Friday, March 28, 2008

Home - the First Mix

As I mentioned in the previous post, I've recently been playing around with remastering some old recordings using Ardour. I thought I could use this space to document my recollection of the song, the recording and my experiences during the remaster.

For background, all of these recordings came from a recording session I did in 1990 as part of a band called Felix Amour. We built a recording studio throughout our house including installing a fully insulated soundproof chamber in the basement with cabling etc all run up through a return air vent to one of the bedrooms where we had the master control room. The control room consisted of our 24 channel mixer, our effects rack and a rented Fostex 8 track reel to reel recording unit.

The original recordings were very much 'album oriented' with each track fitting in for a particular part of the album; however, I'm not pulling them out in order. I'm randomly picking songs one by one to remaster, mostly based on perceived complexity of doing the remix. So far I think the songs stand up individually.

The first song I have attempted to remix was 'Home'. If I recall correctly, I wrote this song, ironically enough, when I was at home. The main chorus simply repeats the phrase "I want to go home"; however I think the question is, where the hell is that, exactly? With each repeating phrase, I seem to be getting farther and farther away from wherever that may be. We tried to keep the song as dead simple as possible, with the feeling of almost a funeral march at times. We also wanted the beats to be very much on the back, slowly trudging along on our way to somewhere - perhaps home, perhaps not. There was even a couple of parts that I remember trying to slow down even more (end of the second verse) to give the impression that at any given moment the song may lose all momentum and completely come to a stop. It ends with the rest of the band joining in the desperate parade (Dean Zimmerman on drums, Jeff Harrison on bass) with some nice guitar work by Wayne Russell.

The mix went extremely smoothly. I don't remember doing much editing, just cleaning the tracks and adding some effects/filters.

A note on file formats. I've have included a Flac version and an Ogg version. If you have never heard of these file formats, you should really get out more often. Both of these formats are completely open (non-proprietary) and are actually better than their proprietary cousins wav and mp3. Flac (like .wav) is 'lossless', meaning the quality is _exactly_ what is coming out of the mix. Ogg (like mp3) is 'lossy' meaning some quality has been reduced to minimize the file size. To play these in Windows Media Player, you'll need to install the libraries, else you can install Winamp as your player and use the the Flac Plugin.

Home.flac (Highest Quality - 27MB)
Home.ogg (Lower Quality - 14MB)

If you really don't know how to install the plugins etc, you can (if you must) the wav and mp3 copies are available, although both the flac and the ogg will sound better than the mp3.

Feel free to add comments / suggestions about the mix, I'm always open to trying other things.


  1. Actually, it appears the download links are broken temporarily. Should be fixed soon.

  2. Thanks for sharing this - I've been curious about your music for years. I found it pretty challenging, which isn't a bad thing of course, but it took a couple listens to even figure out how it made me feel. It actually takes me back to the fall of 2003 after I'd left Parasun. Not sad, exactly. Homesick and melancholy. It's not a bad memory - just a challenging one.

    So, thanks.

  3. It's interesting that you use the word 'challenging'. I'm not sure the exact context you are using the word, but I would agree that there is a 'challenging' aspect to our music. Much less so with this song, but overall we didn't write many 'verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus' songs... in fact, I'm noticing that for some of our songs its difficult to pick out which is the verse and which is the chorus. I guess that was intentional but probably unfortunate. This isn't to say I wish we wrote easier songs, but I'm not sure we considered the craft. For some reason I associated 'accessible' with 'sell out', which isn't necessarily the case at all. I mean look at the Beatles - they wrote some of the most complex (especially for the time) but deceivingly easy sounding songs ever.

  4. [...] use the flac or the ogg (details on how to set it up can be found here), but that is just me. For Windows users it’s probably easiest to just grab the mp3 or the [...]

  5. [...] Home - the First Mix // Mixing - So Much To Learn [...]