Mixing The Great Escape

I had a session at the studio last week, working on the instrumental version of The Great Escape. We recovered the tracks from the digital audio tapes (ADATs) of my original recording, which was around February 2001. Back then we were still using ADAT but since then we have switched over to non-linear editing. That's a fancy way of saying we do it on a computer. After importing the tracks from tape we built up some percussion tracks and then added a a few guitar tracks that follow the melody.

I had another session today - we mixed the tracks we recorded last week along with the tracks from the original recording. It occurred to me that with all the tracks we've recorded, we could do an alternate mix that would emphasize different combinations of the guitar tracks. That will take another session though.

I like the way the mix sounds now - I think it's an interesting sonic landscape. I'll want to get it mastered before I'm ready to submit it to GarageBand.com. Mastering will involve harmonically balancing the frequencies, and will also cause the song to have the same apparent volume and mix when played on different types of audio systems. Mastering will take another session too, but I think it will be worth it.

So it looks like I'll need another session or two before I'm ready to post this song.