Yesterday, everybody’s order was sent out!

Now that they are going to start listening…some people have asked what exactly is different with the 2020 Mixes on each album….

It’s a bit of a technical question, so here goes:

To make the 5.1 Surround mixes on the Blu Ray discs, I wanted to have the basic stereo mixes as a starting point. Since the songs were mixed so long ago, just recalling them wasn’t totally easy. There were different things to fix, or recall on each song, such as re-recording some of the effects (which weren’t originally recorded, and just playing live during the mix), and semi- re-balancing the whole mix into Pro Tools. When originally mixing, I was essentially mixing with stems onto a 32 channel outboard mixer.

Also, now I wanted to split all of the tracks, so that I had complete control of front to back and left to right (for surround). I didn’t want the mixes to be completely different sounding from the originals, but if I heard something that I thought could sound better, I wanted to be able to fix it…so a little level or eq, or re-balance here or there. It was a lot of A/B-ing the original, and making sure that what I had sounded as good, if not better than the originals. The differences are more noticeable on some songs than others, and maybe for some listeners, they might not even hear any thing different…but they are, in fact, completely new mixes, and we thought that they should be labeled as such.

For the Early Versions of the songs, as a starting point, I went through literally 100’s of CD-Rs that I had made at the time, while working on the album, and listening to an equal amount of ADAT tapes that some of the songs had been recorded on.

I love listening to songs where you can hear both the starting place of the song, and what’s not there when the song was finished…. (different vocals, or different arrangements, or missing guitars or keyboards), and comparing it to where it was when it was finished…it’s a chance to see where the songs were at, at an interesting point in time before they were finished. Some of these Early Versions I was able to find in mulit-track format, and some were just stereo mixes, so finalizing and mixing them differed, depending on the song, but in the end, we think all of them offer a cool look into the songs and where they started.

We hope you enjoy taking everything in, we’d love to hear from you after you get them and have had a chance to absorb everything!

-Statik

We just thought we'd keep everyone up to date on how things are progressing in the Chasing the Ghost and Some Kind of Strange Special Edition releases. They are Limited Edition, and still available for pre-release here, and we should still be on track to start shipping them in October.

For anyone who missed it, we uploaded a teaser video here.

Notes from Statik:

Taking on all of the responsibilities of the record company, as well as authoring this release, and overseeing the whole thing (as with any release) can sometimes take a lot of attention to details, as well as unforeseen costs.

For those who are interested in the details, here is what was happening this past week. Originally I submitted a .iso disc image for the blu ray. The manufacturer said they would have to convert it to another format in order to actually produce it. The only other format the authoring software (that I have, and that you can get without spending too much $$) could output is a BDMV file, so I had to make new files for each release…then re-upload each 20+ GB file, which took the better part of another day! THEN…they said that that format wasn’t correct either, and what was needed was a BDCMF file, not a BDMV file!! So there will still be extra costs for the conversion. (BTW, I asked them about this format question about 6 months ago, but I guess the guy who I talked to at the time didn’t know what he was talking about…typical!!) They also said that, in fact, they couldn’t have converted the original disc image file, so they needed the new format anyway. Also, they said that the second blu ray file got corrupted? during the transfer, so they needed me to re-upload it. So now that they have those, hopefully they can get on with the whole process of converting it to whatever they need, which will be another $189 for each release.

With all of the conversions, we are opting to get a check disc back before they make all of them—so we have to wait for that as well, as we figure it would be best to actually double check it after the conversion, and make sure that they produce the disc correctly, the way we envisioned, with no errors….so that’s another $150 per release.

The good news is that the printed artwork—booklets, and wallet, are in the middle of the printing process, or will be completed soon. Making a physical CD is easier, since we’ve done that before…and the DDP file that we gave them will hopefully be fine.

We should hopefully still be on time to start shipping everything out in October, but we just thought everyone would like to know a few of the behind the scene things that are happening.

-Statik

I am working hard to finalize the Chasing the Ghost and Some Kind of Strange Special Edition Releases.

There are so many little details to think about to finish off these special releases, and to double check everything, but they are almost done!! Not that anyone else wants (or needs) to think about all of the technical details of what was needed to put together this release:

Early versions and bonus tracks

For the Early Versions, and Bonus Tracks, it involved me combing through an old box of ADAT tapes, and CD-Rs that we would make while we were working on the albums, to find all of the best early versions, and forgotten songs from the era. Then I transferred all of that into pro tools, so that everything could be mixed. Some of the songs came from mulit-tracks sessions, and some where just stereo tracks.

First off, we hope you all doing well!! Things sure have gone crazy since our last e-mail, but we have been locked in our studio working on all kinds of stuff, including new music.

October of this year will be the 20th anniversary of Chasing the Ghost, and the 17th anniversary of Some Kind of Strange! Wow! Where did the time go! We wanted to do a re-release that would be the Ultimate Special Collectors Edition!!…so here’s what we came up with:

Special Limited Edition Releases:
Chasing the Ghost & Some Kind of Strange

Special Editions Include: 5.1 Surround Sound, New Stereo Mixes, New Instrumental Mixes, Original Mixes, Unreleased Early Versions, Unreleased Bonus Tracks. Click Here to View the exact tracklisting, and songs, etc.

Release Date: Oct 2020, or sooner.

Pre sales are available now!
We are 100% self funded, so we really appreciate your help. If you order anything else with your Pre-sale—we will ship the rest of your order now. Also, there is a special combo price if you get both releases.

The first 200 copies of each release of the Pre-sale Orders will be signed and numbered. (We are only printing 500),

The First 200 order will also include the following:
Hand-signed thank-you card,
Signed, folded poster to go with the release.
Our Eternal Thanks for helping to support our music.

We think everyone will really enjoy these special releases, and hopefully appreciate all of the work that Statik has put into them.

Check out all the details on each of these releases on our website here.
Chasing the Ghost - Special Edition
Some Kind of Strange - Special Edition
Chasing the Ghost / Some Kind of Strange combo sale

Our deep thanks for continuing to make it possible for us to create new music. Please help spread the word.

Peace + Love
The People who bring you Collide
kaRIN & Statik

Technical notes from Statik:

These 2 Special Edition releases started from a fairly simple idea…to see what mixing our songs in 5.1 Surround would be like. Little did we know what a journey that simple idea would take us on.

A lot of our songs are very dense, and I always wanted to try something that would really spread out the sound, and let listeners experience the songs in a completely new way. In order to make true surround mixes, I had to bring up the songs in the studio, which at this point was easier said than done. Most of these songs were started before the idea of mixing “in the box” or just on a computer was possible. Technically, some were started on a Mac Clone running Studio Vision Software, and later transferred to Pro Tools, and sometimes ADAT tapes. At the time they were then mixed out to a 32 channel console. These were mixes that I couldn’t just press a button and bring up. I had all of the main audio tracks transferred into my computer, in a Pro Tools Session, but there was still a lot missing! Most of the effects weren’t there, and all of the various mix routing, levels, and a lot of what I had going on in the mixes was no longer available to me. I wanted to keep everything that really made these songs special, so after buying a couple of new Digidesign Cards, and an old interface on Ebay, I was able to get my 20 year old computer running with a 20 year old version of Pro Tools. This enabled me to bounce down the missing tracks and effects, and see exactly what was going on in the original sessions. At the time when we made these albums, just buying huge hard drives really wasn’t an option, and having lots of tracks play at once from your computer was a major ordeal. It was a lot of work to get all of the tracks into a new format that I could work in, and I believe that the whole process made everything sound better in the end. I now had the sessions in their complete format, and I was able to run the audio through much better converters. Besides just being able to mix the songs in surround, I really started to think that most of these new (stereo) mixes were sounding better than the originals. So we are including the new stereo mixes, as well as the new surround, and instrumental mixes on the Blu Ray disc. For those that want it, of course we included all of the mixes included in the original CD release as well.

While we were on this path, of retrieving all of the files and songs, we went through all of our ADAT tapes, old reference CDs, and old Pro Tools Sessions that we had. Luckily we were pretty good about keeping everything. As we are in the song writing process, songs (of course) go through a lot of changes. In going through all of these tapes, and sessions, it was really interesting after so much time has passed, to hear early versions of the songs, where kaRIN has totally different lyrics, or lyrics that are still being worked out…or where the music was mostly there, but far from its final polished form. I know that (for me) versions like these are always interesting to hear, especially for songs that I really know and like.

The other great part of going through all of these sessions, was running across songs or song ideas that were never finished. It was great to be able to work with these ideas from so long ago. I was able to bring these into my current set up and give them all new mixes! We kept all of the vocals as they were though. It was like finding bits of audio treasure.

Finally, as all of these mixes were getting finished, we really had to think about the best way to release everything. CDs are fine, but it would have taken 5 or 6 cds to fit everything for each release!! and even then, of course, we couldn’t have put the surround mixes there, and the audio specs of cds, are lower than we were mixing and recording in, and we wanted everyone to really experience these albums in the best way possible. Although DVDs were another option, the Surround Mixes would have been compressed, and we still couldn’t fit everything we wanted to on a single DVD. So the best option for ultimate sound quality was Blu Ray discs. Although Blu Rays never took off, they are still around, and playable in dedicated players, as well as Playstations, and X-Box machines. The amount of audio that is able to put on a disc, and being able to have it in high resolution, uncompressed audio, in both stereo, and DTS Master Audio for surround sold us as ultimately the best sound experience that we could offer!