After over three months of recording sessions, all the basic tracks, as well as the keyboard, acoustic and electric guitar overdubs, solo tracks and multiple vocal parts were finally completed on all eight songs selected from the Avalanche repertoire to be used on "Going For Broke." There were many other songs from our repertoire that I would have liked to have had the opportunity to record...but it would have required me to have gone with a double album...due to the amount of usable space and time records were limited to having before sound quality would be affected. Avalanche songs averaged well over four minutes per song, and some were considerably longer than that. The maximum total music time per side had to be kept under 23 minutes, or the signals might "bleed" through from one song to another. This was years before CD's became the norm...and vinyl had its drawbacks. I also believed that this being a first album on a private label with no distribution deal set up, just releasing a single album was enough of a gamble...and I knew that the cost of pressing an album was far more expensive than pressing a single...and there would also be the added costs of artwork, and color photography for the album jacket, as well as the printing and materials costs for printing the jacket and lyric sleeve, which I felt strongly should be included with the finished album...since I believed the lyrics on these songs were an integral part of the music. There was no getting around it...this would be very expensive. I wanted everything to be the best on this project...I still wanted to believe that I could surprise everyone by proving...once again...that I wasn't going to be denied my dream...and I intended to spare no expense in order to do this thing on the same level as if it had been released by a major label...but since I was funding the entire project, I also knew my limitations financially...and a double album was out of the question. The cost to manufacture this album the way I wanted to would have been reduced considerably if I ordered 5000 copies or more, but even in that lot size, the cost per album would approach almost $3.00, and even that was going to be very difficult for me to cover...since pressing costs had to be paid up front. I felt that if the response to this album was positive...there would be plenty of time and opportunity to record the remaining songs in the future, on follow-up albums...so I decided that eight songs would be enough for this first album. Once that decision had been made...the next phase, and a crucial one, was the all-important mixing of the recorded tracks...the part of the process that can take good recordings and make them great...or can take great recordings and ruin them. What is most required for mixing...is a clear idea of what the final product should sound like...a clear goal to strive for...a good ear...and the ability to utilize the available tools and technology to bring that final version out of the basic or "dry" recorded tracks. I was really looking forward to getting into the mixing sessions...because the finished, but as yet, unmixed recordings were very good. Peter and I had done a much better job at capturing the music and the energy in the recording sessions for this project than we had on all the earlier recordings we had made with the original group. We were both much more comfortable in the studio, and with each other, than we had been a year earlier, and the experience we had working together was really starting to be apparent in the quality of the recordings we had ended up with. As I booked the studio time for the first few days of the mixing process...I was really looking forward to hearing if what we ended up with was going to be as good as I thought it could be...and so with a lot of optimism, Peter and I got into the mixing.
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