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.

We had an amazing studio night last night, due in part to some special guests.  Jeff Beam, who we’ve known for years, and who is an amazing bass player, joined us for part of the evening.  He brought along his muse Natalie as well, and we caught up for a bit before we settled into making some music.

The jamming was extra special because K Billy and Jeff played in a Cleveland band in the ’90s called Qynne’s Horse.  This marked the first time that they were writing together in years!

It was a blast.  Prior to Jeff’s arrival Mike, KB and I had written a bridge for an upcoming song called “Today Special”.  We were pretty happy with our efforts, but after Jeff showed up we gave the whole thing another shot and came up with what could be an even better idea.

The idea juice was working last night, I’ll tell you!

BTW, if you’re in Cleveland you can catch Jeff playing out with Calabash, the GeezeCats, Alan Greene and more.  And he’ll be playing in the Mike Farley Band reuinion show at Brother’s Lounge on Sunday July 25.

Amazingly we’re being super-productive as of late.  Despite the fact that Mike continues to forget studio night (even though most of northeast Ohio knows when it is), we’re forging ahead and finishing track after track (okay, to his credit, he did do a Sunday “make-up” studio to track some bass today).

The 11 songs we chose to focus on at the beginning of the year are in the final mixing stages, or mixed.  We’re scheduled to return to Ante Up studios in July to start mastering a couple.  We’ve also been steamrolling through getting tracks laid down for another ten or so songs that have been sitting around for a while.

At this rate we’ll have cleared the pipeline by the end of 2010 (!), and hopefully we can focus on some newer compositions that are already written, as well as getting back to some jamming and idea generation.

Oh yeah, and hopefully some people out there like what we’ve come up with…

Charley was stunned that we were rehearsing for the second time in as many weeks: