The album 'Gloryland' is about finished. Or as finished as it will ever be. I've had to overcome challenges along the way, including inner demons about not having the man around himself to approve or to blame, technnological issues about the recordings being in multiple locations in multiple formats and not having had access to my studio for the last six months.
Most of it was mixed a year ago at Wired with Steve Rolfe after he and Tim Milbourne had added some backing vocals on 'Man who sings'. We spent a couple of days in the studio mixing the tracks that we had transferred from tape and we felt that we were there - done. But upon listening in the days following a couple of nagging issues grew on me...In the second song 'Anything She Wants' the vocal inexplicably drops in level for the second verse and in the final track '(This is) Gloryland' - Garry's bass is strangely distorted, (as opposed to normally distorted) The trouble is both of these sessions were recorded on a high end ProTools session which I had no access too.
In the year since finishing One Dollar Peep Show's 'Showreel' and after Adam had moved on to exciting projects, I'd pretty much been content to work solely and occasionally on my Macbook Pro but somewhere between 1DPS touring with my interface and Apple upgrades to Leopard my ProTools Interface stopped working.
So I set about rebuilding my aging MacBookPro and running ProTools. It turns out 3 interfaces later that my MacBookPro was frying interfaces as soon as i connected then to it...but in very subtle and different ways...I sent 3 ProjectMix interfaces back to M-Audio in 3 weeks....they thought I was unlucky ( I had multiple support calls with Digidesign and had tried all interfaces on other Macs and PC's) but I've always known that I am lucky so I started to think differently...I took my MBP back to the Apple store finally to get a check on my FireWire interface which seemed to work with hard drives but mysteriously never with interfaces. And they did some tests and said something vague was wrong with the FW and that they would need to replace the logic board (expensive). Luckily and to my shock I had had the forethought to buy 3 years warranty...the only time I ever had!
So that gone done for free, I returned my final broken Interface, got a new one back a week later I upgraded all my software to version 8 and now everything worked perfectly!! Just professional crastination to beat, oh and relearning upgraded software and a brandnew Control Surface. Music Technology is gloriously and hideously complicated and when you're as used to it as I have been....not being able to jump quickly and effortlessly between tasks is incredibly frustrating.
And so yesterday I hunckered down and mixed 'Anything She Wants' in my kitchen! I loved it and remember that there's nothing better. Well except mixing/recording/creating with really good friends, and then celebrating with them after.
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