back in business

i had a really productive day yesterday. i sang the vocals for a song called 'willows' and then lugged all of my mountain of crap to the stairwell to record some reverb for those new vocals and several of the 'all hope is blind' songs with vocals that are finished. i used the new microphone to record the reverb and it seemed to work quite nicely- much less tape hiss and the reverb sounds a bit clearer. the 'ess' sounds are going to be murder though and i'm a bit worried about that once it's time to press the record to vinyl as 'esses' are murder on vinyl. time will tell. i think that 'down to the willows' from 'all hope is blind' might be a finished track now- i'm not 100% sure. the string parts are slightly dissonant- can't figure out what's wrong with them- but i did a mixdown and it seemed to me that it is probably a good dissonant- it actually moves in and out of dissonance which makes for an unsettling feeling- which suits the mood of the song. what's more i don't think that the instruments are out of tune like i had previously thought. so i've got the mix of it and i'm just going to listen to it a bunch as a finished track. nice. it feels good to have a finished track. '4am train' sounds fantastic now- all it needs is a violin part and then it's finished too. 'windsong' is nearly finished as well- it really only needs a few things period. the others are coming along.
so then i got all of that done and now there isn't much left to do for the 'dandelions' ep (which has been true for quite a while, really). i've started mixing the ep- i have a few final mixes in hand as well. i listen to the whole thing and i am quite pleased with it. i was worried that the quality was going to dip a bit after 'down to sleep' but now i don't really give a fuck about that stuff because the songs are good enough that i need them to be out there. what's more we've been playing a lot of the songs live and they've already become mainstays which means that they are good. i've found that if we don't play new songs live it's usually a bad sign. i'd almost given up on 'willows' as well until i listened to it. the guitars i had thought were kind of crappy but really what ended up happening was that i tried them without any eq and basically that is the way that they sound best- exactly as they were recorded. the same is somewhat true for 'glasslands'- which is so good it was supposed to be a hidden track and ended up being added to the group of listed tracks. it serves now as a buffer between two songs that basically have the same drum beat.
other than all of that it feels really good to have a real weekend off again. it made the week feel a bit more bearable knowing that i was going to have a weekend at the end of it- a real one. this is my first proper weekend in about a month or so. i guess i'm not surprised that it kind of got me inspired to get productive again. i felt really good yesterday.
i have a nice fat paycheck waiting for me at work today that stefanie's going to deposit for me today. it will have something called 'extra money' on it. just in time for her birthday- which has become a three day extravaganza. tomorrow night we're going to the brauhaus with a bunch of people from her work, a few from my work and hopefully my sister and her boyfriend. saturday night we're going out to dinner with claire. saturday night is also when deerhunter is playing at the metro and stefanie doesn't want me to go now since we're going out to dinner. then sunday night stefanie and i will celebrate on our own and she'll open presents and whatnot. i also have to buy her another present and then pay for dinner and such and the brauhaus is always a dent in the wallet so i don't really expect to have anything left by the end of the weekend. then thanksgiving is basically the week after that- i think that as it falls it doesn't affect my work week at all- which i'm going to decide is a good thing right now.
the acoustic show is making some progress towards working out. fingers crossed. as it stands now it looks like we'll be playing at the record bar at 6pm on a saturday night. probably a decent fit. we are going to play for about 30 minutes- which will probably be a good thing. i didn't want this to be too much of a production. i hope that people show up. it still amazes me how few people we know can show up at our shows when we manage to play in kansas city even though we hardly ever play there. i hope that this time is different but i'm not holding my breath. at least we'll get to play. i just have to remember to record it this time. i didn't remember to record the last show, which was a shame because it went so well and everything sounded so good. i also really wish i'd recorded the seattle show as that ended up being the best show that we played on our tour.