ugh.

running this through mastering software really pulls the parts of the mix out that i want pulled out, which are mostly on the bottom end, but it also introduces a large amount of noise into the track. the noise is at the same frequency level as the cymbals, and is the result of not cleaning the parts up well before i mixed them together in the wave editor (a lot of it is tape hiss). trying to mix the bottom over the track is just making it muddy - what i want is a clean signal on the bottom mastered separately from the top. the only way i could get around the problem is to rebuild the track from scratch - which is essentially impossible. there's all kinds of reverb settings and time manipulations that i could approximate but could never recreate. rebuilding the track is necessarily going to create a new song, which i don't want to do - i already did that a few months ago.

everything i'm doing right now is final. i don't want to come back at this in another five years and decide it still doesn't sound the way i want it to.

so, i'm going to have to do many, many experiments. and this is likely consequently going to take a lot longer than i planned it to take...

i've already learned the lessons and applied them, but i'm still stuck with the consequences.

there's really nothing else like this (excluding the earliest demos, which i can write off as early demos). it's not just the last time i'm mixing this track, it's also the last time i'm going to be dealing with this problem.