Mixing Bowl

Staying up all night Sunday really messed with my sleep patterns, and I'm just starting to get back to some sort of semblance of normality. Kind of.

Wow, so I want to acknowledge everyone's thoughts/comments/questions since The Big Launch the other night. I'm really grateful to all of you who wrote. I've also changed the blog settings here to allow anonymous comments, sorry that I didn't realize that I needed to manually set that up. I don't know from Blogger. I guess I'm learning, though.

So thanks so much to everyone who has downloaded "Help Is On The Way" and hopefully enjoyed it. I've gotten lots of notes and well-wishes and a lot of incredulous reactions along the lines of, You're doing WHAT? I got an email from Beller that said, "YOU ARE FUCKING CRAZY."

He's not wrong, I guess.

The reality of being "IN this" thing, rather than just talking about it has really hit now. I've been spending the week getting some completed tunes mixed, so that I can really attack the writing aspect for the rest of the month. I started this with a little "cushion" of finished tunes (like, 6) and I'm determined to always have at least some safety zone. But even in the weeks where I've been working on stuff ahead of time, I've been stopping after getting songs tracked and not continuing to the mixing stage, because frankly, mixing scares me. And I was lucky in that on the first song, Pete Johnston was mixing it, so I didn't have to worry about it. No more such luck, as I'm mixing the next ones until we get another HZ track ready to go. Yesterday and today I've been mixing "Squandered All My Time" and I think I've got one that's good to go. I've pestered both Pete and Darin via IM and email for pointers and tips and they've helped me immeasurably.

Oh, I should mention that Darin mastered "Help Is On The Way" and time permitting, he will be mastering the upcoming songs as well. That makes me feel better from a quality standpoint, knowing that SOMEBODY with actual "ears" will be making a pass on the songs before they go out to you fine people. I expect to be mixing tomorrow and probably Friday as well, and then I'll almost certainly be jumping back on the writing horse because I'll be getting frantic by then.

Looks like I'll be carving some time to make more videos, as well - that first one got a lot of positive feedback, and I think it would be fun to answer some of the questions that came in about HIOTW and the project in general in a video. Hopefully I won't have to stay up all night to make it either, since now I know a little about how Final Cut works. Just enough to be dangerous, anyway, and that's really all I care about.