Go Around...

Ever been on a flight that aborted a landing on final approach? It usually happens something like this. Your pilot announces to the passengers and cabin crew that they've begun the final approach into your destination. The cabin crew makes one more sweep through the aisle to collect any remaining trash and ensure that everyone's seat backs are forward and tray tables are up.

As the plane makes its way towards the runway, you can feel the pilot giving the plane inputs to line up and descend gradually back to Mother Earth. The engines are steady, wing tips respond up and down to those pilot inputs, and we all get a little butterfly in our stomach as we anticipate touching down, followed by a bounce, and the engines throwing into reverse thrust as we make the stop from 170MPH (or however may knots that translates to...)

On an aborted landing, at some point in the landing process, the pilots "floor it" and send enough thrust to the engines to climb. The feeling of descending is replaced by engines roaring, and you can feel the lift taking your tummy high into the air. Usually the flight crew will come on the overhead shortly after this sequence to let everyone know... "folks, we had to go around because of xyz situation" (last plane didn't clear the runway, etc).

These situations are usually harmless, but they mentally take us out of our routine expectations. So, you sit and adjust (tighten) your seatbelt as you feel the plane lift, turn, turn, and line back up. Now we are having to put ourselves back into another approach, all while reconciling that we should have been on the ground by now.

This past week, I had a big "Go around" moment. Musically, that is.

Every job has a process.

A set of tasks that need to be regularly and predictably executed.

Even music production.

Two weeks ago, my producer, Collin, and I sent the latest track to our mastering engineer to put the finishing polish on it. At a high level, Mastering is a process of adjusting the eq shape and overall volume of the track. Most often, elevating the volume to commercial expectations.

After waiting for a few days for the track delivery, it arrived exactly when promised. I was excited to hear the final product and push it out to all the streaming platforms so you could listen to it every day.

I clicked on the file with great anticipation of auditory bliss. Within the first few moments of hearing the vocal begin, I pressed the spacebar on my computer to stop playback.

The lead vocal was distorted. This track isn't usable. I declared a "Go around"...

First, what happened to make the track unusable? This is a story of a few small things adding up.

We tried a new way of recording the vocals, printing a compressor plug-in after the mic pre.

We tried having me record at a hotter level. In other words, we were pushing a lot of hardware saturation in the mic pre before it hit the compressor.

Add these together, and we had a heavily saturated signal smashing into a compressor, and it printed this way.

Why didn't we catch it?

Well, this signal path has the vocal a nice, full, warm sound. We were expecting some saturation (saturation is a pleasant artifact in audio recording). We didn't catch the fact that it was oversaturated.

The vocal track became the food equivalent of an overcooked steak. Rats.

This week, I will re-cut the vocal and start the process of "going around". The great news is that by doing so, we will have something that we are extraordinarily proud of.

I can't wait for you to hear it and pray with it.

In the meantime, enjoy the ride, folks, we'll be landing shortly.

I'll see you down the road, Greg