As the days go by we’re edging ever closer to the completion of our next EP. I’ve been poking and prodding each track to look for holes, and apart from a guitar part or two recording is almost done… Well, minus vocals, unfortunately. Laura has been travelling a lot and working rather long hours with her job, so we haven’t been able to nail down a lot of the vocal work. I’ve started mixing around most of the vocal scratch tracks, though, and have made a ton of progress. The mixing phase has been rather smooth so far — I think there’s a lot to be said for proper instrumentation that really eases the pain.

Anyway, still pretty well on course for a summer release. I had hoped for early summer, but it just didn’t work out.

In studio geek news, after a year and ridiculous amounts of fiddling and tweaking, I’ve finally exorcised the 8kHz squeal out of my UX8. Yes, I no longer have to feel like I’m mixing the day after a White Zombie concert. The only high pitched whine in my ears will be me if I ever decide to sing. After buying a bunch of different ground loop remedies and almost considering chucking the whole damn thing, the answer came down to something rather simple: don’t use the Line In inputs. They’re junk and cause significant heartache and consternation. As soon as I switched everything over to the XLR inputs all the problems went away. Easy-peasy.

Last but not least, our creaky, home-grown website has finally gotten the better of me, and I’ve decided to go all out for a fully WordPress one. When not in the studio my nights of late have consisted of watching trashy TV, sipping bourbon, and mucking about in PHP. I’m about 3/4 of the way through the technical aspects of it and have a really slick skin rolling. After that it’s all content content content… But the momentum is there to make this sucker work out.