it was theoretically possible to reach a stage of knowing that a record was finished, it had just never happened to me before. Every other recording that I've done, I've either run short of time, money, equipment, skill or a combination of all of the above, and at that point, had to accept whatever I had in front of me at that point as the finished product. It has never been my decision - the choice was made for me.
This record .. is Finished. I can't begin to describe what that feels like.
crossposted from thismyresolve.blogspot.com
Yesterday I got the final mixes back from our producer. I listened through them and everything was exactly what I wanted it to be. The record was Finished. I've been doing this for ten years and I've never finished a record before. This sounds like a pretty strange thing to say for someone who's produced and released three CDs, but it's true.
The question of when a record is 'finished' is not as straight forward as it sounds. In a perfect world where we all have all the studio time that we want, all the equipment that we want, and do everything as perfectly as we'd like first time, this would seem to be a pretty simple idea, but it isn't. Even if you do have all the resources that you need, when do you stop editing? More vocal harmonies? Delay, reverb, chorus? Pan the guitars more, suck the high-end out of that kick drum a bit more? At what point do you sit back and say to yourself, 'I am finished'? It's something that you just feel, when the sound in front of you matches or surpasses what you heard in your head when you went in. That's difficult because the recording process itself always changes songs in itself, as you realise that the ideas you had don't sound like you thought they would, or the technical process finds itself suggesting other parts, extra content, new techniques. What you envisaged may not be anything like what you've ended up deciding to create in the mean time. And that's assuming everything you do goes well - when it doesn't, you're left working around tracking mistakes, poor microphone choices, questionable singing, equipment failure and just not using gear that's good enough to produce the sounds you wanted. When do you stop trying to compensate for the things that went wrong and accept the quality you've ended up with?
I had always thought that it was theoretically possible to reach a stage of knowing that a record was finished, it had just never happened to me before. Every other recording that I've done, I've either run short of time, money, equipment, skill or a combination of all of the above, and at that point, had to accept whatever I had in front of me at that point as the finished product. It has never been my decision - the choice was made for me.
This record .. is Finished. I can't begin to describe what that feels like.
crossposted from thismyresolve.blogspot.com
