The iPod is burning up

It has been a long time since I have seriously listened to Christ I'm Chuck. I think that it is necessary to clear the proverbial palette every once and a while, then go back and check your work.

My role is particularly challenging as musician, sound engineer, and producer. Because I am involved in all phases at some level (I hear my guitar playing and my mixing, etc) it is pretty easy to be critical and just as easy to ignore the many little defects.

So on my return trip from Little Rock today I listened to the entire Christ I'm Chuck collection (the ones that are on my iPod anyway). This spans about a year of recording and clearly represents progress as individual musicians, as a band, technically from a recording perspective and the overall mixes seem to get better, and I am proud of the progress.

Today I began to notice the many imperfections, lots of things that I think are wrong with the tracks that I would like to do differently. Keep in mind that my approach is to try and make it sound like I thought it sounded while we were playing, that is typically raw straight ahead rock. Rough around the edges, imperfect. I like it that way, but there were things . . . to much vocal, not enough rhythm guitar (did I say that?), the kick wasn't fat enough, not enough bass (or in many cases too much bass). These are all things that I can do again.

I also realized that I have a ton of recordings that I haven't touched yet, a bunch of new songs, some new and different classics.

What does all this mean to you? It means that I must produce a new collection of CIC tunes. It will be our box set. Newly remastered classics, some b-sides and rarities.

Not bad for a band that one time played a Halloween party, eh?

Stay tuned.