I can’t believe it’s been ten years since the Mike Farley Band released their album Halfaworldaway.

Around that time I was playing keys in the Tony Lang Band, playing guitar and producing music with Tom Smith, and writing and performing with the nascent version of drunkdude69.  The TLB split a number of shows with the Mike Farley Band, and I was friends with Jeff Beam who played bass in both projects, so I was frequently in attendance when they played to great crowds at the Odeon concert club and elsewhere.

It seems like yesterday that I watched their CD release performance at the Odeon.  I remember wanting to smash my hands with a hammer as I watched Jeff Nagel play guitar like a rock star.  Mike’s songs were amazing, and Jeff Beam and Joe Rohan held down a pounding rhythm on bass and drums.

So on Sunday night it was like stepping into a Cleveland music time machine.

The show was excellent – lots of fun and energy, a room full of people who were psyched to enjoy some original music, and a great venue in Brothers Lounge on Cleveland’s west side.

It was fantastic to see some folks I hadn’t caught up with in a long time, and to meet some new friends as well.  I got goosebumps while listening to the band play their set, which included a guest appearance on bass and vocals by Brian Dossa, who replaced Jeff Beam on bass after Jeff headed to Nashville.

It made me remember the excitement of playing original music for an appreciative crowd.  There was some talk about the band putting some new material together despite the guys living in different areas of the country.  I think the tools exist for that collaboration, and I hope they do it (um, I’ll throw down some Hammond tracks if anybody’s interested).

Whatever they come up with I’ll be in line to get a copy (along with lots of other folks).

Skinny Moo front man Jay Goodman came out tonight to provide some guest vocals for one of our upcoming songs. As always it’s a pleasure to include his performance on some DD69 music.

He provided guest vocals on Funk Out With Your Junk Out, adding an entertaining spoken word part to “Freaky Whacked-out People” and some patios-inflected bridge vocals to “Player”.

This time around his stylings will be featured in the song “No Time for Sleeping”, a song which has also recently been featured elsewhere.

Thanks for your time and performance, Jay.  The check’s in the mail.

We mentioned earlier that our friend Angie created a video of her creating one of her cool pieces of art, and she used one of our upcoming songs for the soundtrack.

She dropped us a line to let us know that the video is currently being featured on Ovation TV.  Awesome!

Thanks for the update Ang.

We had a great mastering session at Ante Up.  It was a kind of “first date” with Chris Keffer, who was the mastering engineer.

Mike, K-Billy and I really enjoyed the session.  We were only working on a couple songs, so it didn’t last very long, but Chris was generous in sharing his knowledge and experience.  We talked about the mastering process in general, tips for Mike’s live bass rig, and the super-secret colors of Chris’s patch cables (you know, certain colors make the music passing through them sound better…).

After the session we compared the mastered songs to the unmastered mixes.  Sure enough, the mastered songs sounded cleaner and a bit brighter, and the mixes were just a little punchier.  One thing I really like is that Chris’s application of mastering effects (EQ, compression, limiting and so on) was very subtle. There was no over-the-top “make this song uber-loud” stuff going on here.

(where is my umlaut+u character, anyway?)

We’re trying to complete a few more mixes so we have a larger pool of songs to choose from for our upcoming release.  Having started the mastering process is really exciting, because it means that there is actually an end in sight and we can keep moving on to new material.  Woo hoo!

We’re scheduled for a short mastering session at Ante Up studios in downtown Cleveland.  Their facility is top notch (we cut drum tracks there this past December), and we’re excited to return there.

Mastering has always been a nebulous subject: what exactly are they doing with the songs? What happens in those magic pieces of custom gear in their equipment racks?

We learned much about mastering when we worked on our last release. Mastering is (if done well) very subtle but extremely effective in terms of cleaning up and solidifying the overall sound of the mixed song. It may involve some compression of certain frequency ranges in the mix, limiting, application of EQ, application of overall reverb, or some combination of those factors.  Mastering also generally includes putting the songs in their final album order and creating transitions or pauses between tracks.

We used to expect a song to sound completely different after it came back from mastering.  Now we understand that mastering will make the song sound cleaner, tighter and more “glued together”, but not substantially “different”.

We’re excited to be able to sit down with the mastering engineer tomorrow so we can hopefully learn more about the art and take that knowledge back here so we can create better mixes.