Happy to report that the newest tune, Seduction, is finally wrapped up. I’ve received the mastered copies back from the engineer and it now plays at “commercial levels”. I’ve added it to the player above, but there’s a link below just in case it doesn’t appear in your browser. Turns out that you need to clear your “browser cache” whenever I post a new song into the playlist. Oh well…

Seduction Mastered Version

My mastering engineer, Brian Lucey, informed me that the mix I sent him was apparently an improvement from my previous tunes. Turns out that’s a good and bad thing because one one hand, he was able to get a better “sound level” out of Seduction; but on the other hand, it shows the need for improving (the mixes) on my prior tunes. This has been a typical outcome of my music journey – and I suspect that many traveling on a similar road experience this as well: Improvements reveal shortcomings in your prior work… So, do you go back and fix it, or just move on? My tendency, unfortunately, is to go back and fix things so I may take a detour and explore that before moving on to a new tune – we’ll see.

I credit a good portion of the so-called improvement to some relatively new gear, namely some NEW mix studio monitors (aka speakers). Again owed to Brian’s recommendation, I invested in a pair of hand-built Barefoot MM27s which are absolutely top of the line nearfield monitors even by professional standards. The difference has been remarkable as I can now produce a mix that is “transportable” across virtually any playing environment. There’s a whole science behind this challenge, but suffice it to say that achieving a transportable mix is an allusive yet foremost objective in music production. Most of it comes from experience, but you also need the right tools and a properly (acoustically) treated room. So I’ll leave that as a segway for an upcoming post to delve into that stuff a bit further.

Thank you to everyone for your feedback during the evolution of Seduction. It was fun to chronicle a project from beginning to end!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 9:44 am and is filed under My Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.