If anything, I've been brooding over my latest piece that I posted, "I Don't Stand Alone". When I listen to the mastered track, I think that there's so much that I could have done with it. The bass was all out of alignment and I hate the sound of the kick drum. It sounds like I'm beating on a kick drum case, rather than the drum itself. And, funny enough, I have a sample of a kick drum case and believe it or not, it sounds so much better than what I have. If anything, there's a lot of life missing in this song. I started replacing some of the amp modelling in it and started applying some creative cutting with my EQ, and the song started coming to life. And, yet, it feels like there is so much more to do on this song.
And yet, there is the other side that is eating at me: should I do it? The song when I recorded it was a milestone in my life. At that time, I felt that I had learned more about mixing than any other time. I know that I am always going to get better. It's a known fact that the more you work to improve at something, the more you will improve. You may not realize it at the time, but you will improve. I'm sure that I can look back at every song that I have mixed and find ways to improve it one way or another. The question is, how far do I go? I mean, if I start looking at this song and improve it, yay! Then what? Am I going to start looking at other songs, seeing how I can improve them. I have a whole bunch of songs that I know that I could improve upon. Do I fix them all up as well?
And then the cycle will repeat itself. I'm sure in the process, I'm going to find my mixing skills even more improved and then I'm going to look at the entire batch of songs, including the ones that I have recently done, and once again try to improve them. And then it will happen over and over and over again. I know I spend a day multing bass parts and stuff for this song and then discovering just how much I hate the kick drum. Then what happens when I improve the kick drum? I may make this song perfect... and at the same time make it perfectly boring. Yeah, there is some lifeless stuff about it. However, there is some character to the song. I don't want to lose the character of the song. It's not supposed to be perfect. I am not perfect... I'm far from perfect. That's the beauty of music. It allows me to display my imperfections in such a way that it is perfectly imperfect.
Maybe, that's the time I should realize that it is time to just stop. I should leave it alone for now. Work on some new stuff and play around with some new ideas. There's so much more stuff that I'm starting to write now. I should just write it for now and get it out of my head onto the hard drives. I should be happy with my perfect imperfections and not try to make them something they are not.
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