trybalfish
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do you ever really listen to your music anymore?
Hey everyone I just wanted to start a little "fun/non thinking" thread Are we ever happy with our mixes? I mean REALLY happy. It seems almost an endless thing...achieving that final mix. the hi-hats are too harsh. Damn..that bass line should have been louder. Why is that 3rd vocal harmony muffled in the mix. I could go on. Im sure you all could too. I guess our jobs at mixing is just getting the song as close to perfect as we can..at least to the point that WE can accept it. I find myself not even enjoying the actual song after awhile. Instead Im too busy ripping apart my own mix. where as friends or the average listener is like...."whats your problem?..that song sounds GREAT to me!" Maybe its not worth spending countless hours just trying to get every little thing eq'd perfectly and sitting in the mix right where you want it. I recorded in a studio down in atlanta, Ga. where the engineers told me horror stories about having to autotune the main vocals on ( i wont mention the famous bands name) every song. They actually spent weeks just going thru every little vocal line word for word to make sure it was 100% perfectly in tune! crazy? well..probably, but thats my point..Do we spend too much time tweaking things, where joe public wouldnt know the difference? It's a shame we cant find a community web site that we could all upload one sonar bundle and have others take shots at mixing it.or something. though they are HUGE files (yes..this is what happens when I dont get enough sleep) sigh trybal
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BlindDog
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RE: do you ever really listen to your music anymore?
May 10, 05 9:43 AM
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Am I happy with my mixes? Generally, yeah. Could they be better? Sure, each mix I do is better than the last one and I'm looking forward to the next one. I've realized that if I spend time looking back on the past I might lose sight of the future, so what's done is done, I've learned, so I can move on to whatever is next with the lessons learned. During the mix, if I find myself tiring of the song, it's time to take a break for however long it takes to get back into the groove. If the producer can't (or won't?) groove, the song won't either.
-Kevin Accidents "happen". Success, however, is planned and executed.
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ohhey
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RE: do you ever really listen to your music anymore?
May 10, 05 10:24 AM
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I know what you mean. I've been working on some of my mixes for 10 years or more. However, I can say they are getting better.. LOL  If that even matters at this point. When I finish the CD (or what ever media exists by the time it's done) I'm going to call the first one "New Old Stock" just as an inside joke. It's bad when there have been two Boston albums put out by the time you get yours done. I enjoy the process of learning to mix and learning the new tools and methods. The tracking has been done for years on about 63 of my songs so I don't do much of that and I want to get back to recording some new songs, but for now all I have time for is to do some mixing in Sonar at night before I go to bed. I try to tell myself that if I did this as my day job I could get much better at it and trun out product a lot quicker but that may not be true. Studio people need work too and if they can get paid to do hours of autotune and DAW work then I am happy for them. You also have to remember that music is a lasting record for the artist and some want it to pass the test of time. That may explain why they are so picky. Also more folks listen with headphones now so it has to be right.
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trybalfish
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RE: do you ever really listen to your music anymore?
May 10, 05 10:45 AM
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hahaha too funny with the boston references. I wonder if THEY took so long because of tom Sholz getting his gazillion gtr tracks JUST right. lol I have to agree though.... whats done is done. and your mixes will never be perfect. Im sure no -one ever think that theirs is. And I have definitly learned so much as time goes on. From my own mistakes and from great input on here. I think its just funny that we as musicians are always trying to perfect ourselves, when the avg listener doesnt know the difference between a bass and a guitar. or my favorite..... How did you play all those instruments on your song at the same time?? that one is priceless. But true that the listening public just wants to hear a good song that stays with them.
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dcasey
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RE: do you ever really listen to your music anymore?
May 10, 05 11:17 AM
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I know exactly what you mean. It's hard for me to do the necessary context switching between being the songwriter, singer, musician, producer, and engineer. I've been doing this for many years, and I have songs that other people love - but I can't listen to them anymore. I suspect that when you wear all the hats you are less forgiving of any aspect of a song; the arrangement, the performance, the mix, and the mastering. I know I am, and it makes for a long and arduous process at times. I dig Sonar, P5, and the multitude of plug-ins that I use, but in some respects I miss the 4 & 8 track tape days (yes I’m dating myself). Back in the day we had to record & bounce, record & bounce, record & bounce – you learned to accept what was on tape because most of the time you couldn’t go back. Having 24, 48 or more tracks to work with is both a blessing and a curse – you can sit and noodle on this stuff until fatigue, doubt, self deprecation, and hatred sets in. I would say that if you are doing this as a hobby or if you are working on projects that have some slack time – get up and walk away from the DAW from time to time. Stay away for a day or two if you can. Many of us do this because we enjoy making music – turning it into another job or taking the fun out of it defeats the purpose. I fully understand the quest for perfection, but sometimes we need to raise our give-a-#@%! factor. Lay it down and move on! Good luck. Dan
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SteveJL
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RE: do you ever really listen to your music anymore?
May 10, 05 11:39 AM
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Good thread I have one word for you: Balance. Your Time, Efforts, and Priorities. You only have to strive for a level dictated by your priorites.
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Susan G
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RE: do you ever really listen to your music anymore?
May 10, 05 1:42 PM
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Hi trybal- I find myself not even enjoying the actual song after awhile. Instead Im too busy ripping apart my own mix. Absolutely! It's sometimes months or longer before I can listen to a song objectively again. I'm not sure how to get around that if you're the songwriter, performer, and sound engineer. I rely on the opinions I trust of people here and on cakewalk.audio re the mix, and I appreciate them, but it's still hard for me to listen to the song again, even to apply their suggestions! -Susan
2.30 gigahertz Intel Core i7-3610QM; 16 GB RAMWindows 10 x64; NI Komplete Audio 6.SONAR Platinum (Lexington) x64
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brucie
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RE: do you ever really listen to your music anymore?
May 10, 05 2:00 PM
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I do listen to the stuff I have done and without wanting to sound egotistical, I actuallly enjoy it a fair bit. I do find myself being critical of things such as the mixes, over use of reverb (on early stuff), the odd note out of place or wrong. But hey it is all a learning process and I think it is great to be able to look back and see how I have improved over the years (like a fine wine I suppose!). We all have to learn and we all learn from our mistakes. Nothing will ever be perfect and no one is an expert which starting out, there will always be something that could have been changed and I know for a fact the guys at the top think the same too. Just be proud that you have something down, because having a thousand bad songs (even if no one else likes then apart from you) is better than never having one at all and talking about how it could have been! Just be the best you can be and you will only get better! Cheers Brucie
Neil S. Bruce Msc B.Eng(Hons) Dip(Mus) Sound Designer, Composer and Audio Engineer - Manchester Tel : +44 (0)7771 877690 Web : www.spencerbruce.com
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Dave Modisette
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RE: do you ever really listen to your music anymore?
May 10, 05 2:15 PM
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Are we ever happy with our mixes? I mean REALLY happy. It seems almost an endless thing...achieving that final mix. It's gone beyond happy with my mixes. What I'm finding is that I'm getting where I'm not be happy with the mixes on commercial releases. Man, why did he mix that h-hat so loud. What's up with the "esses" on the lead vocal. Where did he get such stupid lyrics.
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Vuzz13
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RE: do you ever really listen to your music anymore?
May 10, 05 2:53 PM
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You see, there is actually a very simple solution...never actually finish any song/mix at all! Just keep tweaking and futzing with 500 or so tunes at the same time, forever, and never consider one completed.....of course you will go off the deep end, as will anyone who listens to your "works in progress" for the 12th time. But hey, it works for me! LOL!
"I continue to require more cowbell..." "Turn the light on so I can hear it better..." Asus M4A89GTDPro/ Asus p8z68v-lx AMD 1042/intel I5 3ghz Layla3G XPpro/Win 7 32/64 X1PE/SPE8.5 ,P5v2,DimP,SForge,Audition,GS3,WusikS,QS-7, Reason, bunch o' plug-ins...love soft synths
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sf31454
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RE: do you ever really listen to your music anymore?
May 10, 05 4:26 PM
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There is a lot of music that I've listened to for many years that could have been mixed or even recorded better. However, there is no music from the past that I still listen to mainly because of the mix or the quality of the recording. Same thing applies to one's own music. The stuff I still like was the better composed or more open-ended (where one can still discover some "unintended" creativity). The glossy stuff was fun to do but does not need to be revisited, IMO.[sm=rolleyes.gif] Richard
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glazfolk
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RE: do you ever really listen to your music anymore?
May 10, 05 6:41 PM
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ORIGINAL: trybalfish I find myself not even enjoying the actual song after awhile. Instead Im too busy ripping apart my own mix. where as friends or the average listener is like...."whats your problem?..that song sounds GREAT to me!" Maybe its not worth spending countless hours just trying to get every little thing eq'd perfectly and sitting in the mix right where you want it. I think the problem is that we get TOO invoilved, TOO close, TOO immersed and TOO objective. I made that mistake with the first CD I did with Cakewalk 9 (my first time after making the transition from analog to digital). O became soi obsessive that I couldn't hear the music for the technology (like not being able to see the wood for the trees). This is what I do now: 1. Never mix for more than four hours at a time, and NEVER late at night. 2. Always leave at last 24 hours between mixing sessions on the same project. 3. Keep at least four projects on the go at the same time (OK, this might be outside your control to a large extent, but you can "invent" other projects, as learning experiences for yourself - eg go back and remix that old project in 5.1). This helps keep a sense of perspective and stops you getting too involved in any one. Otherwise, yes, you're right ... those "countless hours" can be counter-productive. You can actually end up making something worse by overdoing it.
post edited by glazfolk - May 10, 05 6:42 PM
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thndrsn
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RE: do you ever really listen to your music anymore?
May 10, 05 6:59 PM
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Hi all, We're a bit late to this discussion, ladies and gents, SONAR users. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, (a.k.a. Mark Twain) cut to the chase on this topic 150 years ago. His "Two Views of the Mississippi" is still delicious reading, having grown not the least bit stale over the years. In case you don't have a copy of it handy on your bookshelf, you can read it here: http://www.mtwain.com/Life_On_The_Mississippi/9.html If you're pressed for time, scroll down to the paragraph that begins "Now when I had mastered the language of this water..." and read one of the most quoted passages he ever wrote. If you're in the mood for a literary break, read the whole chapter. Enjoy. --thndrsn
Beethoven was right: the bigger the stream, the deeper the tone.
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bullet22
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RE: do you ever really listen to your music anymore?
May 10, 05 7:27 PM
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I can't remember who said this.... ...but it's helped me out when gauging where to stop: "You never finish a song - you just release it" I think it was either Sting, Clapton, Reed, or similar. IMHO, once a song is in the public domain it stops being 'yours' and starts belonging to the people that it means something to. Think of "Everybody Hurts" by REM - they could probably still be mixing that now, and that song (amongst countless others...) means a helluva lot to a helluva lot of people - you gotta draw a line under projects, and let them go - like sending your kids to college. With a tear in your eye, and a brave smile - and hope they can fend for themselves!
Sonar 8.5.2 PE & M-Audio FW/410 & Win7
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soundtweaker
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RE: do you ever really listen to your music anymore?
May 10, 05 8:07 PM
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Or A masterpiece is never finished, only abandoned.
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mildew
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RE: do you ever really listen to your music anymore?
May 10, 05 8:48 PM
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i find the best time to listen to your mixes without analysing them is when you are drunk. m
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Mooch4056
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RE: do you ever really listen to your music anymore?
May 10, 05 8:53 PM
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John Lennon once said "there isn't a beatles song he wouldnt like to re-do" He hated Strawberry fields -- it was acually recorded in two differnt keys -- they took the later key and slowed it down to match the first key -- and pasted the two takes togther--- You can even tell the tape was slowed down when listening to it, but most Beatles fans let it slide and say its great -- I am not sure if he was talking about the mixing or the acually performances of all Beatle songs or both (performance and mix) -- But I know where you are coming from -- you make a good point -- I am the same way -- my friends say it sounds great and I am busy listen hard to the mix. I find it always better to walk away from a mix becuase your ears get burned out-- there are a million different ways to approach it and you want to hear them all before you decide and that takes tons of time and work. I guess this doesnt really answer your question -- but I guess in short -- yeah!! -- I think most people think it could always be better... John Lennon did too --- your not in bad company......................
post edited by Mooch4056 - May 10, 05 8:56 PM
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puffer
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RE: do you ever really listen to your music anymore?
May 10, 05 9:10 PM
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Or in this case: "A masterpiece is never finished, only archived."
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bullet22
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RE: do you ever really listen to your music anymore?
May 11, 05 3:42 AM
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ORIGINAL: mildew i find the best time to listen to your mixes without analysing them is when you are drunk. m Exactly. I love doing that. All the playing, arranging, tweaking - maybe one initial mix, is done sober (just so I'm in the 'region' of what I want...) then I sit back, fire up the Lava-Lamp, do some serious damage to a 12-pack of Carly Export - and indulge my ears! Break off every hour-or-so for a Family Guy (your DAW plays DVD's, right..?  ) I save each mix (crazy as they may be) - then the next day I play each mix, one of them takes me to where I wanna be. I'm always surprised at the 'freshness' of my ideas. Anyway, Joe Listener won't be analysing your mix! He'll be dancing to it, drinking to it, making lurve to it.... Skating to it...... Y'know. BTW, if I ever meet Joe Listener - I need to ask him which EQ settings are a good starting point to separate 2 Les Pauls without hard panning....... Ryan
Sonar 8.5.2 PE & M-Audio FW/410 & Win7
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ProjectM
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RE: do you ever really listen to your music anymore?
May 11, 05 6:26 AM
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It's a shame we cant find a community web site that we could all upload one sonar bundle and have others take shots at mixing it.or something. though they are HUGE files That would be awesome! It would spawn collaborations beyond belief, I am sure. A Sonar mixing comuunity would be cool. After a while, you get a good heap of wav files returned with the finnished mix and you can pick the one that sounds best. I'd use it!
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fulcrum
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RE: do you ever really listen to your music anymore?
May 11, 05 9:17 AM
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The last project I completed was a couple of days ago, for a compilation at Another Forum. The deadline had already been pushed back a month, and there was talk of pushing it back again another month and a half to the beginning of July. And I knew that given another month and a half to tweak, I would use it just like I had used the extra month already given, thereby climbing just a little further up my own colonic channel. So I literally had to listen once more to everything I had done and tell the empty room, "This... is... done." I backed the files up to DVD-R and erased them from my hard drive to make it just that much more difficult to want to tweak, then sent a CD off before I had a chance to reconsider. Even putting that figurative exclamation point on the process-- decaring it finished-- wasn't enough to really make it final in my own head. I had to rush through the backup and the mailing in order to be comfortable with the mix as it was-- because now that I've done all that, I have no choice in the matter. This is how it is, and the case is truly closed. I'm done torturing myself, at least as far as that project is concerned anyway. Time for the next one.
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trybalfish
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RE: do you ever really listen to your music anymore?
May 11, 05 12:58 AM
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wow, what great posts!! thank you all for adding in your 2 cents! I guess we're all pretty much in agreement. A song is NEVER finished. I too remember days of recording on an 8-track tascam porta studio on cassette tape. you HAD to bounce tracks WITH effects, and there was NOOOOO going back... kind of a blessing as well as a curse to have such a great DAW now to be able to edit to a millisecond at your heart's content. this forum however has been so helpful to me, and Im sure to us all. Not only for just CPU issues and what not, but also for working together to get better sounds in general from our mixes.
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The Scar
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RE: do you ever really listen to your music anymore?
May 11, 05 1:45 PM
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I dig Sonar, P5, and the multitude of plug-ins that I use, but in some respects I miss the 4 & 8 track tape days (yes I’m dating myself). Back in the day we had to record & bounce, record & bounce, record & bounce – you learned to accept what was on tape because most of the time you couldn’t go back. This is exactly why I convert to audio at the earliest possible moment, and then delete the synth... and I rarely save presets. Commiting it to audio is like bouncing in the old days: you're forced to work with what you've got and it prevents endless, endless tweaking (which I am definitely prone to).
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diamondjim
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RE: do you ever really listen to your music anymore?
May 11, 05 3:13 PM
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Thndrsn, Thanks for that reference. That really hit home. One of the best songs I have recorded was the 2nd one I did after getting Sonar 2, done without any Midi, just acoustic guitar and violin. Minimal tweaking. Mastering? What was that? Now its hard to avoid obsessing, esp. when mixing and mastering for someone else. How do we recapture that child-like sense of awe when seeing (or hearing) something beautiful for the first time? I think I am going to go out and buy a copy of Life on the Mississippi and take a break from sci-fi for a while. And maybe go home and just play for an hour, no recording!
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xohol
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RE: do you ever really listen to your music anymore?
May 11, 05 3:30 PM
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when i am working on someone else's music, well they pay me to mix it. however, when i am working on my own music that i really want to enjoy, i have someone else to mix it so i can still listen to it and enjoy the music, and not even think about the mix.
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HavenLane
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RE: do you ever really listen to your music anymore?
May 11, 05 5:28 PM
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ORIGINAL: The Scar Back in the day we had to record & bounce, record & bounce, record & bounce – you learned to accept what was on tape because most of the time you couldn’t go back. This is exactly why I convert to audio at the earliest possible moment, and then delete the synth... and I rarely save presets. Commiting it to audio is like bouncing in the old days: you're forced to work with what you've got and it prevents endless, endless tweaking (which I am definitely prone to). And I quote (Edna Mode - The incredibles fashion designer) "I never look back,Darling, it distracts from the now!"
post edited by HavenLane - May 11, 05 5:32 PM
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thndrsn
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RE: do you ever really listen to your music anymore?
May 13, 05 3:40 AM
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diamondjim, Aww, shucks.  Twernt nuthin. -thndrsn
Beethoven was right: the bigger the stream, the deeper the tone.
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davidchristopher
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RE: do you ever really listen to your music anymore?
May 13, 05 11:51 AM
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I'm in the studio right now, recording new tracks. As I'm the band (drummer, bassist, guitarist and vocalist) the producer, engineer, doctor, lawyer, mayor and coffee boy, I literally 'shelve' my projects for a little while before finishing the mix for release. I find that I can't listen to the music with an impartial ear while it's still fresh in my head, and my fingers; I think it's excitement, or adrenelane, or perhaps just the caffine... but I find that when I listen to the tracks about a week or two later; I hear where it needs 'improvement' that I would have missed if I'd listened even very carefully right after tracking. As far as my older stuff goes; heh- I have about lots of recorded material that I absolutely cannot listen to. I also have some songs that get 'regular rotation' in my acoustic set. One or two have even gotten stuck in the wife's head, which I found very flattering...
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davidchristopher
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RE: do you ever really listen to your music anymore?
May 13, 05 11:53 AM
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ORIGINAL: xohol when i am working on someone else's music, well they pay me to mix it. however, when i am working on my own music that i really want to enjoy, i have someone else to mix it so i can still listen to it and enjoy the music, and not even think about the mix. That's what ***I*** should do! ;) I guess, as far as the mix goes, ignorance really is bliss. A little learning is a dangerous thing... ;)
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