Quote:
Originally Posted by blim  The best sounding track on my project took a total of probably ten hours to write, arrange, play, record, mix, and master.
On the other hand, I spent probably close to one-hundred hours working on just the mixing and mastering of the track that sounds the worst. |
Yup.
Not every song I've labored over long and hard has been a dog (or a dog by
my standards
) by any means... but it's
so easy to work the life out of a track.
I've seen so many bands do it in the studio. They bust the bank making things 'perfect' -- perfectly lifeless. Admittedly, I'm coming from a different place than most REs... I came
into studio work from out of the first days of punk and was torn between my notion that I wanted to capture
real, live music (at least in feel) and the all-too-understandable desire to get better and better at my craft.
An important lesson for me was -- at a time when I didn't have all that much money -- I took a track by a band I recorded for a punk compilation into the mix studio on my own dime and spent
five hours trying to drill it in to where I kept hoping I could take it. I walked out beat, unable to get it where I wanted, and a lot poorer. And
then the friggin' label stiffed me on the whole project. So it was a multi-layered lesson. You bet.