This year sees me back in the company of Sam Healy working closely with him on the second SAND album.
The second album from SAND called “A Sleeper, Just Awake” is now completed and available for purchase after 18 months of hard work. You can listen to a a track from the album, and purchase it on CD/Download over at sandtheband.com.
For the debut album my role was that of mix engineer, sort of. I would begin by getting the songs to a stage where the mixes had a level of clarity and detail that I was happy with, and then Sam would take them and work on them some more to sometimes sink thinks back into the mix or add extra “treats for the ear”.
Unlike all his previous releases, Sam wanted to retain total control of the sessions right up to signing off for mastering. This meant not transferring his work over to the system of a mix engineer, but rather doing the mix work on his setup.
We worked from his PC laptop, running Sonar, connecting it up to my mix monitoring system and displays. I installed my “must have” plugins for mixing and away we went.
For this, the second album, we merged our setups even closer, me having convinced Sam to give Logic Pro a go. Now we were able to work remotely in the developmental stages, me opening sessions in Dublin from a shared cloud storage space, and him checking out what I had done, adding new elements, making tweaks. We worked together in Dublin or in Edinburgh for the big stuff (recording my parts, late stage mixing) but the freedom to collaborate remotely whilst not doing a “final handover” worked really great for both of us.
Evrything and anything related to my work with the band will be over on the blog, tagged under #SAND.
