I know that I’ve been rattling and rattling on for some time about this new single of mine entitled “All Around Us,” but at long last, I can happily say that this puppy is “out the door in a paper bag” and ready to rock dancefloors andearbuds.
As I’ve mentioned in several of my earlier posts, this is been an extremely lengthy process of composing the melody and the lyrics, creating sheet music for various live instruments, recording live musicians in the studio, and then producing and arranging the entire track on my laptop.
A monstrous tower of ultra-professional-level rack-mounted audio enhancement gear, much of it from before the days of digital.
Finally, after months of hard work, I got to take my labor of love into Threshold Sound + Vision in Santa Monica, and with the assistance of the great mixing and mastering engineer, Gil Tamazyan, we came up with what is without a doubt the best work I’ve produced in my 10+ years in the world of music production.
Now THAT's a BIG UNIT! While most reverb units consist of a rack-mounted unit or even a mere guitar pedal, this massive plate reverb takes things to a whole new level!
Before taking this into the studio, I had to take every single track from my laptop (ie: kick drum, hi-hats, guitar, tenor sax, vocal for the verse, etc, etc, etc - I think it came to about 38 in total) and create audio files with just those individual tracks playing. This process is also known as “bouncing.” Once I had those 30 or so audio files burned to a DVD, we loaded them into the Mac at Threshold Studios and had all of the tracks routed through hundreds of thousands of dollars of top-of-the-top of the line equipment. This is the same studio where artists such as Black Sabbath, Weezer, and the Cure have recently recorded, so I figured it should be good enough for my own laptop musings.
The infamous patch bay, where all of the individual tracks are routed to the nifty equipment you see in the monstrous tower of rack-mounted gear (pictured earlier in this post)
We worked for over 12 hours straight through the night to mix and also master the music, with Gil and his assistant (name escapes me at the moment) working feverishly to dial everything in perfectly. While I do have a good amount of experience mixing down music in a home studio environment, this was completely different, and these 2 engineers were like my guardian angels of audio, handling equipment that I’ve never even seen, much less actually used. Check out the video below to see the studio engineering “geek speak” in action!
The next step is to get this music out there, which will be quite an undertaking, as I will be releasing this on my own label to be known as “Bloompocket Jazz.” As of right now, I have two of my favorite remixers, Eric Davenport and Christian Alvarez working on their own interpretations of the song. Once those are completed and mastered, I will be creating a very special promo package which will be sent out to top industry tastemakers, and assuming that all goes according to plan, I will also be offering this very special promo package for sale online. This package will be something very attractive to look at as well as practical (no joke!), so stay tuned for more information about that!
In the meantime, I leave you with just a very quick snippet of this track. This song goes through a good number of different musical sections, making for an “epic” disco-soul-funk odyssey, so this is but a very small sampling of what you can expect to hear as I release the full version in the near future.
PREVIEW: All Around Us
Wikipedia: Mastering, a form of audio post-production, is the process of preparing and transferring recorded audio from a source containing the final mix to a data storage device (the master); the source from which all copies will be produced (via methods such as pressing, duplication or replication). The format of choice these days is digital masters, although analog masters, such as audio tapes, are still being used by the manufacturing industry and a few engineers who specialize in analog mastering.
