The last song of Ode To J.Smith. This was a very straight forward mix for Emery. He put it to bed in a matter of hours.
This is the gong song. The gong we learned is actually called a tam tam and is used to great effect on this track. There is a 45 second drum fill at the end which brings the
album to a fitting finale, like fireworks exploding.
After backing everything up, beers were had. It felt strange not to have another song to mix.
The next day was Tuesday. This was 4 days ago. Emery and I boarded our flight to Portland, Maine. This is where the worlds greatest mastering engineer has his studio. His name is Bob Ludwig.
The hallways of the studio have not a spare inch of space, covered as they are in hundreds and hundreds of gold, platinum and diamond discs. Nigel came out here to master the last radiohead and more recently I think chris went out to master the new coldplay record.
There was a cool coincidence as well out here in Maine. Emery is getting married next month to Andra. Her brother, William builds super high end speakers, which he names after his friends and relatves.
Bob has been using Williams speakers for some years now. He swears by them. They stand some 6 feet off the ground and are encased in granite, ensuring no vibration. They sit on either side of the room and in between is a smaller speaker, 4 feet off the ground. This is called The Andra... Bob was tickeled when Emery told him.
Anyways we got there at 11am and left at around 5pm. The cut is the final stage of the record. This is where you do the running order, put all the spaces in between songs and Bob listens hard to everything and brings a bit of bass up here and treble up there and boosts the overall volume a bit.
His equipment is very state of the art. It's like framing a painting and polishing the glass.
We sat and listened back, made some notes, then bob added a second here and a half beat there to the gaps between the songs and then it was done. The album was complete.
It sounds amazing.
We wandered back to the hotel feeling a little down that everything was finished and there was nothing left to do. This downer always happens at the end of a record.
The next day we flew back to NYC. The sun was blazing in the sky as I walked from the cab back to our apartment listening to Ode To J. Smith.
Get Travis Blogs via RSS (RSS?)
