Submareen

Just a quick note of where we stand now, and where we are going from here.

Eight out of Decline‘s nine songs are fully recorded (not counting backing vocals and special effects, which are all missing at the moment). There’s only one song waiting for my finishing touches in the form of an elaborate layer of guitar solos. The musical concepts for this one still need to be fleshed out and a certain amount of rehearsal has to be done before I can proceed with recording it. By the way, this song is a very special one: it is an instrumental piece (unlike all others) comprised of three distinct movements (unlike all others), thus musically a bit more complex than those (not that those are the simplest you could ever imagine). Its title is Avoiding the 9-to-5 society.

The crew welcomes Csilla Badacsonyi on board who will create all the artwork needed for the album cover. I have already discussed with her my concepts regarding the cover (which, as an engineer, I naturally developed to an exhaustive level of fine detail, and extended to her as a shrink-wrapped requirement specifications manuscript). Sorry, no spoilers for now, it will be available when it is time.

Sophie Füzi will be working on backing vocals. I’m excited to see how this cooperation will contribute to the material.

Finished editing (at least for now) the first four songs, corrected at least 19,387 small timing errors during the process (the actual figure is somewhat higher, but I lost counting at one point). Nothing too serious about these errors, but stuff like this tends to add up during a song and significantly drain the attentive listener’s enjoyment. The edited songs became much better, much more powerful, and that is still before any proper mixing. I also have to say, though, that I’m progressing slower than I’ve imagined. It is “second 90% of the project” phenomenon in full glory (very familiar to anyone who has ever worked professionally in the IT industry, or, for that matter, any competitive industry).

My realistic estimate is that all tracking activity will be finished by the end of July (this includes backing vocals and any special sound effects), and mixing will commence in August. I don’t like deadlines; Decline will be released when it is time. By all means, though, it will be released in 2011.

The trivial stuff: just picked up one of my preamps from the repair shop. One of the XLR inputs stopped working a while ago. As the repair guy squarely put it, the only thing they had to do was finish the manufacturing process: internal cabling was loose, poorly connected in the factory, which, added to the fact that originally no hot glue was applied to hold parts in place, eventually caused the fault. I thought about this as I was driving back to the studio with my preamp. Finishing the manufacturing process, I guess that’s pretty much the most polite way to put it.