Walk The Whale - Let Me Land EP
Written on October 30th, 2023 by Alex Zahn
Cetaceous Bipedal Pop Rock, and the Mixing Thereof
The past few months, I had the immense pleasure of mixing a six-song EP for Walk the Whale, an alt-pop band based in San Luis Obispo, CA. Logan and Parker are wonderful people and talented musicians/songwriters, and it was a joy to work with them. The EP tells their story of taking the leap to move across the country to follow their ambitions, and the challenges that arise in the midst of that. They have a great blog post here about their intentions with the EP.
Aside from assisting them with drum tracking in their living room (which has surprisingly nice acoustics!) they handled the majority of the recording and arrangement themselves, and passed the multi-tracks along to me for editing/clean-up and mixing. My process involved discussing with them the general vibe and intentions for each tune, drawing out a map of where each element of the song should sit in stereo space/depth, and noting some reference tracks. After using those to do a first pass of the mix for each tune independently, we got back together and reviewed the mixes, making adjustments and tweaks until we were all happy with the final result. In hindsight, there are some things I wish I’d mixed differently, but as with all creative endeavors, there’s a point where you have to call it and move on. Another EP is in the works as well, with which they took a very different approach stylistically. I really dig the songs and I’m excited to share it when it’s done!
You can listen to the EP on Bandcamp, or on any of the other major streaming platforms.
Give Walk the Whale a follow on Instagram!
