Sapphire...Saturnian Narcissist...Scythe Sculptor...

Ah, finally finished the demo for Acrostics... taking a little transition break before proceeding with the Vessels one... The others are sounding pretty good in the car...Almost time to take a drive somewhere and listen to all of them with a little notepad in a parking place and jot down the little notes...

So far, things are going way better as in faster than originally planned... might get the Patriot 1 disc done before July...or late July... Basically, a month ahead of where I thought I would be...

The finished demos with very little changes necessary are:

1. Spectrum of Orbit
2. [almost done]
3. Ultraviolet Landscape
4. [almost done]
5. Pneumatology
6. Ethereal Fire
7. [after vessels]
8. Acrostics
9. c l o c k

so, more than halfway thru the hard part of the first 9 Warlock albums...and there are a lot of tracks on each one...Ultraviolet Landscape ended up needing to be put on 2 discs, for example...and Pneumatology, originally only like...9 songs...is 25 tracks... feels nice to finally be getting these done and I'm not getting tired of listening to them...which is also nice...

The topic is one of the Acrostics songs first little blurbs....

For anyone who uses Audacity, I found a cool trick for mastering which I haven't read about anywhere... There are preset EQs in the "Equalization" option, and if you duplicate the main tracks and play with the volume enough, you get a great sound with "Telephone," for the music panned with one duplicate left and the other right... for Vocals, the 100hrtz Rumble/AM Radio/Walkie-Talkie work nice for a 50% similar kind of pan... keep the volumes lower than the main tracks though...sounds way good. Obviously depending on the content, and vibe, you can switch them up...

For example, if I was mastering some song about a shipwreck, which I was doing for the Vessels demo yesterday, I would do something like this: Record two different main vocal tracks [one usually with harmonies on a handheld condenser mic and the other on a basic condenser for studio recording through a preamp with phantom power].... then duplicate them and mix the volumes up so nothing clips [i.e. -2 for the main ones and like...-15 or something for the duplicates...2 of each duplicate...]...Pan the duplicates 100% and 50% each stereo side and then EQ the handheld condenser to like...Telephone or "Walkie-Talkie"...add some plate reverb....then with the other set, add 100hrtz Rumble or like...AM Radio....and the stereo-ization adds a depth previously not there...

This of course works best only after the basic mastering process: Declipping, no clicking, hiss removing, little high/low pass filterings...compressions... but, if you know what I'm talking about, really good trick...