EASTER EGG
Sunday, April 5th, 2026 07:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snoozefestaudio51F and clear this Easter Sunday evening.
Where have I been for three weeks? Basically just having my weekends blown by building checks, and also focusing on bills, filing my taxes, etc.
It struck me a while back, that at the current pace of things, with overtime being a regular new reality, that it no longer made sense to try and finish the entire album before releasing anything.
As of the last entry, March 15th, the guitar automation strategy had proven itself, but I also realized there is still no silver bullet default guitar. Each song does require it's own slight tweaks to the guitar sound.
But guitar is the final peice of the tone-balance puzzle before compression so... instead of nailing guitars for all 12 songs, and then going back to compress all 12... why not just completely finish one song, upload it, then finish the next, upload it, and so on?
We're talking about a beta-release strategy, where a new single is released every few weeks, to SoundCloud, YouTube, and maybe BandCamp... no distro yet, just getting listenable mixes up there, one by one, and then further down the road, a full album release.
So, after working one weekend day for three weekends in a row, I finally had a three-day weekend this weekend, Friday, Saturday, and Today.
So on Friday, Consulting DeepSeek for tutorial, I compressed all the instruments for Reavis! Kick, Toms, Cymbals, Snare, Bass, Guitar, Cello, and Xylo. And after some final tweaks to things, the mix was good to go.
On Saturday (yesterday) then, I got the vocals and sound effects properly mixed and compressed.
And then today, after a few minor tweaks, I uploaded Reavis to SoundCloud! My first beta single, on Easter Sunday!
https://soundcloud.com/patrick_melody/26-02-reavis-betar?si=a3af35cf2ad34b7e9146138768e41a8f&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing
So the next song to prep for release is Miss Fortune. I've decided to release them in a different order from how they'll appear on the album.
Reavis, for example, is perfect for April, because it has that romantic spring vibe. Miss Fortune will be a good one for May, and it'll be a good follow to Reavis, because they're vibes are similar.
The schedule of releases also prioritizes songs that feature the rock trio, meaning the orchestral, "set peices" will be last on the list. Also the song Archeology itself will not be released until the album is released.
When working with NighCafe a couple months back, I did generate a bunch of images of "artifacts" with egyptian vibes... photo-realistic stone objects to represent each song. I decided that for the album I'd rather go with graphic novel illustrations, but these "artifact" images are perfect for the beta singles!
They hint at the album to come without spoiling it.
And I'm calling these "beta" singles, because I *will* probably re-master all of these songs before the final album release. So on SoundCloud and BandCamp, I can just replace the file with an updated mix, while keeping whatever plays and likes the track has on their platform.
So yeah! Reavis is out there, and Miss Fortune will be next!
Now I'm gonna spend the rest of my Sunday evening getting Reavis onto YouTube and BandCamp.
HAPPY EASTER!
Okay, so this is 3 minutes 20 seconds, from the school bell and passing period intro foley, to the outro foley of students in the hall fading out. So it's a three minute buzz of a song, one third of which is the instrumental outro.
I uploaded it to YouTube, but Bandcamp doesn't seem to like me tonight and the upload failed.
I texted YouTube links to Brian and Dylan, which gave me the first opportunity to hear the mix blasting out of my phone.
Out of the little phone speakers, it sounds very much like transistor radio rock from the 50s/60s. You can hear everything, including the bass and drums, and cello, but there are no actual bass frequencies. It's kinda tinny, but in the good way that old songs would sound over tiny speakers. The guitars bite. The vocals are still clear and present. You can actually hear the xylophone better!
So, call that my first test of the mix outside the studio monitors and studio headphones.
Still, in decent speakers it sounds great, and in the headphones it sounds better, which was one of the goals.
The room is very much a reality in this mix. This does sound like a band recording in an old school session room, but with more modern frequency response, and in stereo, and with distortion on the guitar.
Not modern commercial grade... but more like oldies grade meets 80s underground demo grade... which again, was the goal.
Rather than, "wall of sound" I'd call this more, "wallpaper of sound." In which the wallpaper is the rock trio... a solidified sound texture with 3D relief provided by the panning of the drums.
And then the vocals, and in Reavis' case, the cello stand out a bit in front of the wallpaper, like the next level of a diarama, with their Haas effect... a bit more 3D than the background.
Soundcloud auto-played an older upload from 2008 after one spin of Reavis and I was kinda shocked to hear the difference! The older uploads are great in their own way, but there is definitely a "bedroom" or "livingroom" production feel to them.
The old drum machine created a good rhythm that approximated a real drum kit, but in the new mix, it doesn't sound like a drum machine anymore.
I suppose it's kind of silly to compare old productions and new, on that level, so suffice it to say the "room" concept of the new mixes is the novel breakthrough... not possible in the pre-DAW era.
It very much sounds like younger Pat, with his listenable livingroom jams, went out and formed a ghost band who've been practicing for a year, and are now recording an underground demo.
I guess that's all I have to say tonight.
It does feel nice to have something finally out in the world.
And it's gonna be fun prepping and releasing one single after an other, over this spring, summer, and fall!
I think I will still drop an unbroken "Archeological Record" before the official album release.
The timeline is not yet clear for all this.
I'll get a better sense of that as I start work on Miss Fortune.
°¦}
