The Mixing Progresses

For the next few months, I spent most of my time in the studio mixing the album with Peter. As the process became more familiar to me, it also became more comfortable...and I realized I was actually starting to know what I was doing as a producer. I not only knew what I wanted to hear, but as I got more experience in working with the tools that were available to me at the studio...I found that it was getting progressively easier for me to "dial up" the sound I wanted. Getting drum mixes to sound right had originally required up to sixteen hours of fine-tuning and experimentation. By the time I was into the mixes on the fourth song of "Going For Broke" the time involved for drum mixes was down to three or four hours...and the end result sounded better than the inital mixes of the first few recordings had. It had gotten to the point that experimentation wasn't even necessary...we had found the "formula" that worked...and so essentially, we were able to just set the dials and move on to the next instrument in the mix. By the time the album was completed, the time involved to get the drum mix right was under two hours. The same thing seemed to be happening with all the instruments...knowing what had sounded good on a song...and duplicating that process on the next one. But there were always variables. Different combinations of instruments from song to song created new challenges in seperating those instruments in the mixes, and making sure that all parts were clearly heard at all times could still be quite a daunting task. Because there were many different guitars, and guitar parts (at times up to five guitar tracks could be found on certain songs...both acoustic and electric), and because I was trying to create the illusion that there had been two different guitar players on all the songs, just as there had been in the original band...that part of the process was very time-consuming and painstaking. It isn't that easy to take one guitar, two Marshall Stack amplifiers, and one guitarist...and make the parts sound different enough to create that illusion. One of the biggest problems that I had doing that was...I had to ignore what I was used to hearing as "my sound" (which I had spent a great deal of time and money over many years to get "just right") and intentionally use the studio's many different processing tools to create a different sound on some of the parts I was now playing, but that Mark had originally played on when the original group had been together. Any guitar player who is distinctive will tell you that tone is a huge part of a guitarist's "style"...and Mark, like me, had spent a great many years getting his guitar sound the way he liked it...and once he had what he wanted, it was very easy for him to get that sound...because he used different guitars, and had different playing techniques than I did. Most of what is involved...is simply knowing what you want to hear. But now, since he wasn't there...I had to try to duplicate what I remembered as his sound from memory...and with totally different tools than he had used to get "his" sound. I don't think I ever really pulled it off...but I knew going in...that this record would be different from the Avalanche I had grown accustomed to hearing when we were a real band. Since I had one guitar that was my favorite...and that I felt more comfortable with...I decided not to use any of the other guitars I owned to create a different sound. I thought playing the parts to the best of my ability was the most important thing to accomplish...everything else was negotiable. When the playing is precise...the mixing becomes much easier, because I wasn't spending a lot of time trying to correct playing mistakes through the manipulation of sound in the mixing process. But mixing that many guitar tracks was still quite challenging. It became quite common to spend two or three weeks mixing just one song...because I wouldn't consider a mix finished on any of these songs until I believed it was as good as I could possibly get it to sound...from the recordings I had to work with. It was the one lesson I had learned very well after the final mixes of the first Avalanche single had been such a disappointment to me. Cutting corners just wasn't an option. There was too much riding on this project. But having that attitude was starting to become a very expensive standard to maintain. Although I had already decided that money was not going to be a reason to settle for a mediocre end result...the truth was that the cost was rapidly becoming thousands of dollars per song...and that was for a studio that was relatively inexpensive, compared to what a state-of-the-art studio would have cost for me to record in. My life had become a whirlwind of dealing to make the money for the album...and three or four eight-hour  nights every week in the studio mixing. And I found that although I was making a lot of money...I was spending it as quickly as it came in. Because I was so caught up in the momentum of the project...I think I failed to notice that the face of the drug business was rapidly changing...and that the flood of cocaine onto the streets of America was creating an entirely new marketplace...a new set of circumstances...and a whole lot of competition that I had never had to worry about before...not to mention a whole new set of customers...and with them...a new set of rules and a new set of risks.