Fear Uncertainty and Don’t Forget The Doubt

everything sounds terrible. i’m in this negative feedback loop where everything i try sounds like absolute rubbish, and i can’t think of anything to make it better. i listen to all of these great recordings by bands like el ten eleven, god is an astronaut, mogwai, saxon shore and others and i’m just disgusted by my work.

i keep wanting to blame the fact that i can’t use a real mic’d guitar cabinet, or that i am not using a real acoustic drum kit or that i don’t have $500,000 worth of equipment stashed away in my little apartment. i find all these excuses and realize that that’s all they are, empty, meaningless and stupid excuses. yeah i know the artists mentioned above are highly gifted individuals working in fantastic facilities with highly experienced professionals, and i’m not asking to just magically produce something that satisfies me as much as those recordings, but i at least, in my own perception, want to at least be on the same field.

that’s the thing, i’m not really complaining about wanting to sound “like” those bands, i don’t. i have my own voice, my own take on how things should go, but what i am complaining about is producing a sound/tone/mix/whatever that satisfies me as much as those records do. to my ears my work lacks several important characteristics: warmth, cohesion, fullness, clarity and nature. i’ll spend a few minutes on each.

warmth – yes this is often bandied about as analog-for-everything and tubes tubes and more tubes. well, i don’t have the money and space to satisfy the commonly marketed solution for creating warmth. the problem is, i do have the tools and the book-knowledge of how to do this, but when i try, things turn flat, lifeless and overly colored.

cohesion – where everything sounds like it fits, where instruments fall into place within the audio spectrum. guitars aren’t harsh or fizzy, drums don’t stab out of the landscape and lead elements don’t have to compete for their own space. yes, this has compression written all over it, and this is something i’m still learning.

fullness – the opposite of thin. probably the immediately apparent flaw in anything i produce, there isn’t a fullness, a presence to the music. this becomes painfully obvious when i test a mix of mine on my macbook pro’s built-in speakers. i’ll listen to something like “untitled 1″ by windmills by the ocean and even on those crappy little speakers, the mix sounds really good, each instrument is right there, your ears don’t have to work so hard to pick out the parts, its all presented for you. then i listen to something i just mixed and its night and day… more like a foggy inarticulate night and day.

clarity – when i try to combat the fullness or lack thereof, i sacrifice any sense of clarity. instruments blend into each other, like stepping on each others toes… or more like everything turns gray. like a painter’s cup where at first she cleans her brush and it only has the one color floating around, but after an hour, that water in the cup is a gray mess. welcome to my audio world.

nature – this is probably the one that hurts the most. when i start to work on making things better my primary tools are eq and compression. nature simply refers to the sound sounding natural, the way it is produced in nature. when you hear a drum kit you hear lots of things aside from just the drums. you hear the room its in, you hear the material the drums are made of, the drums sticks and you hear the mics. my stuff lacks natural color, meaning what i hear is so artificially colored it just sounds ridiculous. i hate it. the snare drum sounds pinched with too many high frequencies, the kick drum is either all click or just a thud, and guitars, oh the guitars… are just thin and fizzy or they sound like they are recorded through the telephone (because i’ve been backing off the high frequencies to combat the fizziness.)

so, this is where i am right now. i think i need to take a break from trying so hard. i think i just need to stop with the ridiculously high expectations i have for my sound and just realize that nothing i will ever produce will ever satisfy *me* as much as the other music i listen to.