Mezcal -- early versions

This is the original "boombox demo" I recorded in about 90 minutes late one evening, on a whim. It's pretty rough, with some of the noodlings on the second bass guitar being way the hell off, in terms of song key. But it has a good feel and it seemed redeemable, so I've kept at it.

Mezcal "Seed" (Download)



Next comes my third mixdown, after having done some "upgrades." Note that I've not added any new musicianship to this -- it's the same vocals, bass guitars, and drums from the first night of recording -- but it's been dressed up using Reaper, cutting out the bad parts, replacing them with duplicated good parts and rearranging the order of things.

I've also thrown in a few samples:

• The song opens with live music from a video I made at Wes and Ana's going-away party at Los Arcos last spring
• The jarocho break after Misifus' meow-meow-meow is the audio portion of a video I made of a jarana class I attended a couple years ago
• There's also a tip of the hat to the boys from Liverpool.

Note that these samples were not in tempo with the song, so I had to stretch them to fit the song tempo.

Mezcal - Jan 22 Mixdown (Download)



Jan 24 Update: Further listening in my favorite listening space (my car....always my car) has revealed that this version is too trebley, thanks to a combination of adding a bright reverb to the mix track and the mp3 compression algorithm to make the file a bit smaller. The maximum-quality mp3 file is less harsh, but is still too trebley. The cymbals are just way too piercing. Expect that to be fixed in the next version.