
You know, since we’ve all got the proverbial day jobs and crap like that, some of our tunes get worked on for a while and then just… sit. We either get some kind of music or lyric block, or some other shiny new tune catches our attention and we’re off to the races.
Or sometimes we think we’re pretty much done with the song, and we go on to work on other things thinking that when it’s time to get the songs together for mastering it will be there all wrapped up and ready to go.
On occasion we’ll go back and listen to a song and wonder, “WTF were we thinking?” Maybe it was too much idea-juice, or too late of a night, but we’ll find that the mix sounds like it’s being delivered from under a blanket, or that the bass is subsonically shredding speaker cones – and not in a good way.
This, my friends, is what happened with the upcoming song “Martini”.
Some time, when we’re all sitting around the campfire with a handy supply of fresh adult beverages, I’ll regale you with the exceptionally long genesis of “Martini”. For now, though, it’s enough to know that we’ve already worked on multiple versions. It was a supreme drag to realize that we still weren’t quite “there” with it.
So, last Wednesday KB and I convened here, cranked the sweet jeebus out of the amps, and cut new guitar tracks. Even though tracking my part was a pain in the ass because I did it in drop-C and my guitar was in need of constant re-tuning (like in the fricking middle of the song, on every take), it was worth it.
Here’s a spiffy comparison of the raw tracks. The original guitars are in the first round, and then at about :10 the audio cuts over to the new guitars. To be fair, the drum mix is cleaned up and there are new loops in the updated mix, but even without those changes I think the new guitars breathe new life into the old, stale mix:
[audio:martini-guit-ab.mp3]