Tag Archives: mixing

News

Put the kazoo down, man! We’re producing here!

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They say you go to war with the army you have. (I don’t know who “they” are, but they seem to know all about it.) It’s the same with making an album, friends. You make the record with the tools available to you. When Bach made his first album, all he had was an organ. Bet you didn’t know that.

As I’m certain I’ve said before, Big Green typically makes their albums using the equivalent of stone knives and bear skins. Have you met our production budget? Let me introduce you to a little guy named ZERO. And I don’t mean Zero Mostel – I mean nothing, zip, zilch, nada, bupkis. That said, there’s enough to afford a second-hand kazoo, a discarded grade school violin, and at least one maraca.

The tools at hand

The first question is always a practical one – do we have what we need to get started? Maybe yes, possibly no. Sometimes the tools are mismatched with the project. Picture a butter knife in the hand of a hard-rock sculptor. Not that recording and mixing an album is anything like sculpting or painting. God, no! We don’t wear any smocks, and our hands are clean as a whistle. (Trouble is, the whistle is filthy as hell. And that kazoo is disgusting!)

Hey, look …. we’re making modern music. You know – the kind the kids really dig the most. Songs that feature electronic pluck-string instruments, plastic keyboards, and invisible drums. Of course, when I say “modern”, I don’t mean music like what Captured By Robots records and performs. But then we are not oppressed by malevolent automatons set on enslaving us against our will. That kind of thing can kill your buzz super easy.

The show so far

Despite the limitations of our budget and our instrumentation (to say nothing of our musicianship … or lack of same), we’ve come quite a long way on the current project. How long, you may ask? Glad you asked. As I’ve reported previously, we have recorded all of the songs and are now deep in the Pon Farr of mixing. The musicians amongst you will know that mixing is an iterative process – in other words, taking multiple passes to get to the “it” that you’re looking for. (Ergo, it-erative.) How long will the blood fever last? No man can say.

Joe attempting to take the lime back out of the coconut.
Joe attempting to take the lime back out of the coconut.

I can tell you that we’ve done preliminary mixes on about 19 songs as of this writing. We have a few more to plow through, then we’ll assess, review, mark the suckers up, and take another pass. Early on, I set up a spreadsheet to keep tabs on our progress. I of course abandoned the thing within about three weeks, as I HATE being organized. Everyone knows Big Green craves chaos. At least, everyone who knows Big Green …. which amounts to almost no one. But I digress.

Next stop: stopping!

Aside from mixing and mastering, there are a few details we need to tie up. Little things like coming up with a name for the project, developing album art, etc. With us, the biggest challenge is knowing when to stop. My guess is that the work will end kind of abruptly, sometime this Fall, and we’ll drop the album like a load of bricks. Either that or we’ll put it in a time capsule and leave it for future generations to ponder.

What’s your guess? Let us know at info@big-green.net!

News

What kind of monster is it – Gumby or Ghidorah?

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Hey – any of you out there remember Milton the Monster? You know, the cartoon show about the big-hearted Frankenstein-like creature that … um … well … talked like Jim Neighbors and … oh, ask your mother!

Well, brother Matt and I find ourselves kind of reviving the role of Professor Weirdo as we continue our work on the upcoming Big Green album (our fourth, by the way, and the first one in more than a decade). As you will see from the intro to Milton the Monster (if you can stand listening to it), we too are struggling with the question of how much tincture of tenderness we should add to the mix. Milton’s theme lays the problem out pefectly:

Six drops of the essence of terror
Five drops of sinister sauce
When the stirring’s done, may I lick the spoon?
Of course, hah hah! Of course!

Now for the tincture of tenderness
But I must use only a touch
For without a touch of tenderness
It might destroy me!
Oops, too much!

Okay, so … this time around we’re a little light on the essence of terror. And we left the sinister sauce out in the rain a little too long. And as Matt tried to add a touch of tenderness, well … I bumped his elbow and the whole damn thing poured into the mix. Damn it all!

Sentimental jerk ass

This, of course, begs the question – is Big Green going soft and sentimental in its old age? Well, that question begs an answer: Hell no, man! We’ve ALWAYS been sentimental. Ask anybody who likes us. And if you can’t find anyone who likes us, then you’re just like everybody else we know. And we HATE people like that!

Seriously, think about it – what is I Hate Your Face if not a sentimental song? There’s a lot of sentiment in that sucker. Sure, maybe not the Gumby kind of sentiment, but more the Ghidorah kind. In any case, you can expect a whole lot of sentiment in our next album. That’s my personal guarantee: a sentimental monster.

Knob-twiddling our way forward

As I’ve said previously, we’ve got a lot of tweaking ahead of us on this project. We’ll be pushing sliders, twiddling knobs, occasionally pulling sliders (but mostly pushing) and plugging things into other things. I will be wrestling computers like a live thing, swearing at them bitterly as they fail and fail again. But (and this is important) we are making progress, completing our first swipe on about one third of the songs.

We will keep you all posted on how the snail is faring as it climbs Mount Fuji. One way or the other, new music will be coming your way in the foreseeable future. Whether it’s the kind that makes Gumby happy or provokes the wrath of Ghidorah, only time will tell.

News, Recording

It’s the time of the season for mixing

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Damn, it’s hot out there. Hot enough to boil a monkey’s bum, as Monty Python used to say in a mock-Aussie accent. Mind if I call you Bruce, just to avoid confusion?

Well, it is, after all, summer in the northern hemisphere, which means balmy weather for the lot of us. But for your friends in Big Green, this year the solstice means that the season for mixing has arrived. Yes, brother Matt (a.k.a. “Mr. Ears”) has left the premises to keep a keen eye on his Peregrine Falcon charges … but not before recording his final tracks on our upcoming album, titled [INSERT WORKING TITLE HERE]. After two years of tracking, it’s time to start pushing those faders. (And, of course, pulling them occasionally.)

The job ahead: hard as f#ck

Make no mistake, we have a big project ahead of us: making sense of between 20 – 25 new recordings and arranging them in the general shape of what is still somehow called an “album”. But hey, Big Green has faced challenges before. Remember when we were almost captured by Captured by Robots? No? Well, perhaps I imagined that. Nevertheless, it hasn’t always been an easy road for us. Sometimes it’s uphill, sometimes down, but there are always plenty of potholes and no freaking shoulder. (Not mention the fact that it’s a toll road.)

Getting back to mixing, we try to keep things in perspective. Like all modern DAWs, ours has a virtually endless number of tracks and tools to work with. And yet, our favorite albums are mostly from the analog four, eight, and sixteen-track era. Multitrack recording was mucho expensive in those days, and most non-famous bands had zero access to it. In the 1980s, we got into a proper studio maybe three or four times total; the rest of the time we were bouncing takes between stereo cassette machines while playing kazoos into live mics. (Ah, those were the days.)

Placing the lime inside the coconut

Anyway, despite the distinct technological advances we now enjoy that weren’t available in the 1960s, we rely heavily on our musical forebears for inspiration. In other words, if they twiddled a dial a certain way to get a certain effect, that’s good enough for us. If they put a speaker and a mic in a big closet to get reverb, well …. maybe we won’t do that, but perhaps we should. The one thing they did that we won’t do under any circumstances is work super hard. Those are our principles. And if you don’t like them, we have other principles. (Shout out to Groucho.)

Now, that doesn’t mean that we want to imitate the previous generations. I mean, there’s no point in putting the lime in the coconut again, right? That’s been done. We have to break new ground, like any other band. Maybe put the plumb in the artichoke, then mix them all up. (See illustration.)

Unpredictable prognostications

Okay, I’m not going to be irresponsible enough to predict when this album is going to be finished, released, etc. All I can tell you is that [INSERT WORKING TITLE HERE] is fully recorded and on its way to completion. Looking into my magic crystal mixing bowl, I see a Fall release on the horizon. Fall of what year? No man can say, but Fall is a good bet. TO THE MIXER!

Usual Rubbish

Mixology.

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Why does it rattle so much? Is that the low end putting out all that noise? Hmmmm … well, there’s only one thing for it. Grease. Lots of grease.

Oh, hi. As is so often my affectation, I will behave as if you just came upon me in a coffee shop or squatting down on the curbside, changing a flat tire. Of course, neither of those things is true in this particular universe, but sometimes we like to act as though we’re interacting on a more personal level and not merely connecting via that series of tubes known as the internet. Okay … that’s a long way of saying, welcome, once again, to Hammer Mill Days, the Big Green blog, where we’re liable to burn half a column just saying hi.  Uh … hi.

We’re at the mixing stage of our current project. What project is that, you may ask? (And well you may.) It’s the next musical episode of Ned Trek, of course, and we’ve been working on a raft of eight songs designed to keep the plot moving forward. Matt and I have been hacking away at these songs for better than six months now, and we’re finally getting to the mixing stage. High time, too. We learned long ago that slow doesn’t necessarily mean good. So if we’re moving slowly, it’s not for goodness’s sake.

Let's get a little more guitar in there.

Mixing a Big Green project is different from most other mixing jobs. We have a peculiar approach to the process, as you might imagine. First we find a stand mixer, like one of those Kitchen Aide thingys you see in yupster kitchens of the 1990s. Then we drop the instruments in one by one, keeping the rotors going at one-quarter speed. Once everything has been dropped in, you add a pint of black coffee and switch the mixer on high. Fair warning – your music is going to slosh out of the bowl and splatter all over your kitchen … I mean, recording studio. Pay it no mind!  Think of the sacrifices made so willingly by those artists who came before you. They didn’t even HAVE electric mixers … they had to do it all by hand, with a FORK. Think about THAT for a minute or two.

Anyway. when you’re done mixing, you pour the album into cordial glasses and serve while it’s still foamy. Then you wait for the accolades to come drifting in. We’re ready, people … are you ready for some rock and roll?