That can be said about many things in my life right now -- just a lot of things nearing closure, in transition, etc.

But I'm referring to the Celtic Folk project with Marc Gunn. I'm mastering the 13-song duet album right now.

Now, I'll be the first one to tell you that I'm not a mastering engineer. That's one area of production that is best left to (and usually is) a specialist. Mastering is an art that requires highly specialized skills and equipment and while with the digital age came an easier access to such tools, it doesn't make one a mastering engineer no more than digital camera makes a rock a dog. (a stretch of an analogy??) Anyway, he does know that I'm really not a mastering engineer but he thinks I'm good enough for what I'm charging -- and I generally don't argue with my clients. :)

In case you don't know what mastering is, let me explain real quick -- it is the final treatment a set of recording goes through in a large, project-scale manner, where all the songs in that particular set go through a series of fine-tuning so that they all appear to have similar volume levels, and overall sense of dynamic and distance evened out, and the entire mixes tweaked and adjusted so that they have the maximum chance of sounding good in all situations and equipments. Mastering is abslutely critical to the success of a recording -- it can make or break it. The recent trend is to master everything real loud, which sucks the dynamic range (soft part and loud part have little difference in terms of volume) out of a recording and make it sound real flat. And there are folks who want that trend reversed -- but that's a whole another topic.

Suffice it to say, I care deeply about the project that Marc and I labored on and off for the past 7 months, and though it's still a "quick" recording. I definitely don't want to break it. But mastering is really not my thing and the whole process, usually done in a day or two by a pro, has taken me a number of passes and tweaks at it. Grrrrr. I'm so ready for this to sound all good and cohesive. But I can't rush this process. So I force myself to take a break, think about something else -- it's been a real challenge to my own mental control.

I think it will be done today. I think, I think, I think.