Hello champions,
So the album is done and dusty so I thought I'd sum up the last few days of mixing and mastering:
MIXY
We started in Folkestone, the only town where you can get away with beating someone up if you claim it was for artistic reasons. We sampled the local fish and chips and seafood bars and also mixed our album, quite intensively, while eating hob nobs. Oz had already gone and done a rough mix before we headed down so we just had to tell him to remove all the squealing guitar solos. In theory....in actuality there were no guitar solos in the first place so we spent 2 days agonising over whether the imperceptible change in volume of the glockenspiel was drowning out the steel pans or if the guitars would sound better if they were a bit more "y'know....sub tropical". At the end of the first day we went to Doug's parent's house, ate lots of olives, watched the rugby and mucked about with the cats. The next day pretty much the same thing happened but with different songs. We had our first ever completely split decision (this is what happens when you become a 4 piece!) over a really trivial part of O' Science, about whether the bit where we all make stupid noises was stupid enough. Turns out it was according to lady luck as we flipped a coin and the number of stupid noises was cut from 6 to 3 (sorry fans of stupid noises but there has to be a limit otherwise the album would've just been stupid noises (although some have argued that this is already the case (and with strong justifications))).
MASTERISH
No one knows how mastering makes everything sound better, all we know is that it does. Ben and Jamie travelled to Turan Audio to try and find out what mastering is, how it's done and what the decibel level of a space shuttle launch is. They found out the answer to just one of these questions. Tim Turan is the man though and between his stories of NASA trivia, hanging out with Radiohead and mastering pretty much all of our friend's bands he made the album sound flipping ace. This is also the stage where you sort out the song transitions too and these feature quite heavily on Motherwhale as there's pretty much no gaps until the 12th song. So there was plenty to do and it was lovely to hear it all being stitched together and start actually sounding like it only has in our heads up until now.
We'll slide out a couple of sneaky peeks over the next couple of days so keep your ears peeled and your carrots peeled.
Bencat and the aristocrats xxx
