Mixing and Mastering

I absolutely love playing music. I don't claim to be a great musician or even an extemely creative songwriter, but I love music and I love creating it. BJ wrote a great entry a couple days ago about how we're all created in the image of a creative God bjwoodworth.blogspot.com . God has gifted me with the desire to create, music is the thing I'm good enough at to put energy into and end up with what I think sounds pretty good. Making space in our lives to create is essential to us all. It seems so many people are just too busy to create anything - stop what you're doing and pick up a paint brush or a guitar or a journal and make something that expresses who you are!

This Side of Eve has spent the last two months trying to mix our album. You would think that recording would be the hard part and mixing would be easy, it's not! Recording can be a lot of fun if you do it right, mixing can be annoying and frustrating! A poor mixing job can completely ruin great recorded performances. But on the other hand great mixing can't make a shotty band sound good. So... we had our friend Peter Guellard from Club Cafe on the South Side do our mixing. It's finally done and now we've sent the mixed songs to Athen's Ohion where Chris Weibel will master the album. Now mastering is a very mysterious thing to explain to people who are not musicians or who haven't worked through the production of an album. Often times bands that are just getting started will skip over the mastering process, that's a big mistake! Mastering evens out the overly high sounds and the overly low sounds, it compresses the songs and helps the intricacies of instrumentation come out. Mastering makes your record ready to be played on the radio next to great recordings. We're really excited about this album, since we're waiting until the end of October to have our CD release because of the baby we're going to do an online digital release of three songs. If I can figure out exactly how to do it, It'll be available in August!