Posted 6th May 2009

[Typed from a table seat on an Edinburgh -> Newcastle train]

Well that's it done. "Ambients" is finally finished, fully mastered and sounds amazing (in my humble opinion of course!). It's been a pretty difficult past two days in Edinburgh as it was very difficult getting the most out of every song. Some songs in particular (once we cut them open) we realised had a lot going wrong with them, although it kinda explains why I'd never fully liked them. For instance "Of Rolling Hills" which is the second track on the album has never been one of my favourites and so it was nice to find loads of millisecond out-of-time string sections and dissonant harmonies amongst the lower instruments. Now I'm actually liking the track a lot more!

Mastering the album was my brother, the wonderful Ghostsmut with me there to help and to make sure things didn't veer too much away from what I was intending for the songs (a right I kinda exerted a few too many times I think!). Here he is blatantly not working:

Though I did get a bit worked up today when we were running out of time and all the software suddenly turned on me. For instance I exported the whole album track by track only to find it had decided to cut off the last 5 seconds of every song because some rogue setting was not turned off, or when we converted the entire album to high-quality MP3 and transferred it to my MP3 player only to be told they were all corrupted. Boo!

It's funny how stressful situations can bring out the worst in you, it was scary seeing myself in proper stamping-feet-and-whining mode as we began to run out of time and nothing sounded right.

Luckily my brother is a wonderful and VERY patient man and made sure about everything.

At the minute I'm on the train back from Edinburgh, as tired as tired could be, here's a picture of me in my current pitiful state lol:

The reason I'm so tired is because I was up till 3am last night checking the mixes only to find we had normalised them all and ruined a lot of the subtlety of tracks like "Forest" and "Ever Emptiness" then up at 9:30am because of building works... See the picture below for a few of the notes I made. I recorded a VBlog before I left my brother's place for the station so that'll be up on YouTube in a day or two.

Hope you're all doing well, just think the next place you'll hear "Ambients" is on iTunes. How scary is that?

Right now I could really do with some kind messages or interest in the album so please feel free to comment or just say hello. I can barely type at the minute lol.

Syn x

P.S. If you're wondering what state Edinburgh was in while I was there, the answer is of course, rubbish!