ok. i've got the thing set up to remix it - i can do this. i may have to split the drums up, but it's otherwise pretty clean. you can barely tell on an a/b, and i'm going to be putting it through a mastering transform, anyway, so it just has to be close. bonus: i can resync that classical guitar part.

that's it for the night, and probably until wednesday afternoon....

it's almost a total reconstruction, afterall.

the parts i can't recreate are the drum soundscape (it's the reverb) and the time modded guitar effect that defines the second half of the track. i mean, i can do it in theory. and i may end up trying. but trying to get the exact point where i split it and the exact length i stretched it to is a fool's errand. if i feel forced to do that, i'm going to get a different shape in the second half of the song. i can say i've decided that the production is more important, but i want it to be a last resort.

i should be able to just cut the track at about the six minute point.

it's a slow fade in at that point. so it's easy to splice. i can then master that section a little differently.

so, it's coming together. again: i'm not doing this a fifth time, so i'm not fucking around with it this time.

ok, it's the first few minutes that are pissing me off.

and i can probably reconstruct the first few minutes. it just means cross fading the end.

which is easy to do anyways.

i need to go to london (ontario) tomorrow, so i won't be working on this much longer tonight. but i think i've got a successful tactic, here.

realistic assessment: i think i can make it better. i have to resign myself to the reality that i can't make it perfect. i guess every serious composer has a piece that somehow got away from them. maybe this is it for me.

one thing i want to try is to run the drums and bass separately through a mastering shape, then kill the high end, then mix it with the same file that's had the low end cut (and just has the cymbals and snare reverbs on the top). that could conceivably separate the tracks. but i sort of already know that it's going to sound messy. have to try it though...

these are the kinds of hacks that i'm stuck with, though.

one thing i'll state clearly: in the end it'll be close to what i want, and i'll fuck with it until it is.

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.

the day i saw you cry (instrumental version)

ok, here it is one more time.

i'm confident this is really done this time. i think i should have the mix up to date to july, 2002 before the sun comes up, but i'm not uploading that version. the final production decisions may take a little longer. but i'm still convinced that this gets done by the end of the day.

--

the recording of this track over the spring of 2002 seems to have occurred in spurts, likely based around gaps in my school schedule. the drums in the first part of the track were sculpted together on the night/morning of march 7/8, which would have been a little after the track took it's initial folk punk form and centred on it existing in that way. the drums were sculpted from a mix of the initial drum machine part, real time ry30 square pushing, washes of digital noise and short, sculpted samples of greg playing in real time. the track seems to have been shaped into what it is during the week of april 15-22, a little after it was expanded by playing it as a classical piece, with the addition of multiple guitar and synth overdubs and all kinds of digital wave shaping through notch filters and time manipulation. i must have had that week off for exam related purposes; i probably had late exams that year. incomplete versions of the track exist that seem to have been burned around april 25, which are what the live version with sean would have been based upon.

the next spurt in recording was to add bass parts over the weekend of may 17-19. further drum and guitar parts were also added at this time.

i was experimenting with sequencing a rabit is wolf demo throughout may and ended up with two cd-r snapshots of the track at this point. these are the only instrumental versions from the period. unfortunately, the more complete version cannot be ripped from the cd properly - it was burned in three sections and normalized, which created volume gaps. it also has roughly 0.050 second null spots at the beginning and end of the three tracks, making it impossible to paste together properly. so, i've reconstructed a very close approximation of a late may mix out of a good sounding april mix. i've then used that mix to reconstruct a final instrumental version.

i was growing very insular during the period this was recorded, which was partially out of a decision to force myself to go straight edge in preparation for transgendered hormone therapy, which i was set to begin at the start of may. the bulk of the track was recorded before i went on hormone therapy. it may in some way reflect a sense of resigned preparation for a difficult process. but, it really comes more out of the isolation i had forced upon myself.

my parents were coming out of a difficult financial situation due partly to their own mismanagement and partly to my father coming out of a period of unemployment. he was completing a course in management over the period, which put me in the weird position of having to do his statistics homework for him. i was a second year honours math student at the time, so his basic stats assignments were not very challenging for me; conversely, he wasn't interested in the topic. i should probably have a diploma in business stats from the university of manitoba along with my math degree from carleton. but, who's counting, really? my math degree never got me anywhere in life (i haven't aspired to use it for anything....), but his management course opened up doors for him that have aided me. so, it worked out....

what this meant was that i found myself living in a split duplex around the beginning of 2002. for many years previously, i had lived in various basements and more or less had those basements to myself, merely having to tolerate the odd laundry run. the split duplex put me in the rather normal situation of having a bedroom upstairs, the privilege of having a studio downstairs and the inconvenience of having to follow scheduling rules. as i'd been so used to having total freedom in my scheduling for so long, i was unable to adjust to this.

if i were to come up and down the stairs in the middle of the night, i would wake my labrador retrievers up (who just wanted to come say hi) and that would wake up my parents. this was consequently forbidden. to get around this, i started sleeping in the afternoon, so i could go downstairs in the evening and not come back up until the morning. this left me without human contact for days or even weeks at a time. on long days, i would sleep on the carpeted floor of the studio. some days, i simply wouldn't sleep at all.

what you're hearing here is in many ways the culmination of this lack of human contact, complete abstinence from drugs and sleep deprivation - all in the context of the stress from simultaneously completing two university programs and preparing for a dramatic life shift. while the music was recorded in spurts, those spurts were emotional stress outlets. while parts of this may sound like my sanity was fragile while it was being created, the process of recording them is probably the only thing that allowed me to maintain it.

the final mix for this track was completed on nov 24, 2014, to mimic the version that existed immediately before vocals were added.

https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/track/05-the-day-i-saw-you-cry-instrumental-version

i missed a classical guitar part last night. i was wondering about it when i was mixing it, because the file was dated to after the cutoff but seemed to already exist in the mix. i'm sort of remembering that what i did was cut the file up to create a manual delay effect. so, i need to do get that back in there and upload the initial instrumental a third time.

it's a subtle effect, and you'd probably miss it if you weren't listening for it.

i missed it myself...