The Ether Family Presents... A Blog

John and I spent the day reviewing the songs we tracked for How To Get Lost In A Time Consuming Ego Trip - Part 3 of 4. These masters were from early 2006. God. FIVE years??! Yes.

The sessions were kinda hurriedly thrown together at the time because we were in the process of moving. I was in a rush to get as much down as we could since I knew I’d be without a studio for a while (that “while” ended up being a couple of years). I figured we could overdub in the meantime, but that didn’t really happen.

Four or five of the songs are pretty strong or at least have bits we can keep. The others were either weak tunes to begin with or don’t really fit the narrative. Those will probably get finished off as b-sides.

And then there are about a dozen or so demos for songs I’ve written potentially for the album that we need to weed through. The remaining tracks we’ll write anew.

I’ve felt very scattered with this whole How To Get Lost… project since late 2004 — basically around the time we finished the tracking for Part 2. Once I got to the mixing phase of that record, I was never quite happy. Things started loosing steam from that point forward. It wasn’t that the songs weren’t strong (I think they are some of our best) or that they weren’t performed well. I just couldn’t find the modus operandi for approaching the mixes.

HTGL Part 1 had a very specific sound. I was hyper-focused on it at the time and must have spent months perfecting it. I mixed 80% of it through a tiny mono auratone speaker right under my chin… popping up to full range monitors and panning in stereo only at the very end. The sound had a retro innocence to symbolize looking back at childhood and early teens. There was a unpolished grittiness to represent naiveté. And there was just this overall feeling of earthiness that I can’t really explain… but, I hear it.

Now that I get ready to do the final mixes for Part 2, I have to solidify its sound. The tone has to be one of untethered freedom, reckless abandon and identity confusion (it’s based on college years afterall… the getting lost). I want a sense of hovering miles above the ground. Overall, it needs to sound like air with atmospheric ambience. For this record, I’ve always planned for reverbs and delays to be treated as instruments themselves… taking as important a role as any other sound. But I also don’t want it to be your typical washed-out verby record.

I have ideas for how to pull this off. I may end up printing a lot of very stylized reverbs, delays and effects — then mix the damn thing backwards. Literally reverse all the tracks and mix in reverse so I can focus on tones and clearly distinguish the instrument resonance from the effects. It’s an idea from Paul Stavrou’s book “Mixing with your mind” (which my buddy Adam McIntyre kindly lent me). Stav points out how this process, while weird, eliminates the distraction of transient attack and lets you focus on blending these other-worldly tones. The attack (punch) is the last thing you hear, and it quickly gets sucked into a vacuum of rising resonance, so you tend not to over-compensate by smoothing out the hits. I’m hoping it helps me get the dry punch of being suspended in air while allowing the background to be smeared with earthy ambience. It’s worth a shot. At least it’ll be a fun experiment. I’m kinda psyched to see how compression and limiting behave backwards too.

And then there’s the remixing for the 10th anniversary of Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, which I’m running behind on due to some computer issues over the last month. But the few tracks I’ve done so far are a dramatic improvement over the original mixes. It’s tremendous to be mixing on an analog console again, especially since I essentially have unlimited access to fantastic emulations of classic audio gear on the digital side of things. It’s the best of both worlds. Ten extra years of experience is pretty significant too though. I was still fairly green at mixing in 2000. So, hopefully that record will be wrapped up and mastered in February so we can get it out. There are a ridiculous amount of bonus tracks. 15, I think. Probably overkill. But, it’s not like we’re forcing people to listen to this stuff. :)