This note is written retrospectively. I didn't have time to write anything the last few days.

I slept a few hours during the early morning, from 5 to around 8 clock. My plan was to work for another 12 hrs, then sleep a few hours to reset my ears and then a final session of preparing the tracks. The tracks had to be uploaded to the mastering studio Monday morning. This plan was doomed I didn't sleep a second. And this workload is highly inappropriate during the critical final stage of an album, one should give things rest. But what must be done must be done. I'll document my horrible planning and execution skills in another journal entry.

Most of the day was spent finely adjusting mixes, correcting small errors and detailed work. Cleaning it up, and render to final 24 bit premaster. But two of the tracks still didn't have a final obvious version, I was still debating which was best, what combination of parts and their sequence would be most optimal. Idiotic and extremely unprofessional of me to keep working on such fundamental issues just hours before delivery, but if it is not good enough I will keep trying until not possible anymore.

What I did not take into account was the amount of time lost in waiting for the computer to load or render. My projects are pretty complex, lots of itsy bitsy tiny samples cut up and duplicated and processed and manipulated and then loaded into soft-samplers, with demanding channel strip FX, and all this takes time for Logic to load and fit into my poor limited RAM. When working on a track over a few days the load time is negligible compared to production time, but when continuously switching between multiple projects like this, the loading time becomes a troublesome factor.

Another issue I didn't foresee was time lost in freezing. All of the projects either max out or über-max out my CPU, so there is much need for freezing of processor intensive tracks. This again eats up time, just changing a little EQ or automating a filter in a slightly different curve can suddenly cost me 5 minutes of freezing time.

All the time I was uploading or emailing new versions to my external ears, Hans Igor and Roar. I have no idea how I would have pulled this off without them. They kept listening to everything, informing me of any issues or shortcomings, and keeping me sane and grounded whenever I went too far.

Continues in the T minus 63 entry.