Ok, continuing my series of thoughts about Expansion. I was originally going to go through in track order, but I think I’m going to bounce around instead.
13. B--t -n -he Biz (‘Biz’)
I’m fairly certain this was the first song that I provided production support on, which is to say, probably the second track I worked on. The songwriter had (fantastic) chords/melody/lyrics, but put out an open call to actually produce it into a full song. Checking the discord for timelines, I picked it up maybe a month after and started adding a few of the key design elements. My thesis was “vocal forward” and “throbbing”, take that how you will.
Whilst there were innumerable delays that have contributed to Expansion, one of the biggest ones on my front was catastrophic tech failure:
My long term writing computer shat the bed entirely, and despite knowing better, I didn’t have backups of a lot of the projects. I also was in a position where I could neither afford to get it repaired or replaced, which meant it looked like it might have been curtains for Bertie’s contributions. My memory is a bit hazy here, but I’m fairly certain I never managed to recover the original project files.
The solve came many months later, when - unable to access the original computer - I started to reconstruct the song from scratch using an old buster laptop. This was slow and laborious as I had
vastly less processing power, requiring me to work track by track.
very few of my plugins (and even fewer of my ‘go to’ patches), requiring me to try and rebuild sounds from scratch
only one or two exports of the original mix to try and work from.
We’re somewhere at the 2 year point by now.
Around another year later is when I stepped into the project management/co-ord role to try to assess the album and help get it all together. We’ve had a range of fantastic people across the album’s life (shout outs to Rain, Max, Yana and others) who had at various points taken on management, but had to step back due to life commitments or - I think it’s fair to say - the overwhelm of what this project entailed. I had just come off the back of a multi-year work project and had two powerful tools at my disposal: (1) a set of procedures and spreadsheets for tracking and managing competing work streams, and (2) hubris. I also had the ability to finally get a new computer, my first actual ‘brand-new, not second hand’ workhorse. So, three powerful tools I guess.
Anyway, as part of trying to land the proverbial plane, every song got categorised:
Those numbers of “awaiting mixing” are pretty key, because we had envisioned this album having a cohesive feel. Older garages albums typically had the individual artists writing and mixing their own songs, before submitting them to be mastered by a single individual. The closest analogue to this album’s process was some of the live albums, where individual performers would send in their parts (and videos) to editing teams.
In the end, we’ve ultimately decided against having the whole album mixed by a single person. That said, assuming everything progresses as expected it’s likely to be 5-6 mixers in total, with roughly 50% of the songs having been through me.
Biz was the first song other than Pivot that I mixed. Of the mixes I’ve done (so far) this album, this one also probably took the most revisions. I’d label each mix alphabetically for feedback from the artists, and the final version I have is ‘N’.
The challenge to this song is balancing certain elements that should feel ‘delicate’ and ‘intimate’ with other elements (often at the same time) that need to feel ‘powerful’ and ‘punchy’. Along the way I had to learn a host of new techniques, especially in terms of pinning the bass frequencies in place so they didn’t fluctuate and drown out other elements. For anyone who hadn’t mixed music before, your ears fatigue the longer you critically listen to music (especially in headphones as I do), but they don’t do it equally across the frequency spectrum. The high end goes first, meaning that if I mixed for too long, I could be totally missing what’s actually listenable.
I’m really proud of where this song landed, and there are certain friends of mine in the blaseball fandom that I actively cannot wait for their first take on this track in particular. @wooshofficial I’m staring you dead in the eyes right now.
EDIT: oh, and because I got so caught up in talking about the process of this one, I forgot to add why this is my ‘Favourite Child’. Biz is the song I find myself singing to myself the most often without even realising it, and whilst there are many songs on this album that make me cry, this one makes me smirk.
germansingergirl
theartofmadeline
jacobvanloon
turnnoffyourmind
areudirty
2087
romaincrisis
