Labor day picnic





I am in Nash vegas today (or as toby calls it, "the ville") mixing with Reid. The song is a remix of "what if I stumble" from the DC Talk Jesus Freak album. They are releasing the remix album to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the release of Jesus Freak, an album that was significant to me, and it gave me a little thrill to open a folder on my computer and label it DC Talk. The mix went down really easily, partly thanks to my fellow thump monk Brian who did a first rate job with the programming and recording the orchestra in prague. ;) Sadly, this marks my last record working with Brent from EMI. who's leaving his post in A&R and coming back over from the dark side. Good luck Brent, hope to see your name on a lot of records. Brent apparently is a wicked bass player and a cellist, if anyone is looking for that particular combo...

UPDATE: It has been pointed out that I should go into a wee bit more detail, so here's how it happened. Skip this if you're not into making records.

A couple months ago, I got a message from Brent, asking if I'd like to take a crack at remixing some songs off the Jesus Freak record. Brent and I have worked together before, notably on all things toby mac: diverse city, remixes, e.t.c. A short conversation with Brent revealed the following parameters which are pretty much standard for the Toby/EMI machine: I was to choose a couple songs to remix, the original master tapes would be sent to me and we (fellow thump monk Brian Gocher and I) would develop a "sketch" or rough mix to show the idea. When we felt satisfied it showcased our idea, (which is pretty much 90% of the tough work) we would submit it, for which we would be paid a small fraction of the final budget. Multiple producers were invited to submit sketches of songs so there were no guarantees that the sketch would be accepted, which if it was, the final budget would be then be released. Brent and I discussed the song selection and my off the cuff ideas for them. Seeing as how busy Brian and I both are, we opted to only take one song, which I ended up choosing to be "what if I stumble", partly because I love the song, partly because it's meaningful to me lyrically and partly because I had an idea for how to remix it. Remixing anything that went platinum or was a hit, (which this album was) is always a challenge since people have very strong memories attached to the original and you either have to completely alienate them and win them over again or not change it in a way that alienates them. We planned originally to do an ambient style remix since I could hear it in my head and Brian is very strong with that kind of programming.

I had them send the original tracks to Brian in New Jersey and he took the 1st crack at it, sending me a 1st draft that was roughly what I had envisioned. After hearing it, the element that stood out to me the most was the amazing string arrangement he had come up with. Brian and I have both been working with a brand new technology for arranging string parts that makes it so easy, it's synful, so we were in a big hurry to play with our new toy. He got to it first and did such a bang up job, it was pointless for me to try to add string parts. After sending Brian through some wild goose chases, I realized that the best part of the mix was the strings so I had him discard everything but the strings and vocals. The vocals incidentally were recorded beautifully and Kevin and Tait and even Toby gave us wonderful performances to work with, which ALWAYS makes a mix easier. If your lead vocals are performed and recorded well, the rest of the song will mix itself. So basically now, we had our vocals and our strings, the rest of the work consisted of merely finding the supporting pieces that wouldn't get in the way of the strings and vocals. Should have been the easy part... or so we thought.

Brian had originally programmed a drum and bass style drum loop for the song as I requested. While it was a lovely bit of programming, I felt like it got in the way of the strings, so we started over with strings and vocals to find the right drum loop. I've probably got 15,000 drum loops in my library to start off with for inspiration. Brian is more of a roll your own kind of guy so he's maybe got slightly less, say 5,000 loops since he likes to hear it in his head and then program in NI battery or even on our old skool SP1200 for when we want that vintage thang, We both started to come up with other ideas for drum loops, Brian programming and me auditioning through my library to find inspiration. I use emagic logic and the new apple loops feature that is in both garage band and logic allows for very quick loop auditions, so I whipped through a lot of loops in a very short amount of time. And none of them fit. at all. I spent a couple evenings steadily working my way through probably close to 1000 loops. Normally in about an hour, I'll have 5 or 6 loops that fit with different feels which I'll then start customizing to the song. After a couple days of listening to drum loops I was starting to feel like I had picked the song that did not have a matching drum loop, sort of like that Prince song that doesn't have a bass line because Prince couldn't find one that didn't mess up the song. In the meantime Brian was programming iteration after iteration of drum loops based on my nebulous feedback and we were both getting steadily frustrated. Brian and I work together via a combo of phone, IM and emailing audio snippets, but it generally doesn't slow us down at all. We both run Logic so we can save songs and email them to each other or if the song is too large we post to servers.

So in cases like this when I'm blocked, I usually take a break and listen to other people's music. I went through my itunes looking for songs that I liked that had a similar feel or arrangement and hit on one that I thought we could take some cues from. I won't name the song for legal reasons, but I basically programmed my own version of the beat and sent it to Brian to see what he thought. Brian liked it and he started reprogramming what I sent him to make it fit the song better. At this point we both felt like the beat fit but I still wasn't in love with it. I had to run out for some shows, so I loaded the song on my laptop and took off. Of course, during the run of shows I was way too busy and unfocused to actually work on the song, so I think I was more into the idea of working from the road than actually doing it...

When I got back, I wasn't quite as sick of the song as I was before from listening to it for 5 days straight, so I started messing with a fresh batch of loops. One of them had a rushed snare that didn't fall on the 2 that I really liked, but I wasn't sure if I was just maybe sick of the original. I sent it to Brian who loved the idea and incorporated the idea and the new sounds into the original coming up with some kind of frankenloop that fit the song beautifully. With the loop in place, he could now add the bass and that went down really easily. Bass, drums, strings, vocal, basically we're done the rest is candy as we say... or so we thought.

I started to feel that the chorus was missing an element, so I encouraged Brian to add just one more piece. We thought maybe it was synth thing so he tried some of that and I tried and it was really hard to find sounds that didn't compete with what was already a very very full sonic spectrum. Strings have a tendency to dominate a mix and after awhile I thought I was trying to gild the lily so to speak, but the song just didn't feel finished to me. After trying practically every instrument, I realized that I was looking for a clean guitar line and broke out my guitar. I'm not much of a guitar player, but I can typically sketch out enough of what I'm looking for to show real musicians what I want. After some back and forth, Brian played a line that was exactly what I wanted, just without the "my first guitar line" feel. At this point I thought we had a workable rough, so Brian did a quick mix and we emailed it to Brent and Toby.

Toby called me the next day and when I picked up the phone, he started right in with "you are sick". While he meant it as a compliment, he was inadvertently clinically correct since I was in the midst of my raging dental infection and I was on enough drugs to make me loopy and I hope I didn't say anything particularly awkward, except I do know I ended it with telling Toby to tell his kids to BRUSH and FLOSS. Brent weighed in with similar compliments and it seemed like everyone was pleased with the direction it was going. Toby had some thoughts, but wanted to live with it a little longer. At this point, everything seemed like a go.

The next week we didn't hear anything. I left a message with Brent trying to establish schedule. The week after that nothing. Another week. Pretty soon about a month and a half had passed. I started to wonder if it was a go after all, although this is typical of the record industry in general, it's usually hurry up and wait. I got ahold of Brent who let me know that Toby was trying to choose between 2 mixes of "what if I stumble", both of which were good. This was depressing news, since Toby usually asks all the good producers to take a crack at it and I was sure that the other mix was probably also really great. Toby had some feedback about the verses which we spent some time punching up. We sent new mixes and waited.

As we got closer and closer to our theoretical deadline, I got fairly convinced that we hadn't made the cut. It's happened to me before, once even after the mix was finished in the case of David Crowder. That was awkward because I was telling people I had mixed a song on the record and then had to find out from Steve Ford that my name wasn't on the CD. Kind of makes you look like a tool or a liar. About when I had given up hope, Brent calls with the "I talked to Toby" and I was sure he was gonna let me down easy, but surprisingly, we get the green light. I won't even go into the scheduling hoopla that poor Brent went through trying to juggle 2 records, 3 producers and 2 artists in a short space of time, but let's just say that we got approval to mix this, at 2PM, the day before we were scheduled to mix. I think Brent developed white hairs over this one. I still had some minor scratching to put on mix so I whipped out a couple of what Reid calls "fickets" and I saved the audio file to a USB pen drive, threw it in my backpack and took off. Fortunately I was able to make the scheduling work even at the last minute.

Most of why I work with Reid is because he and I like the same things which translates into a great working relationship, a synergy of sorts which is so important when choosing a mixer. I walked into the studio after he and his sidekick Lee had been at it for a couple hours and it already felt like a mix. Reid pretty much read my mind on this mix and after some conferencing between Reid, Brian and I, Reid had it sounding really great. Brent dropped in with some comments and we addressed those and surprisingly, Toby made a flattering vote of confidence by telling Brent that he trusted all of us to mix it. At 6 PM monday, we wrapped up on a great mix, printing some edits and options in case Toby wanted to do an edit later. We made our customary trip to Jacks in nashville for some amazing barbecue, the brisket being my favorite. We still have mastering to do and Toby may have some edits or possibly a recall, but let's all cross our fingers and hope we nailed it the first time. I'll keep you posted. Peace! thanks to all who made it happen!

Posted: Mon - September 5, 2005 at 07:08 PM          

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