Second Story – ”Dancing on the Hill"

This was a tune I was very worried about, based on how the other mixes of it had come out. It’s a complicated tune, even though it may not sound like it. The drum beat is somewhat disjunct, the bass line (distorted and played with Funk Fingers) is a bit “blurry” and some of the other parts of the song (keys, guitar) have some unusual rhythmic things going on. When it worked, the song had an undeniable groove and a very original sound. Unfortunately, the previous mixes we’ve had of this song sounded sloppy, uninspired and just plain bad.

I’ve long had the feeling that the success or failure of mixing this song might be the “make or break” moment of whether or not I took this project to completion. Meaning, if I couldn’t make this track sound good, there was probably no point in bothering with the rest of the album – it’d be too demoralizing.

Luckily, I think (and Scott agrees) that the song is sounding AMAZING. I was able to tweak the drum sound and really phatten it up. The bass tone, which the other engineers could NEVER seem to get right, is punchy and “gooey” – all at the same time. Some judicious audio track “nudging” helped fix some timing errors that I blame on the varied equipment used to dump the songs to digital, which may have caused some of that disjunctedness that we couldn’t seem to shake in the other studios. Danielle’s vocals just jump out at you and beg for attention. I’ve done some cool things with panning and effects – there’s a really cool bounceback delay that I used in several places that really adds to the tune. And I even added a sound effect sample (Extra points if you can guess what and where it is.)

So the project will go on. “Dancing” sounds really good, so I think there’s a good chance that everything can be mixed to our satisfaction. More to come!

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