Mixing ‘Battle Hymns…’

Ahhh, nothing like some ear fatigue. Spent the entire day mixing the new Beggar’s Son album, and it’s coming along quite nicely. I’d say the mixes are about 85% there. After taking a break and listening back to the mixes, I’ve made a bunch of notes that I’ll have to go back and fix. The good news is that it’s nothing too major and I should be able to finish mixing and start the mastering process next week. My goal is to have the album completely finished by 2/29 and have a 3-song sampler to give out at the Machine Gun Joe record release show.

I might as well add: I’m pretty much addicted to the Massey plugins, especially the CT4 and VT3. The CT4+VT3 combo on each track adds up to the equivalent of a nice channel strip. Granted, I don’t use the VT3 EQ on everything, but the CT4 is pushing and pulling pretty much every track. Tape-Head is another sweet little gem. You can get some great grit out of any clean track, and I really like drive bass with it somewhat hard, and drive things like synths and piano even harder (on mid or bright setting). I don’t use the THC distortion plug that much as it seems to have some kind of memory leak that causes any session I use it on to choke. Sounds great when it’s working, but I think it needs a little more programming love. The TD5 delay is amazing for vocals. I freely admit I haven’t used it on anything else–but it truly excels at the task. The L2007 Limiter is also great, and you can be assured it’ll be the last plug in the mastering chain for this album.