Tag: EP

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We mixed our EP at El Studio with Phil Manley, over two separate half-day sessions in December. Phil (from Trans Am and Life Coach) did an amazing job, was very easy to work with, and provided a lot of information and guidance as we worked through the songs.

It was really interesting to mix via an entirely analog workflow. The sessions were loaded into ProTools, but then everything went out to the MCI mixing console and through various outboard processors, before being bounced down to 1/4″ 2-track tape, and then finally recorded back into the ProTools session.

Highlights included using outboard analog gates on the drums, checking out the amazing and unique plate reverb, and listening to the mixes in the live room through some massive speakers designed and built by Bill Putnam.

In particular, Phil did an excellent job making the mix sound bigger and more cohesive. It’s hard to say exactly what the analog workflow contributed to the mix, but it did make things surpisingly efficient. Rather than spend hours selecting plugins, each component of the mix had its dedicated outboard processing, then everything went to the tape, and that was it. The only downside to this style of mixing was the lack of recall, which wasn’t a big deal for us, since our songs are pretty simple.

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We are excited to share our first EP with you. It seems strange to give a title to an EP. An EP should either be self-titled, have a chronological number, or have no title at all. This one is self-titled, but will probably be described in the future as the “5 song EP”, unless the next one also has five songs…

We recorded this EP ourselves, in our practice space in San Francisco. The songs were mixed over two days at El Studio by the great Phil Manley. We will cover that experience in a separate post, but very briefly, if you like the analog sound and workflow, then you should go to El Studio. We mastered the album ourselves, for three different formats, relying heavily on a plugin called LEVELS to make sure that the mixes were hitting the correct loudness targets for streaming, iTunes, and BandCamp.

You can listen to the EP on BandCamp, or you can listen to the streaming versions of the songs here.