This blog is part 11 in an ongoing series. If you missed it, jump back to part 10.

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It was a little while again before I heard back from the producer about scheduling the vocal workshop. I reached out a couple times and then finally he responded and had changed his tune about it again. We were no longer going to do the vocal workshop and I could just go ahead and book my final session. 

In reading the email back now I’m seeing that he also omitted that we would do vocals on this day and only mentioned editing and mixing for the final session, but surely this was a mistake since we hadn’t actually recorded vocals for the song at this point. 

Right? We’re all keeping up with what’s happened so far in the sessions? Okay, good.

I wasn’t able to book my final session until October 24th and I couldn’t believe how many months had passed and how little progress I felt we’d made. 

I’m sure you know I had come to terms with the fact that the parts we’d laid down were in fact supposed to be the finished parts that he’d mix with despite the rushed and amateur way they were put together.

I was hoping for the best because this really wasn’t sounding at all like I thought it would when we started. Every time I was in his studio, I couldn’t help but glance again around at all the plaques of these very well established renowned artists he’d worked with. There is no way he’d put the same level of care into those projects as he did mine. There is just no way.

I was not excited about the final session, but tried my best to stay positive. A great mixer can turn what we’d done at least into a pretty clean sounding mix with the right tools, so if nothing else we might have that and maybe I could use it to appeal to Factor or something for some grants to do it for real myself. 

I arrived and after waiting for him to get off another phone call, he sort of clapped his hands together and said, “Alright so let’s mix this song!”

I hesitated. 

What?

In hyper-speed, the series of our previous conversations whipped through my mind. Surely he remembers we have not done vocals. This guy specializes in working with vocalists. I got this gig through a singing audition. This should be the most important part of the production to get right. He previously wanted me to go through a vocal workshop before we recorded vocals. We didn’t do the workshop, but we also did not do vocals.

I was mildly dizzy and flat-faced. 

“Don’t we still have to do vocals?” I asked stupidly. 

His demeanor changed. It wasn’t the first time I’d experienced it. 

Rudely as though I was being a temperamental extremist of some sort, he shot back, “We can’t just keep re-recording things. We can go back and do it but we really shouldn’t be spending so much time going back and fourth –” 

What in the ever loving fuck is this guy on about? 

Has he even been in the room while we’ve be– oh, right, he often in fact has not been in the room while we’ve been working and he’s cut just about every single session short instead of ensuring quality work wa being captured. Nevermind.  

And if nothing else there is no fucking way he listened to my dummy-vocal take from the day I recorded guitars and thought that was my best effort? Or even a good effort?

Shouldn’t he give the slightest shit about the quality of this performance? 

I wasn’t sure how to proceed, but I was annoyed and had a lot of opinions at this point. 

I decided to keep it professional and tread lightly. 

“Well I’m just saying, because last we spoke you said we were doing vocals after the workshop. The vocal that’s on there, we can listen to it, but I really just threw that together quickly as a reference point after doing that guitar part and it was always my expectation that we’d be re-recording that.”

He sort of shook his head and was saying things like, “ultimately it’s your song so it’s important you’re happy but –” and I just didn’t buy a single thing he was saying. Sometimes this producer is really good at saying the right things, but his actions up until this point spoke incredible volumes to me. This entire thing was a wash, but I’m not folding completely yet. I’m going to make you re-record my vocal, you lazy sack.

“Yeah, let’s listen to it.” 

He cued up the session (we did not have an engineer again today), hit play and then walked out of the room. 

Cool, so you don’t care literally at all. Cool.

I didn’t have to listen to it, I knew what it sounded like – I recorded it. 

It played through twice regardless before he came back into the room. 

“Yeah we’re going to have to re-record this,” I said. 

He didn’t seem happy about it. “Alright, I’ll have to move some stuff.”

It was clear he had no plan to be recording today. The vocal booth was full of random shit. Hot plates, boxes, I’m not even sure what was all there but as he moved in and out of the booth with a new item it felt like watching a college kid moving out of their door room. Why is there so much shit in that small space? 

I didn’t offer to help. 

My brain seemed to almost shut off entirely to stop me from thinking back through this experience. I waited standing quietly until it was cleared. 

“I think the mic is high enough,” he said as he exited the booth.

It was actually a little too high for me, but fuck it at this point, guys. “Yeah, it’ll do.” 

I knew I wouldn’t use this for anything. I was disappointed and I knew that would probably carry through on my performance that day, but I know that there will be many situations where I might not feel up to performing on a gig day and I thought it was important to carry through and give it my best go anyways. That’s what professionals do. Being able to see the benefit of any given situation is a skill I’ve learned after a lifetime of increasing disappointments.

I waited while he got the session ready and we did a quick mic check for levels. 

I wasn’t in the mood to be too fussy, but I had to call out a couple things before I was able to give it a proper go. 

As I worked through a first test take, the levels were peaking horribly and distorting hard. That had to be fixed, obviously. And he flooded my headphones with reverb which was distracting and needed to go. I don’t normally use any reverb when I track myself, so it’s disorienting at such close proximity. Plus there was too much vocal in my headphones even with my taking off an ear as I do, and overall the level was too abrasive for me. I should have actually caused a bit of a fuss about the height of the microphones because it caused me to stretch my neck too much to compensate at times even though I was trying to be mindful of not doing that. 

But I just wanted to run through the song a couple times to improve what we had. So we did two, and I figured we could listen back, but he pushed for a third, which was fine because I know I was only giving myself two takes because I felt like he had no interest in what we were doing anyways. It was a weird last ditch effort of his to feign interest in the project and I just wasn’t having it. I was pretty over the whole thing.

So I did three takes and then came out to listen. There was really just 1 spot and 1 line I wanted to re-record because I fell flat on it, but he said he’d rather just float over the same line from the previous pre-chorus. 

I prefer not to do that, personally, but I was willing to let that go, too. As long as it sounded fine – sometimes even when you fly over the same part it just doesn’t sit right in the new location, there’s all sorts of fluctuations that happen when I record vocals that (to me) are important to the way the song flows and develops over time. They are sometimes very small fluctuations, but they make a big difference to my own ears. Again, I’m not really focused on perfect and same-ness in my productions, it’s a little more about the way the story is expressed.

Once that was done, I wasn’t exactly happy of course, but I couldn’t see this track getting any better from here. 

When I first signed on to this, I really thought he’d make more of an effort to encourage backing vocals and harmonies given his experience in pop and that was something I was really looking for, because it’s an area I am actively trying to improve upon, but he didn’t care to do any of those on this song at this point. 

We had not quite hit the hour mark when he said, “Okay, so I prefer to mix alone.” 

Why am I not surprised? 

Weird because the original plan he had for today was to have me come in while we mixed the song, or did he forget that, too?  

My eyes must have glazed over at this point. I checked out. This guy sucks. This place sucks. These plaques and chart numbers are meaningless.

“That’s fine.” 

Before I had a chance to ask, he added, “I might want to add some shaker or something to this too, so I’ll mix it and do that and then send this over to you in 24 hours.” 

Oh, so we’re still recording as well, but without me? Odd. Who’s song is this? Am I confused again? Also did he forget that he nixed the shaker we already did on the first day saying how much he didn’t like it?

This guy had a habit of saying one thing and doing something completely different after the fact anyways, so I didn’t think it carried much weight and wouldn’t have been surprised if there was any shaker on the track after I got the mix back, if I even got the mix back at all. That’s how swindled I felt at this point – I didn’t expect to ever hear a mixed track.

For someone that had stretched out this project over so many months, I had a hard time believing the mix would be done within a day, too. 

Weird to suddenly have so much urgency after dragging this on. 

I left that day feeling dull and unimpressed and a little mad at myself for ever putting any trust in this guy.

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We’re almost there. Come back tomorrow for the next installment in this series!