It’s been a long time since my last blog post; I’ve been doing other things. One of the things I’ve been doing is recording a new album, and I’m finally ready to pre-pre-announce it!
The players are top-notch: Cody Rhodes on drums, Terrence Brewer on guitar, and Ben Torres on tenor sax in addition to myself on Hammond organ. I had the pleasure of engineering the recording with Heidi Trefethen. We did the recording in two days in my home studio on July 8th and 9th, and in the few months since then I’ve been working on mixing it (when I wasn’t out of town on an awesome vacation trip — but that’s another story). Because of vacation travel and other demands on my time, the mixing has felt like the opposite of the tracking sessions: tracking was two pretty full days wall-to-wall, whereas mixing has been about a million little 15-minute sessions at each opportunity I find to work on it. That’s the peril of deciding to mix your album yourself while you have a lot of other stuff to do, I guess! But it’s been fun to discover what we got on those tracks, and I feel like it would be hard to hand the joy of that discovery over to someone else. That’s why I’m mixing it myself, just like I did Big Shoes.
The good news? The new album sounds awesome! I’ve done a bunch of things differently from what I did on Big Shoes and though I still like the sound of Big Shoes I tried a different approach mixing the new album, and I’m enjoying the contrast.
The bad news? It’s going to take a while to get it done and released. Big Shoes taught me quite a bit about the process, and one of the biggest things I learned is not to hurry too much. There’s still a lot to do, and luckily I’ll have help with most of it. But even with help, it will take some time. Mastering, CD jacket design, CD manufacturing, planning a concert or two to celebrate the release — none of those things is started yet, and to be honest it also makes sense to hold off a bit while the winter holidays go by, otherwise everyone would be distracted by Christmas shopping when they should be paying attention to my album release, attending my release concert(s), and so forth.
Once the album is out, I might write a super nerdy post or two about how it’s engineered and mixed, maybe comparing it to the approach I took with Big Shoes. There’s a lot to say about the performance, too, but the liner notes will hopefully cover that. Oh, and that reminds me! I need to figure out where the liner notes will come from this time!
Luckily the hard work is done; now it’s just a matter of doing a million easy things to get this little item out the door!