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A couple people have emailed to ask for a comparison of the old and new mixes of No Regret. Here’s a sample:
No Regret Mix Comparison (160 kbps MP3)

The first and most obvious difference between the mixes is volume. The final mix is compressed to a much higher degree than the rough mix; as a result, the overall volume is much higher, because there’s less dynamic range between the quieter sounds and the peaks.

The original dirty guitar sound was well recorded, with a neat stereo effect, but it was very bass-heavy. The final mix pulls out some of that low end.

You’ll also hear some neat vocal effects in the final mix. I really love what Evan did here; it’s like Enya singing a hard rock song.

Mixing is an art, to be sure. There is a technical skill involved in using EQ and compression to place the various sounds on the stage, to emphasize and deemphasize voices, to smooth transitions between passages… but that’s only part of the package. There’s a creative element that can bring magic to a track. I think we captured a little of that here.

As promised…

For a few weeks in 1994, I played in a band with a bassist named Pete Franco, who went on to find fame with The Mother Truckers. Our band didn’t last, but it produced two great tracks: Want, from the JAR CD, and a song called No Regret.

We recorded both at Suspect Studios, to 24-track ADAT. But the band broke up before we could mix the tracks, and the guitarist and I formed JAR a few weeks later (and subsequently re-recorded Want with our new bassist at Brilliant Studios). Somehow I ended up with the ADATs from the Suspect sessions; I carted them from apartment to apartment to house to house (or garage to garage, more accurately), until I got curious (or nostalgaic, more accurately) and paid a local studio to transfer the ADATs to Pro Tools a couple years ago.

I taught myself how to mix well enough to know that I was terrible at it. So recently I hired a real engineer, Evan Rodaniche, to remix the song, and the result kicked my ass. Here it is:

No Regret (160 kbps MP3)

Credits:
  Lyrics: Franco
  Music: Franco, Sparks, McGlynn
  Guitar: Sparks
  Bass, Vocals: Franco
  Drums: McGlynn
  Recorded: 1994, Suspect Studios
  Mixed: 2005, Evan Rodaniche / Master Blaster Studioz

I’ve owned a Canon SD450, a 5-megapixel pocket camera with a decent reputation, for about a month. There are two things about it I find nearly intolerable:

1. The redeye prevention mechanism is worthless. Or, it’s turned my son into the spawn of Satan.
2. Unlike every other digital camera I’ve ever used, it doesn’t mount to my computer like a disk drive.

The redeye problem is horrific. More often than not, portrait subject have glowing fireballs where their eyes are supposed to be. Sure, I can darken the pupils in Photoshop — I don’t mind using a $600 piece of software to correct a design flaw in my $300 digital camera. I have nothing else better to do with my time, really.

The camera appears to have two different redeye-reduction flash modes, although I believe the redeye reduction is the same in both cases; the difference is limited to whether the flash fires at all. In Portrait mode, the camera’s flash setting defaults to “Auto Redeye Reduction.” The second redeye mode, “Redeye Reduction On,” in which the flash fires regardless of ambient light, is available at the cost of an extra button-press. Both flash modes are equally incapable of eliminating redeye.

(In attempting to determine whether the two red-eye reduction modes are doing the same thing, I looked at the EXIF data for several test images. There is no difference in notation regarding redeye, so in the absence of any visible difference in the flash’s behavior or the sample images themselves, I’ve concluded that there is no difference. The EXIF tags follow:

• The “Redeye Reduction On” mode generates an EXIF tag reading: “Flash fired, compulsory flash mode, red-eye reduction mode”.
• The “Auto Redeye Reduction” generates an EXIF tag reading: “Flash fired, auto mode, red-yed reduction mode”. Yes, there’s a typo in the camera’s firmware. And perhaps in the redeye prevention routine too.)

One workaround would be to shoot images without the flash. Given that the camera’s highest ISO setting is 400, this is not an option indoors. At ISO 400, images are grainy, and unless you like to leave a lot of lights on, blurry too.

The other workaround is to buy Canon’s $100 external slave flash, the HF-DC1. I just bought one, and it does appear to alleviate the redeye problem. But it effectively doubles the size of the camera, and adds two more button presses to the process of taking the first picture. I’ll post a review of the slave flash in the future.

The second thing I hate about this camera is that I can’t access the SD card directly from my computer. I know external USB card readers are cheap ($15), but I can’t imagine Canon shaved too many cents off the manufacturing cost to not include this feature. The USB port is already there. They’re just missing some software.

And guess what? Software is really small. It would have fit inside the case.

So, until I remember to add a card reader to my next Amazon order, I’m stuck using Canon’s feature-limited “CameraWindow” software to offload images from the camera. It gives me only two options: copy all photos, or copy new photos. I can’t copy selected photos. Nor can I delete selected photos.

Also, the CameraWindow software stupidly writes image files to the computer’s hard disk with a mod time of “now,” rather than the time the image was taken. So I can take my new camera and its 1 GB memory card, shoot 500-odd pictures over a week’s vacation, return home to offload the photos, and every image file is dated within the past minute. That’s just incredibly lame.

There’s a workaround, of course; I wrote a PHP script that parses the image files’ EXIF tags, extracts the exposure date/time, and resets each file’s mod time. It’s yet-another clumsy extra step to fix a problem that my 4-year-old Coolpix 995 didn’t have.

After a meeting in St. Helena, I had a purely Napa experience: I bought $16 worth of chocolate that I could nearly close my hand around, and three doors down, a small bottle of balsamic vinegar that at $160/gallon costs 66 times more than gasoline, even in St. Helena.

In other words, the Napa experience is: upscale food items, great presentation, and, natch, exclusive prices. Or excessive. Maybe both of those.

Foodie photos from St. Helena