Mastering, Mixing & Songs

I am the mastering engineer on the newly announced Library Catalog Series from Asthmatic Kitty.  I’ve already finished a few of these records and they’re pretty amazing.  Additional info and MP3s here.

My uncle Tim Campbell is making very high quality microphone capsules.  Check them out at Campbell Transmitter.  He’s also the guy who originally designed the birds on the fretboards of PRS guitars.

The Soft Drugs are opening for Joe Lally and Glorytellers at the Middle East Upstairs on June 10.  Joe used to be in Fugazi and Glorytellers features Geoff and Gavin from Karate.

In the next few days I’ll be wiring up my new API 550m mastering EQ’s.  These are a bit rare and totally awesome.

I’m back on Twitter. You can follow me at twitter.com/twwalsh.

As it turns out, I’m extremely picky! The Obsidian is an amazing unit, especially for mixing. However, it’s not quite flexible enough and its metering is not really precise enough for a mastering application. So I’m swapping it out for an API 2500 which will hopefully be in the rack for quite a while.

A couple weeks ago I put a little band together to record a cover song.  Mark Mulcahy is a talented songwriter who recently suffered a personal loss, and a bunch of artists are recording his songs for a tribute album.  I asked Geoff Farina to play guitar and Ken Maiuri to play bass.  I played drums and sang.  We headed over to Scott Craggs’ Old Colony loft studio in Southie on a Saturday and banged out the tracks, and I mixed it down in the basement of the Tower of Song.  It came out great.  I’ll let you know when I have details about the release.  It was fun to work with Geoff, Ken and Scott, and I’d like to do more of it in the future.

I worked with web designer & developer Nick Robinson to build the new website for the Billions booking agency.  It’s an extensive site with over 200 band pages, a Wordpress blog, an average of 1,000 concert dates that auto-update every day, and much more.  I did all of the back-end PHP and MySQL development, designed the data structures and integrated with their Filemaker concert date database.  Check it out.

I mixed and mastered David Bazan’s new album, Curse Your Branches, which will come out on Barsuk on August 25, 2009.  I also played bass on one song.  It was a really fun record to work on, and the process was more fruitful and more collaborative than anything we did together in Pedro the Lion.  I hope you like it.