The Sound – a never ending story
Hello – well, I’m working on the sound again. I wonder why I’m not capable of getting the sound of my music right the first time I release it. I almost always have to make revisions afterwards. But then again – if I waited for the perfect result before I put anything out there I would not have released a single song yet. As embarrassed as I am about having released music of inferior sound quality I have come to regard my music as a work in progress. So when you download a song or just listen online, when it somehow doesn’t sound like the music you can hear on the radio you can be pretty sure that I’m already working on a better mix – I just had to get it out there first, while the excitement of having a new song was still fresh.
In fact I think that my insecurities regarding the proper mixing and mastering of my music are partly to blame for my lack of success. When I feel that a song doesn’t sound really fantastic I’m hesitant about promoting it. I haven’t really begun yet to properly promote my music to people who have power in the world of music, because of my insecurity regarding the sound quality of my work.
From a songwriter’s and singer’s perspective I believe in my work, but I’m aware of the fact that nobody will take your music seriously when it doesn’t sound good – that’s why I have been quite ambivalent about promoting it. Sometimes I tried, but then I stopped my attempts again when I realized something like “Oh no, there’s still too much booming bass in the mix”, which is a general problem of my mixing. I’m so afraid of having a thin and weak sound that I always go for the other extreme – with too much low frequenzy energy, which makes the result often sound muddy and distorted.
You know, music sounds different on every stereo system. My main system is a very nice Yamaha set which produces a very generous sound that has a nice forgiving attitude towards badly mixed music – so my own music basically always sounds good on it. But recently I had the rare chance to test my latest EP on the stereo system in my parents’ livingroom – and the result was shocking. The boom was so heavy that the whole cupboard was vibrating, particularly during “Matter”. And after I heard the flaws there I could also hear them on my own system and in my recording setup – before that my ears just didn’t notice it.
That’s a very tricky, complex thing – this interaction between the brain and the ears. Perhaps when your brain doesn’t want to hear a problem then your ears just can’t notice it. That’s why it would be so good to have an unbiased assistant in the process of mixing and mastering.
Right now I’m working on remastering the whole “Keys To The World”-EP and I’ll put it somewhere on the net for everyone to download when it’s finished. So you’ll be able to replace the bad sounding first mixes with the new ones.
