Day consisted of cleaning up the tracks, getting them ready for mixdown. Starting with the drums, I cut out a section to cleanup a part where Toby missed a fill. Cutting and pasting drums can be a pain because of the cymbals, but this was really smooth, no clicks or pops. I fixed some punches in the bass and guitar with some crossfades, and lining up the waves at the cuts and moved on to vocals. I made a lead vocal track by comping the best performances of the verses and choruses into one track. I created a new doubled lead vocal track by comping the rest of the takes there. Where the timing was off I was able to move words around and line them up for a better blend of the two lead vocals. I also selected the best performances from all the choruses and made bigger, gang vocals for the choruses.
Once the tracks are cleaned up it was time for getting ready for mixdown. We are mixing on Wednesday at Cowboy Technical in Williamsburg, NY. They use Pro Tools and Digital Performer and require each of the tracks be exported to its own file, with each one starting and ending at the same spot, and each track saved as a SD2 (Sound Designer 2) file to preserve that information. This isn’t hard, but time consuming, especially with 40 tracks.