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Once the recording sessions were completed, we had the prodigious task of overdubbing various complicated parts that we couldn't get to during the sessions, fixing things here and there and mixing down all the tracks. We were all pretty new to this. Matt Pearson had done various recording projects but had never tackled one quite like this. I'd had a lot of experience on a home 4-track and some rudimentary experience in a U of R sound recording class. Matt and I did some pre-planning that Summer at Cal State San Bernardino and began mixing proper sometime that Fall. We attended every one of the "Colton Avenue" sessions from then on, with Ross joining us - for overdubbing, second opinions and general moral support - for at least half of them.
The sessions started out with Matt EQ-ing the tracks and preparing a board mix, and then turning around to me to see if I approved. Sometimes I'd sit at the board and tweak the tracks a bit myself and then we'd track it on the DAT as a final mix. After a few sessions, this relationship changed and he would EQ the tracks and I would do most or all of the mixing myself, since I knew what kind of sound I wanted. Sometimes these mixes were fairly involved, with a lot of running back and forth and hands flying around the board. Because we weren't using Pro Tools all the mixes were done "by hand" on a mixing board. This made the more involved mixes like "Ana Ng" very challenging. We did, however, put most of the tracks through a digital processor in order to achieve reverb, compression and the like.
All this was compounded by the fact that both Matt and myself were full-time college students, and had fairly complicated personal lives (read: busy). Various attempts were made during the actual school year to get together, but we could never quite coordinate our schedules. Once we did get into the studio, sessions proved to be rather slow going, with us having more work cut out for us than we had previously thought, or with both of us having little know-how about the tasks afforded us. And only so much time could be dedicated to a particular song during a session, or else serious aural and mental fatigue was induced. We ended up hitting our heads against the board a lot when it came to some of the tracks. The overdubbing process alone - which mainly involved Ross and myself - was a major hindrance and proved to be incredibly time-consuming. It was obvious this album was going to take a while if it was going to be done right, and, regretfully, various deadlines were made and subsequently broken along the way.
Sadly, there were two unfortunate casualites of these sessions that may never see the light of day. Joel had an arrangement of They Might Be Giants' "She's An Angel" that was fairly involved, and we could never really get the backups to gel properly. We attempted two takes of this, but both were lacking some vital ingredient that none of us could put our finger on. The other was The Bobs' song "Johnny's Room," which we had performed off and on for several years. We attempted this song on the first day of recording, but the "magic wasn't happening," so I decided to shelve it until a later session. I seem to recall making at least two other passes at it with the group, yet several *thorough* scourings of the master tapes by both Matt and myself revealed that the first session's take was the one and only take. Matt and I came to the conclusion that any further takes had probably been erased inadvertantly. Ah well. Perhaps they will turn up someday and be included on my proposed Those Guys! "Rarities" collection.
When we were headlong into the mixing process, Cal State received a huge grant and got thousands of dollars of new audio equipment. Poor timing, to be sure. By this time 80% of the mixing was finished, but we did make some use of the new equipment. Only two songs got Pro Tools treatment. The TV medley was one of these, and in retrospect, there was probably no other way this could have been mixed. All the musical tracks had to be pieced together alongside commercial bits, and everything had to be evened out nicely. Some of the stereo panning also proved to be fairly involved, and we had a field day with some of it. (One only needs to listen to "Silver Spoons" for evidence of that.) Pro Tools proved to be a great asset with this piece, and we got a satisfying mix in just a few sessions. The other piece that got the Pro Tools treatment was "Tips For Teens," which we did simply because the board mixes we had done were deemed unsatisfactory and, for lack of a better term, "static." Some off-the-cuff messing about with different types of reverb led to the interesting mix you hear on the final record.
By the Summer of 2000 we finally had all the final mixes on our hands, yet our attempts to master them at Cal State with Sound Forge led to some fidelity problems (a curious "warble" not unlike a badly made mp3). It was at this time that Matt was presented with the opportunity of a lifetime - doing tech work at the Aladdin in Las Vegas - and thus he made the decision to move out of town at the end of the Summer. Matt and I worked a bit more but couldn't come up with anything final. I then took the DAT full of the finished mixes Matt and I had completed and shopped around for someone to clean them up again and assemble a finished master. I had recently run into old friend Brandon Rhoades at a party and he volunteered very quickly to get into the studio and see what he could do. However, there was one catch. He would be going into the Navy soon and didn't have much time to spare. I figured this would probably cause him to work a bit faster and I ended up being right.
We grabbed the Electronic Music Studio at the University of Redlands whenever we could. We usually had to compete with students who had projects they were working on. Once Brandon and I got into the studio he worked like clockwork. He took the DAT mixes and ran them through another board, smoothing them out EQ-wise and achieving better balances. Because Brandon wouldn't be in town for long, we had to pack many hours into a session. We spent a few long nights after closing hours in the studio with the door locked and lights off, huddled over the board amidst the dull glow of the computer. A lot of the work he did by himself so by the time I got there we just had some minor touching up to do. Some of the tracks got put on Pro Tools - because of additional edits that had to be made - but because of the extremely limited space on the computer, we just made it by the skin of our teeth. Brandon and I worked right up until the day he had to leave town and, in my assessment, he really "saved our bacon."
After this, some very minor editing had to be done and so I took the liberty of finishing it on my own computer. Basically all I did was assemble one complete, finished master disc from our various CD-Rs of final mixes, and assemble the "banter track" at the end of the album, which is an idea I had had since the "Colton Avenue" sessions had begun in 1998 (you can hear Ross reference this at one point in the track itself). My original idea was to have talking between the tracks in a style similar to The Beatles' "Let It Be," but good sense soon prevailed.
But of course, we had to hit another roadblock in the post-production process. We sent the masters off to Canada in late November 2000, only to hear back a short time later that our artwork disc had crashed their computer systems several times. Brandi - who had worked at a print shop before - let me know that this was actually a semi-common problem, and that they had probably tried to install the appropriate fonts incorrectly. However - thankfully - this problem was soon rectified and we were again on our way. We were sent the proofs of the artwork and were bowled over, giving them an overwhelming collective thumbs up.