Posted on Mon, Aug 2, 2010
Wow, has it really been a year since I finished remixing Crawford Street? Well, I've been at it again, and I'm very happy to announce that by popular demand, I've remixed my Only Whispering CD as well! Here's a link to the album tracks, or you can download a ZIP file of all of the tracks.
The instrumental mixes are also updated. Enjoy!
This was done with the same philosophy as my other remix projects: nothing new is recorded, I only use what's there, and I keep the same feel of the originals.
I went into this process thinking it was going to be a breeze - I mostly liked the sound, there were just a few flubs and clicks I wanted to patch up. Those damn pops that creep up now and then were caused by a piece of crap Tascam interface I used for a couple months as I was finishing the original recording. Unfortunately, it turns out there wasn't much I could do with those - the underlying audio was pretty twisted, so it wasn't possible to gracefully remove the pops. So pretend you're listening to it on vinyl or something, I guess!
It turns out that most of the work to be done wasn't with pitch, because by this point in my musical career, I'd mostly figured out how to sing without sounding like a theremin next to a ceiling fan. The bigger challenge was timing, mostly caused by my foolish thinking that buying a drum set would instantly make me sound like Neil Peart. Luckily, Sonar's AudioSnap has come a long way, but it was still an incredibly tedious process on some of the songs (especially Deaf Dreamer and Goodbye to Spring).
The overall production was pretty good to start with, so I didn't mess with it much. I did pull back a little on the limiting on the mastering, and added a little ambience to some of the tracks that sounded dried out (especially Deaf Dreamer). I still had a little residual overbrightness on the mixes, but not as bad as the first two CDs. The bass bomb on the first two was already fixed. There were a few tracks that were frozen as 16 bit files, which overloaded and distorted them. I redid them as 24 bit and they sounded much nicer. The piano on Fit For a King was switched from the unrepairably noisy The Grand to the much cleaner Akoustik Piano. Many tracks were hissy from my crappy audio gear at the time, so I did my best to fix those up.
The other challenge wasn't a technical one so much as a logistical one - this was the first (and only) CD I've had professionally pressed. That means I have boxes and boxes of discs in pretty shrink wrapping up in my attic gathering dust, each CD with the original recording eternally pressed onto its shiny butt. I've decided that rather than trying to throw a new disc in the old cases, I'm going to keep selling the shrink-wrapped version (collector's edition, I guess?) and include a link to the FLAC download so you can burn your own updated version. But who's still listening to plastic discs these days, anyway? The FLAC link is updated if you already have it, or if you've already bought a CD, just drop me a line and I'll hook you up with the updated FLACs.
As always, this is free to download and use for any purpose under Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution licensing.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy. I didn't think this would have a big effect on the overall quality, but I'm very pleasantly surprised what I was able to squeeze out of these songs.
Thanks, Josh. Shiny, squeaky-clean Woodward is always welcome. 
Mickey Limon
Party. Jetset. GO!
Whoops, fixed. Thanks!
Salutations! I'm a chinese. I love your songs very much,especially the song named 'Coffee'. Would you send me a download link?Thanks !
Thanks! And of course, here you go:
http://www.joshwoodward.com/song/Coffee
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