Well, it’s a long story. I thought it would be an interesting exercise to put down a summary of what has happened in my music “career” since Blue Laws, 9 years ago. I released my last full-length album of songs, Blue Laws, in 2001. Since then, there have been 3 EPs - 2002’s Pollensongs, 2006’s The Soft Drugs In Moderation, and 2008’s The Soft Drugs Get Back (Side A), as well as my contributions to David Bazan’s records and technical assistance or production on hundreds of others.
This is something that Frank Padellaro and I wrote up several years ago (ca. 2002) about the process of making Blue Laws, which came out in April 2001.
I mixed and mastered a new live album by the Bazan band. It was recorded by Matt Barnhart at Electrical Audio in Chicago on October 28, 2009. There’s sound clips and more info at Bazan’s website. It will be available for pre-order today.
How We Spend Our Days came out ten years ago this month. To celebrate, you can now download all of my releases for a price of your choosing at Bandcamp.
The majority of my work is mastering work, which I enjoy. However, I’m seeing a trend which I want to address. Many artists have small budgets, which I can certainly appreciate, being an independent artist myself. A lot of these bands (appropriately) attempt to minimize the amount of money that they spend on a recording. It does seem logical, then, to do as much of it themselves as possible, and to hand it off to a professional mastering engineer to “finish”. But what they may not realize is that the recording/mix is 90% of the sound, and the mastering job is 10%.
I finally got around to picking up the Abbey Road TG Mastering Pack, which contains two incredibly musical EQs.
This might be a first for me - Curse Your Branches is charting in the Billboard 200.
You can view my notes detailing my work on David Bazan’s Curse Your Branches at his website. Feel free to contact me if you have any specific questions.
An acquaintance of mine, Mark Mulcahy, suffered a great personal loss when his wife died suddenly earlier this year, leaving him to raise his twin infant daughters alone. He is a respected songwriter, and many artists have come together to cover his songs and release a benefit album. I’m honored to be among them. I recorded “I Hate To Needy Need You” with the help of Geoff Farina on guitar and Ken Maiuri on bass, keyboards and backing vocals. You can hear Thom Yorke’s (Radiohead) song at the following link, and the rest of the details are below. Michael Stipe (REM), Frank Black (Pixies) and many other artists are in there. There are 41 artists/songs. Please consider supporting Mark, my heart goes out to him and his daughters. [click to continue…]
