phonofield

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This past Sunday was our final day of mixing.

Not only that, I re-recorded the vocals last-minute for three songs… with a somewhat raspy, flu-laden voice. Will you notice? Maybe you wouldn’t have if I hadn’t told you. Perhaps you would have thought I just sounded particularly sexy for some unbeknownst reason. Ah… but the cat’s out of the bag. However, I am very relieved that I was well enough to do it after being sick twice already this year, once bad enough to warrant a trip to Urgent Care. Any later and we would have delayed the whole process, jeopardizing the timeframe for the EP’s release! Yikes.

But yes, the day has finally come when we can say we have a legit, professionally-mastered recording. Pretty scary… but we put a lot of thought and heart into every moment, and since it is semi-permanent, we thought it would be a good idea to have the whole thing brought up to industry standard specifications, and basically polished off like all other serious records.

That’s essentially what mastering is: evening the volume levels from song to song, making sure the loud parts are not overbearing, and the soft parts are audible, making sure the vocals have presence, and bringing out the frequencies that get lost and toning down the frequencies that get muddied-up. Oh, and “mastering” sounds really cool, too.

Chris from Hyperraje Records. This is one cool dude.

He’s got the creds to prove it, too

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Funny/terribly sad/cool story:

For our cover art, I spoke with a photographer from Italy who was willing to license a photo of his out to us for free, if only in return we would send him a CD. Good deal, right? Yeah, well after going back and forth for a few weeks, this photographer’s lab supposedly suffered a terrible incident the night before our deadline. Wonderful! So yeah, I had one night to come up with a new concept for the design. Oh well. I don’t think I did too shabby a job though. I almost like it better my way…

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Oh, and if you want to be surprised by the track listing, I suggest you LOOK AWAY NOW

(Continued)