The process of a song: write it; practice it; record the individual instruments and vocals; balance those individual parts so they mix together. Mixing is fascinating to me, and also where I find myself caught up in an endless quest for misplaced perfection. The tracks are there, played or sung. What has been recorded won’t be changed. Yes, it is possible to go back and re-record a performance or have a do over, but that is something I choose not to do. (Reasons for this perhaps in a future post.). The “best” I can do is not to use it.

So these tracks of individual performances need to somehow fit together. Their relative dynamics are adjusted, some of their tonality may be changed with EQ so they have more individual space and don’t fight with each other for the same frequency range, some parts may be muted and then only play in a particular part of the song. And again, some might not even be used at all. Whatever I had originally intended to convey, whatever emotion or feeling was there when I wrote and played the music and the lyrics, passes through this process called mixing, and I find it to be just as much of the creative process. What comes out of this becomes the identity of the song, how other’s will hear it, it’s public persona. Hopefully it becomes something someone will want to listen to, without it having lost any of the original passion.

Life is a little bit like this. We have all these individual parts we perform, and we don’t really get to re-do them. If we don’t like some of them, or they don’t seem to fit, the best we can do is mute them. Then we take all of the parts and mix them, and put together this identity. We adjust the parts, the volumes, the tone, and try to make it something someone will want to listen to. Or think well of. Or be with. We just have to make sure we don’t lose the passion in trying to do that, because if we do, we have lost the song.