Early Hours Toward Betterment

I've been on an exploratory venture to make my vocals better.

I wish I could sing like Johnny Cash. If I could sing like him, all my problems would be at an end.

But I can't. So I've been trying to tidy up the vocals in, say, Ice Maiden, by singing earlier in the morning so that if I maybe hit a low note it'll be loud enough that once we tune it up it'll sound right. Or not. My big problem is in my lower range. Maybe I should have sorted all that out before recording the songs, sure. But we didn't.

So here we are.

This picture is from the Internet. Do you remember practicing this damn thing? I sure do.

I know that artists are all about saying that their latest project is their best and favorite, but this Tyrannosaurus Mouse album really is my favorite album. Everything from all my earlier albums is learned, and stuff I've never done before is executed. This is my first album using no click-track too. I'm so glad to have Lou and Ethan onboard -- they're such a fantastic rhythm section. The record breathes nicely. The band sounds positively unhinged -- but in a good way.

What I would like to do is to mult down all the guitar tracks to a stereo pair, mult down all the bass tracks to a mono track, and maybe even mult the kick and stare tracks so that there's only one of each rather than two of each (inner and outer kick, top and bottom snare) as there is now.

The reason I want to do this is that when I eventually have some money to mix this album I want as few tracks as possible to make mixing easier. The trick is that if I screw up the mults and premixes in my little studio I'll end up making more work for the mix at the end. So it's sort of half of one and six dozen of the other. Or something.