“New Mix Tonight” or: “Needs More Tuba”
Beginning February 1st, I will be posting early versions, rough mixes and sketches of songs from all four Whiskers releases, in reverse chronological order. This will occur once a week for twelve weeks, as twelve songs will be featured.
A quick bit about the way Whiskers songs were made: Jim and I (Thom) would occasionally throw some ideas together—Jim’s riffs and chord progressions, my lyrics and melodies—and write a song in the most raw and skeletal sense. Then we would record that and post it as an mp3 on a message board for all the Whiskers to hear and critique and then record their own parts. They would send those new parts to me and I would incorporate them into the mix and post that new mix and it would go on and on like that until we all deemed the song to be done.
Some songs were declared done in only a few iterations. Ziggurats took less than a month I think. Five mixes—five mp3 files posted to the message board. Some songs took nearly two years and 30 to 40 mixes.
Essentially, the writing process and recording process were one. What would usually happen in a practice space had to happen much slower and in a far more calculated way. If a band member in a normal band started playing their part differently in the middle of a run-through, someone could stop and say, “What are you doing?” (Or, more politely and constructively, say, after the song, “Hey, that was cool but the old part is much much better. Stick with that. What does everyone think? Yeah? Yeah guys?”)
That practice space scene would occur with our band as well, but it could take a week for the conversation to begin and months to come to an end.
So, this production method results in so many “versions” of the songs as mp3 files. Each file is a cross-section of a song’s incomplete state within the amalgamated writing/recording process. None of these cross-sections were to be for consumption by our listeners, but—
