Since the day I bought a used yamaha 4-track and freaked out that I could now record multiple tracks at once, I feel I’ve made some pretty good progress teaching myself how to record and produce music. I’ve passed a lot of milestones but it’s been a long road.

So, after a long time reading and figuring things out, I came to understand that I needed to master this new album professionally. Ultimately I would love to do my own mastering, probably for the same reason an artist seals his painting himself. But it’s not easy to learn something without some sort of instruction, so it came to pass that I spent an evening with Ben Adrian at Mr Toads mastering studio in San Francisco, literally having my mind blown. I was learning how to listen.

The upshot of it is that the album, now officially titled “Mostly About Ferns”, is mastered and going out for duplication. I’m not going to replace outright the online songs and .zip file (under the Completed Albums category) with mastered editions, but I will post the mastered album in its entirety with a new .zip file next week. The reason I don’t want to replace the earlier, unmastered songs is that I would like you to be able to compare and hear for yourself what mastering has done.

The track for today, for example, you may remember as Bloom, the fourth song on this album. I’m posting both mastered and unmastered side by side. It might be tricky to hear not in context of the whole album, but I’d like feedback from you (public or private) on any differences you can hear between the versions. Personally, I’m quite taken with the mastering process and feel like I’ve been taught to hear. But this may not translate to the wider world, so get in touch!

Next step: CD replication. If you’ve got a good company to recommend, please do let me know. I’m quite interested in supporting good people. With any luck, the CD should be complete soon!

Mastered Bloom:
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Unmastered:
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I had the pleasure of starting a new project recently. Aside from my own albums, and the upcoming performance with Morgan and Nando, we officially broke ground on an album of Morgan’s. This is a particular joy for me, because I find that working on someone else’s material gets me out of the echo chamber of my own head. I’m so used to engineering and producing my own stuff that working with someone else is particularly refreshing. On a purely selfish level, I think it improves the quality of what I do on my own, but aside from all that it’s really just a whole bucket of fun.

Morgan wrote this song and I think it’s brilliant. It was easy to record because he’s been playing it for so long that he pretty much nailed it right off the bat. The guitar and voice are his, and I laid down the bass and the solo guitar. We worked quickly and well, and I think both of us are looking forward to getting into the studio again.

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Keep watching this space for more of Morgan’s album as we get it done.

This is the end, unless you’re thinking about things in a circular way. I’ll post the mastered versions of the songs when they’re ready, and soon after that I’ll have the actual finished disc in hand. Look for them soon!

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How do you write a song about death? Should it be grandiose and terrifying like a requiem, or quiet and dreamy like a child’s wind-up music box? How do you weave into it the inexorable pull, the undertow which pulls you out away from land into the unknown? We’ve all been through birth, and so there must be some part of us that remembers. But who among us can say what it is like to die?

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This one went through so many iterations and took so long to get together that I think it deserves its own evolutionary history (I’ll post that one next time). At first I envisioned this song in three parts, clearly tracing out a rise, climax, and fall that seemed appropriate at this time in our plant/character’s life. As it grew - and you’ll see how drastically it changed tomorrow - I ended up throwing away the third part entirely, and even invited my friend, the very inspiring and very talented Alexis Harte, to do the guitar solos.

So this, the final cut, took a little more than a month to finish. What we’re left with is part 1, divided into two chunks, and part 2, also divided in two. It breaks down this way:

Part 1
Being a funky introduction into a more mature world.
Chunk A: My solo kicks it off, and ends as our character reaches a momentary point of reflection, as in: “who am I becoming?”

Chunk B: The introspective pause gives way to Alexis’ solo, bluesy, wild, and ultimately surrendering to…

Part 2
Being the consummation of the funk, and its inevitable decline.
Chunk A: This is Alexis wailing in a way that makes me cry, it’s so beautiful. He asked for some general direction I wanted to go in, and I told him about how the plant is reaching maturity, how it’s a very sexual song, really, and ideally I’d like something in the vein of that great master, Carlos Santana. I think what I love most about art in general, and music in particular, is how influences spread among people. My guitar style is clearly heavily influenced by David Gilmour, Santana, and Frank Zappa, but I’d like to think that at the end of the day, through all of these teachers, I have come to sound like “me”. So it is with Alexis’ solo, which took Santana as inspiration and then went off into something which is, in fact, totally Alexis. And yet the DNA of these great artists is there somewhere. So really, this process of inspiration and creation is something like pollination, isn’t it? And that brings us back to the theme of the album as a whole.

Chunk B: This is still Lex, but a different take and a different day. I ended up liking his solo so much that I invited him back to finish it off. In about half an hour he whipped through a dozen different takes, and I took what I liked best and put it in to finish the song. That’s not to say that this is totally a FrankenSolo. I ended up using the majority of one take, but spliced on a different tail for the conclusion of the song. And I couldn’t help but put a beautiful line he came up with in the background here and there, because I’m a sucker for multiple layers of guitar.

So here it is, the fourth song in the album, Bloom:
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If you want to find out more about Alexis and his music, I’d recommend checking out his site at www.alexisharte.com. His stuff is wonderful.