Dustin, Anthony and I met one last time at Fur Seal studio in Minneapolis to work out the final mixes for Modern Day Fairy Tales. Nick regretfully couldn't be with us tonight, but he said he trusted us to make the right decisions.
Earlier this month, Joe was able to get the first mixes to us and we all listened to them and made notes. We all got together and compared our notes for the purpose of making sure we were all on the same page before going back to Fur Seal. We thought it would suck to get there and completely disagree on some minuscule thing and waste Joe's time arguing.
So after we were all in agreement, we went back to where the magic happened two months ago. For the record, we all really like the initial mixes, but we are nitpickers and end up bordering on perfectionism sometimes. Joe did a really great job on setting us up, and our notes just finished it off. Dustin and Anthony hadn't yet heard the mixes for "Bumblebee" and "Like a Dream," so the night started with listening through those tracks and writing down some tweak ideas. Then we gave Joe a copy of the notes and jumped right in.
It was a really smooth process. Joe would bring up the session files and simply tweak, nudge and dial up or down as we told him. We ate some pizza, drank some soda and had some laughs. That's about as much as I can say without elaborating on the boring details of every single thing we worked on. Let it suffice to say we got a lot of good work done; tedious detail work. And it made all of the tracks even better than before. We started at 8:00 p.m. and left around 2:30 a.m., with the final mixes burned to discs in our hands.
Now all that's left is mastering, artwork and printing. It's happening, and hopefully it'll all be said and done by the end of May. No promises, though.
