New/Old album almost done!

Yup, I am listening to what will hopefully be the final mixes of my new (old) album. I did two different versions of the mix - the first was just too compressed, and the drums just didn't stand out at all. So I removed the heavy compression from the master track, revised the drums' "leakage" to be a bit drier sounding, and re-mixed some of the levels to balance everything out.

The final tracks may not be as loud as a commercial CD (or MP3s), but I'd rather have more dynamics and variety than to have everything sound so squashed and compressed (like Metallica's "Death Magnetic" album). And the drums sound very different than they usually sound.

The music, ... how would I describe the music? I'd say Contemporary-Progressive-Classical-Rock-Fusion. There's 3 brand new songs, 3 recent songs completely re-recorded, and 3 from "Gothambia," my 1995 cassette recording (see my most recent post below). Those songs are not what I'd call "mellow," but definitely less "metal" than I've been doing lately. Think more Kayo Dot or maudlin of the Well, with longer guitar solos and piano solos. Oh yeah, GUITAR SOLOS! I've got some really long doozys there for all of you who might think I've given up the guitar solo. Nuh-uh! Some nice long ones. But please forgive the piano solos. I'm WAY out of practice, and they're downright amateurish. But I think they fit the mood of the album very well. OH! And all of the bass guitar is 100% real. No synth bass this time.

When the songs are ready (very soon!), I will post them to The Internet Archive, Last.fm, and probably a Mediafire link. From there, anyone who wants to create their own links to Rapidshare, zshare, P2P BitTorrents, and the like, please feel free to do so. I will probably not post them to Soundclick, because some of the songs are just too long for my free account.

I really love those older songs. I put a lot of work into the original recordings back in 1995, but decided that they needed to be redone for the digital age (without tape hiss and crappy samples).