Week 3’s track was not one where everything came together without friction. The track has been nearly finished for a while but was sitting in the pile of not-quite-done. This makes it a quintessential piece for the website. There are many reasons why a piece can sit unfinished for too long:

• Sheer resistance.
• Fear of the finished piece falling short.
• The relinquishment of hope.
• Lack of determination
• The accumulation of too many such pieces, such that it all feels like a swamp and starting afresh feels more inviting.
• A belief that only with further learning and experience can I justify the piece’s promise.

When I came to open this up, something dispiriting (in the short term, I hope) happened as I was finishing it. I was greeted by a wealth of ‘enhancements’ I’d made to various elements of the track – giving the drums a bit more distortion, the pads more fizz, the sounds more coherence. On returning afresh, I found that many of these were not helping; some were harming.

So finishing the piece mainly involved removing plenty of ‘enhancement’s that I thought were a good idea at the time, revealing the track again, and then making a far small number of overall balancing corrections.

I’ve noticed that the really good producers seem to add far, far less processing than less experienced ones. Some are incredibly judicial in their work, but each change seems to count so much more. This is exemplified by mastering engineers (who receive someone else’s finished track and make the final tweaks to prepare it for release. Their changes are often tiny: a db of eq cut here, a touch of gentle compression there. When you’re following along you don’t think their changes are adding up to much, but when you here the original again it’s like night and day.

It’s hard stuff this, but in the end I was pleased with the result.