Listening Day Three

There is something marvelous about the crisp spring day of a first tee ball game,something delicious about a first kiss, something enlightening about devouring a first Chicago-style Vienna Beef dog. Tonight I have the digital equivalent of a scalpel, tweezers, and hacksaw laid out on the table to do some subtle yet massive surgery to the first full-length product of the Redline Project - "Slips Away."

Though it is not necessarily my most advanced work, this firstborn child of endless daily effort has become the apple of my ear. My nerve endings tingle with excitement at the thought of sharing it with this blog's readership and anyone else who cares to download it

Song Report Number Three: Slips Away
I added condenser/limiter to the master track and a touch of EQ to bring the mix to life. The vocal track required much cleanup, and I am not entirely satisfied with the result. This is more an issue of poor raw material than it is a product of bad engineering, so I may have to settle. I also utilized the same de-esser settings and added a bit of hollow reverb to add a hint of mystery. I added some automated volume control to the song to bring up the soft spots and reduce the loud areas. The struggle with this track is its progression from extremely sparse to gratuitously explosive. I want to leave dynamics in place while not forcing the listener to consistently adjust her volume knob. The song ends with several bars of sparse, passionate acoustic drums; I completely reworked this section, eliminating a mechanized delay effect and putting the drums in a ridiculously echoey reverb space, just for fun.