colleen

We have finally just agreed on the final master version (V3.0) of LP8 with Antony Ryan @redredpaw @the_isan_workshop. I’ve had to modify 15 of the 22 tracks – some several times (photo shows my boys during those last work sessions) – and have just decided to drop a track that was not up to the album standard.

So what happened exactly, given that when I send my “finished” tracks for mastering I don’t exactly anticipate to work on them *that much*? It’s been a case of psychological-factors-meeting-technical-factors… I work on my own, it’s my thing, with all the limitations it entails, but all the joy too: I’m not technically trained, but I love learning and have taught myself so much over the years, with this approach allowing me to make records that feel 100% mine.
With this album, I became fully absorbed by synthesis, and in terms of purely technical matters, well, over the past year I had encountered and solved a couple of hurdles along the way: bought a silent desktop computer just for music-making since my previous laptop made *terrible* noise, finally changed my DAW from T-Rex Acid to awesome Reaper when Acid started to severely malfunction after a Windows update, and also sent my Space Echo for a full revision to its daddies @soundgasltd last year.
When I really started to record this summer, I DID NOT WANT ANY MORE PROBLEMS. So I pretended there weren’t any. I heard there was an annoying sizzling noise coming from my beloved @moogsynthesizers MF-104M Analog delay, but I hoped this would “blend”/disappear in the song itself. Considering that the songs using the MF-104M delay on the record are made up of – roughly – 60-70% MF-104M sound, how the hell did I think this was going to happen?
And sure enough: the first thing that Antony said after hearing the music was in relation to that sizzling noise. The second thing was in relation to something else I had noticed, not a technical problem as such, but a sonic consequence of my choices on some songs: really noticeable tape hiss presence.
TBC…

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