Graveyard Smash by Rougaroux was released on April 11th, 2025. I had the pleasure of recording, mixing, and mastering five songs from the album: Panic Room, Fever Dream, Wasted, If I Go Down to One It’s All Over, and Eschew the Meat. Recording took place on February 23rd and March 2nd, 2025 at CHOMS.
Since I was only handling one half of the album, mixing and mastering were particularly difficult. I had to do my best to match the work of two other recording and mixing sessions. Cam Thiessen and Matt Roach handled recording and mixing for the other half, and mastering for those songs was handled by Stu McKillop. In particular the song t4t was really difficult to try to match, as it was clearly top-shelf work done at Rain City Recorders, one of the best studios and greatest available engineers serving the local Vancouver music scene. Trying to match this work with a three week turnaround from recording to release was a real challenge.
As usual, recording was handled with Bitwig Studio running on Fedora Linux (the recent move to Fedora coincided with me replacing my old Arch Thinkpad with a secondhand T470 specifically for recording work; it does the job admirably, for the most part). Microphones used include the SM58, SM57, e906, e602 II, Beta 52a, and a unique vocal microphone of mysterious origin provided by the band’s lead singer George Finley.
Go listen to the album as soon as you can, it’s a great listen from front to back. Be sure to support the artist on Bandcamp if you’re able, and keep an eye out for future shows.