reRealize

Well its been a while.... but I do have a good excuse. During the past 3 months I had the pleasure to work in a real recording studio in Bolivia, Cantvs Studio to be specific. I got the chance to produce and engineer my first LP, a ten song album for a new Bolivian band called Illimani Beat and to help out with the recording of other higher level artist and directors like the Orquesta Experimental de Instrumentos Nativos who where recording the soundtrack for a new movie. If that wasn't enough I got to meet incredibly talented musicians, but more of that in another blog. What I want to talk about today is the last song I got to record in El Salvador. This happened after I had left for college when I was back for vacation for not to long and we decided that the only reasonable thing to do was record another song. This project includes as always Marito Rivera and Carlos Escalante (Ñanga) and this time we also got to record  with Daniel Milla. The song called "Realize" titled by Ñanga because he did what most of us consider the harder part which is writing the lyrics, which he also did for the first song I posted (Moon). I started "writing" the song while I was in college but by that I mean I came up with a cool sounding chord progression and a few licks, the actual composing of the song began when we all got together and finally gave the song texture and form. If I recall correctly the recording of this song took about 3 days, that includes moving all the instruments and organizing my room so we can record there, writing the song and constant trips to McDonalds. We recorded all the instrumental in my room and for the vocals we got the pleasure to, again, work in Marito's studio. As always the hardest part of the writing process was coming up with a melody we could all agree on and thats probably what took the longest to figure out, other that a challenge we had was that we only had a fretless bass to work with which meant that it became very imprecise and that took a little bit longer to record. Its also worth mentioning that there were different opinions about the backing vocals, not everyone was too happy with the way they sounded.

One of the main reasons for which I'm posting this song and blog almost half a year after we actually recorded ( and the reason for the title) is because the version of the song I'm uploading with this blog is a new mix of the song that the previous "final version that everyone else has". The reason I did this is because after training at work over the summer I realized how many mistakes there were in the mixing and editing of this song, and that also goes for the song I already uploaded. For the new mix of this song I gave the song a better panorama that it didn't have last time, more precise and cumulate depth and a better equalization process. In other to give it a better panorama it was mainly a work of setting a better space with use of the simple paning techniques that distribute the instruments in a more organized way, for example splitting the drums left and right depending on their actual position while recording. For a more commutative depth instead of giving each channel its own reverb track I created a new auxiliary track with a new reverb I got at work and passing all channels through that. For better equalization I used new software I got from work that made my old EQ software look like a kids toy and I actually got to apply some of the stuff I learned in my "Physics of Sound" class from last semester. However I'm sorry to say that I did some rookie mistakes during the recording that now that I found them they were beyond repair in post-production given that they were recording mistakes and I don't only mean some peaks but some other stuff that I wasn't able to clean up, nevertheless I still feel this new version is much better than the original one.

Realize Mix by Electric Axis

I will (hopefully soon) be adding a few blogs giving new mixes of the songs I previously uploaded and a few blogs about my experience in a recording studio. Those might take a little bit longer to be up just because I want to upload them with the songs I produced and since I had to leave right after we finished mastering I don't know if all copyright have been processed and I don't know what kind of licensing they got (hopefully Creative Commons) as I figure that out I'll upload them.

(thats Fito Paez I got to see him front row in London... it was amazing)
also its very late and I don't really feel like proof reading this one so lets be nice and ignore all the fuck ups in my writing