Things I didn’t know; or thought I knew, & there I was being wrong!
The first thing I’ve learned this week, as we have been mastering Drivin!, is that I like my piano playing much better if I take a month between recording and mastering.
The wait was unintentional. Or forced by circumstances, more accurately. Lee was tuning for me daily when I recorded, as a trade for my doing the layout for his CD A View from Above. (I cannot recommend that CD too highly; in fact, David Nevue selected it as the Whisperings CD of the Year for 2010. Actually, I can say this: I listen to Lee’s CDs when I want to hear lovely piano music. I can hear my music in my head! So when I want to hear with my ears, I put on Lee.)
Back to the real story: Lee was tuning for me daily, and the only time this fall that we could coordinate our schedules was the beginning of October. I already had the rest of October scheduled with other events, which meant that we would not be mastering right away. I decided to go ahead and record, since passing up the first week of October meant waiting until 2012. And the time is now!
So here we are, mastering the recording. And I like my piano playing a lot, which generally when I have been recording I do not. Lesson the first!
Lesson the second: even when I think I’ve created big noisy rambunctious music, once I can just listen to it, it is still quite spare. Spare for noisy piano music, I guess. I don’t like muddy textures. Even my approach to a “wall of sound” still has space in it. I had no clue. The music is not as “clobber you over the head” as I always imagined.
Or possibly, the music clobbers me over the head (as I am rather busy doing), and all y’all just get to listen to it.
I expect that we’ll ship this on Monday, and you’ll be able to hear what I mean by the end of November. Excuse me while I run out of the room and cheer...