My New Album! Self-produced. Dark songwriting. (now w/video)

[leigh]

This album has been in the works for quite a while, and I'm happy to say it's finally out! Please have a listen to "Where the Knives Meet Between the Rows" here:


http://music.leighmarble.com/album/wher ... n-the-rows

I started this record with a full band, and the intent to bang out a "band album", 90% live in the studio, and get it done quickly. Due to a combination of circumstances (some of which are detailed here, if you're interested), that plan went off the rails.

Some songs (like "Goodnight", "Inebriate Waltz", "Greener Pastures") did wind up retaining a "live take" approach, and those consist mostly of tracks played live in the studio. But for other songs, I took pieces of those initial sessions and re-built new arrangements around them, working out of my garage studio.

Band tracks were recorded at The Map Room here in Portland, with engineer Josh Powell. There are some videos from those tracking sessions that I'll be posting soon.

The rest of the production work was done at my own place. I mixed most of the record myself, working mostly ITB in Pro Tools, except for "Greener Pastures" which was mixed on a Trident Series 65. Three of the tracks were mixed by Jeff Stuart Saltzman at his place.

"Where the Knives Meet Between the Rows" came out this week, and has been getting some great reviews. Thank you for listening, and I'm happy to talk more details if you're curious about particulars.

cheers,
Leigh


The board mix for "Greener Pastures":

[leigh]

There were a handful of plug-ins that got heavy use in mixing this album, but above all the one that saved my ass was the Kush UBK-1. Over half of the time I used compression, it was done with the UBK-1.

It's a great sounding plug-in, and strange as it may sound, it made me LIKE mixing this record. After over a year of hearing these tracks, I was kind of burnt out on them by the time it came to mixing. I had decided early on that I wanted to try mixing this one myself - my past records had been mixed by Jeff Stuart Saltzman (who, as it turned out, wound up mixing three of these songs anyways), and he does awesome work, but I wanted to work on my mixing skills and do this one myself.

My big ideas aside, when it actually came time to mix, I was under the gun timewise, and feeling intimidated. On a whim (or maybe to procrastinate), I decided to demo the UBK-1 by pulling up the first song to mix and trying it out there. And I'm so glad I did! Very quickly, I liked what I heard, and by the end of doing that mix, I knew that this plug-in would be a keeper. I felt more in control of the sounds, and despite having had these songs around for so long, they now felt fresh and exciting again. And THAT, even if this was somehow a placebo (which, rest assured, it's not), would be worth the price of admission right there.

The more I worked with it, the more I realized how versatile a processor it was. There's a lot of nice stuff happening under the hood, but this is not a one-trick-pony, a run-of-the-mill compressor with a little "nicerizer" action added. This is like 5 different compressors (via the mode switch), with a LOT of ways to control how hard they push back, and separately, how hard they saturate/distort.

The UBK-1:
http://www.wavedistribution.com/webstore/store.html

cheers,
Leigh

[mjau]

Leigh...I'm loving this! Nice sounds, and the mixes are really terrific.

[leigh]

Leigh...I'm loving this! Nice sounds, and the mixes are really terrific.

Thank you!

[leigh]

I'm making this album free to download, for today only:

http://music.leighmarble.com/

More thoughts and background on Free Album Day here: http://eepurl.com/l8Cvr

cheers,
Leigh

[leigh]

I can finally share this with you! The first "making of" video from the album tracking sessions, for the song "Cars":

http://oregonmusicnews.com/2012/06/15/n ... he-studio/

Leigh Marble and band recording at The Map Room studio, Portland, OR. The audio you hear is the final mix of the song, synced to shots of us playing the rhythm parts.

There's a few of these videos I put together, and I played around with including different amounts of the audio track from the footage. On this one, except for the very beginning (and the one little "easter egg"), it's audio from the album mix.

cheers,
Leigh

PS: This song lives at Bandcamp here:
http://music.leighmarble.com/track/cars

[leigh]

Here's a another video - this one has more live audio and talking in it... hashing out arrangement details last minute and whatnot.



LEIGH MARBLE - Tracking "Holden" at The Map Room

[leigh]

Just posted the last of the videos, and put all 3 in-studio clips into a playlist for your watching convenience:

Knives Recording Documentary

Watch as the wiseass ?Holden?, the mellow ?Cars?, and the terminally depressed lullaby "Goodnight" are conjured into existence at The Map Room studio in Portland, OR.

[leigh]

I did a remix of the song "Jackrabbit", using an approach I'd never tried before. Hear the remixed track here:

"Jackrabbit Cruise Ship Remix"

My approach to this remix was to loop 8 bars of the song's chorus, and shape a new piece by bringing the different layers in and out. The elements got new sonic treatments as well - for example, the bass was hipassed & fuzzed, the acoustic guitar was further distorted, and new delays and reverbs were added as well. But the real coup for me was finding enough interesting ways to arrange a new piece via the mute buttons.

All the tracks heard in the remix were part of the original (album) mix, except for the canned samba rhythm you hear right from the start. That's a part I had added during the overdubbing process, just goofing around with the M-Tron one day.

The original version of "Jackrabbit" is here:
http://music.leighmarble.com/track/jackrabbit

cheers,
Leigh