When in doubt, cheat

So, the CD is really and truly almost done.
I am about to enter the very final phase where I see if I want any final tweaks to the edits and then set the levels of the respective tracks to :
-fine balance things between the instruments and vocals
-make sure they don't clip when I export them to .wav files
-make sure that they are balanced so that there aren't huge volume jumps between songs.

It's a tricky and almost tedious phase, but it mostly involves listening, making some notes, and doing some little tweaks.

To finally get there, I resorted to a big cheat.
The very last song I worked on was a take of Bowie's "Memory Of A Free Festival", a song that is very dear to me and invokes all the things I feel about having found various iterations of "my tribe" at cons, medieval events, pagan things, etc. The version I wanted to use was a very very good take that I got last year at Chesapeake Pagan Community's "Summer Gathering".
The problem was that I was having some weird sound issues in the pavillion I was playing in and my usual level and EQ settings went haywire and I wound up with a very tinny recording where the vocals were concerned. This was the song that drove me so batshit with the 31 band EQ. I would tweak things, and hear improvements, but then I would hit a wall and make things worse. I must have started from scratch about half a dozen times with that damn track, and I would have scuttled it but for it being such a good take otherwise, and it being so appropriate that I recorded it where I did. Also, I kept getting close, so damn damn close.
Ultimately, I got an EQ curve that DID take out just about all the stuff I wanted taken out, and did bring up just about all I wanted to bring up. But then it sounded just a little bit flat, and the fact is, that despite how wonky that pavillion made things sound, I was kind of grooving on the slap back echo of it's strange shape and the echoes I was getting off of the hill. Once I made it sound less tinny, I wanted it to sound more "live". The answer:
Reverb! Now if I were doing this analog, I'd just plug in my loverly coil reverb and -Tada!-
that would be it. But I wanted to keep things digital.

But the echo effect in my Linux version of Audacity (where all the good editing tools were) wasn't quite giving me what I wanted. So I exported the part into a .wav file (since the Windows Audacity couldn't read the version that the Linux version made) and then played with some of the fabulous plugins that I could download for the Windows version that I just can't seem to get loaded right on the Linux side.

A few hours(!- Why the fuck does this always have to take HOURS?!!!!) later, and I got something that I finally think sounds better than what I had. I'll still have to play with the wet and the dry tracks to get the right balance.

But the nice thing about reverb is that it can, while it spices up the sound and add alot of flavor, cover up little imperfections while it's at it.

So, I cheated. And as a result, I got something, that actually sounds (IMHO) a little closer to what it was like to hear it live, even tho the effects in the venue were all acoustic and not electronic.

While I was at this, I also added just a little bit of reverb to one of the guitar parts in a song that I thought would sound better with just a smidgeon of acoustic "space" in it.

I may do one more to a bouzouki part. And then, it's on to the final phase.

Sometime next week, I will have a new album out.