I’ve been listening to Bear Radio Network for a while, and kept thinking that I ought to submit my song “Waiting”, which I wrote in 2000, to see if they’d play it. But I realized that first I’d have to give it a hefty overhaul, as I’d recorded it with low-end mics on a computer that could barely handle the task and had mixed it while listening through bad monitor speakers (not to mention that my mixing skills weren’t exactly great back then).

So I started putting in a little time each day, with what I thought what would be a simple task quickly turning into a major production spanning several weeks. Lots of tiny glitches in the individual recorded tracks had to be manually corrected; tracks were EQ’d and re-balanced with each other; the synth tracks, which were jittery due to the old PC’s having been unable to keep its MIDI output steady while recording, were re-recorded with better equipment; the reverb plugin was swapped out for a massively better one, which was then adjusted repeatedly to give lots of rich ambience without drowning the whole song; and the bass line got rewritten and was assigned a new patch that I adjusted until it purred. Finally, the whole thing was put through a pro mastering program over and over again until I’d tweaked it to the point where the mix felt cohesive and dynamic, which was a major learning experience.

I sent it off to Bear Radio Network - and they’ve accepted it into their playlist! What a huge rush!! You can request it here.

I’ve got a big new project in the works, and it’s gonna take a long time and a lot of effort. This small personal victory with “Waiting” gives me renewed confidence as I forge ahead.