Yesterday, everybody’s order was sent out!
Now that they are going to start listening…some people have asked what exactly is different with the 2020 Mixes on each album….
It’s a bit of a technical question, so here goes:
To make the 5.1 Surround mixes on the Blu Ray discs, I wanted to have the basic stereo mixes as a starting point. Since the songs were mixed so long ago, just recalling them wasn’t totally easy. There were different things to fix, or recall on each song, such as re-recording some of the effects (which weren’t originally recorded, and just playing live during the mix), and semi- re-balancing the whole mix into Pro Tools. When originally mixing, I was essentially mixing with stems onto a 32 channel outboard mixer.
Also, now I wanted to split all of the tracks, so that I had complete control of front to back and left to right (for surround). I didn’t want the mixes to be completely different sounding from the originals, but if I heard something that I thought could sound better, I wanted to be able to fix it…so a little level or eq, or re-balance here or there. It was a lot of A/B-ing the original, and making sure that what I had sounded as good, if not better than the originals. The differences are more noticeable on some songs than others, and maybe for some listeners, they might not even hear any thing different…but they are, in fact, completely new mixes, and we thought that they should be labeled as such.
For the Early Versions of the songs, as a starting point, I went through literally 100’s of CD-Rs that I had made at the time, while working on the album, and listening to an equal amount of ADAT tapes that some of the songs had been recorded on.
I love listening to songs where you can hear both the starting place of the song, and what’s not there when the song was finished…. (different vocals, or different arrangements, or missing guitars or keyboards), and comparing it to where it was when it was finished…it’s a chance to see where the songs were at, at an interesting point in time before they were finished. Some of these Early Versions I was able to find in mulit-track format, and some were just stereo mixes, so finalizing and mixing them differed, depending on the song, but in the end, we think all of them offer a cool look into the songs and where they started.
We hope you enjoy taking everything in, we’d love to hear from you after you get them and have had a chance to absorb everything!
-Statik