Olguin's facility with Pro Tools convinced the band to ask him to stay on for final mixing and editing. He describes the band's recording setup as “very, very basic.” Except for the Universal Audio 6176, mixing was entirely done within Pro Tools.

“We worked mostly on the 001 system, using only 32 tracks,” he continues. “I spent a few days and got it working better, but it was a Macintosh G3 that, for some reason, had incompatibilities with the Pro Tools software, and caused us problems all the way up to the end. There were instances when we were bouncing mixes to disk when we didn't know if the system was going to be able to handle it.

“The 1176 is one of my main choices for compressor, so the 6176 worked out pretty well,” Olguin notes. “We used it mainly for vocals, inserting it when we mixed. For some songs it was a little too harsh, so we used the stock Digi compressor that comes with the system. For a couple of the bass tracks we also used the 6176. We printed it so that it would be free to use on the vocals for mixing. Except for that, we pretty much stuck with those stock Digi plug-ins. There were times I wished I had more to use, but I caught myself and thought, ‘I can handle this. I can make the best of what I have.’“

FIG. A: Patrick Olguin helped Cake with engineering and mixing during parts of the Pressure Chief recording process. FIG. A: Patrick Olguin helped Cake with engineering and mixing during parts of the Pressure Chief recording process.

Asked to describe the room that was used for both recording and mixing, Olguin says, “Take your basic everyday living room, don't do anything to it, and drop a Pro Tools rig in. The console, Pro Tools, and the speakers were all backed up against the wall in a little desk type of area. You weren't going to get an ideal listening spot, no matter where you were at in the room. I just kept that in mind when I was listening and went for the vibe of the songs rather than getting too technical.”

In addition to the Tannoy Reveal monitors, mixes were auditioned, through iPod playback, on a portable sound system complete with a built-in subwoofer. Headphones were also used for listening, as was John McCrea's car stereo.

When Olguin came in, he laid Cake's tracks onto a grid to preserve their original tempos, making slight adjustments where necessary. He conformed the grid to Cake's existing tempos, rather than the other way around. “I think it was a bit of an eye opener for them. When they tracked things, they did a pretty good job, but they didn't do it as quickly as they would have liked to. Also, while a lot of the drum tracks had a great feel, they wanted to make some adjustments, sometimes moving certain instruments to another part of the song. I didn't want to lose the original feel of how they had put it down,” he recalls. “To me it would have been sacrilegious to alter the rhythm or feel they'd already established.”