How I came to be stuck in audio mixdown limbo - Part 3

I finished recording in 2001 and called the album "Somebody's Dad", because while I was recording it I did become somebody's dad and I found (and still do find) the whole concept slightly unbelievable. The recording quality on "Sombody's Data" was a little better than "Four Track Mind" - I had learned some valuable lessons: don't atttempt to record on the cheapest tapes from Radio Shack, don't attempt to bounce tracks to and from the cheapest tape recorder from Radio Shack, do record at the highest possible signal volume.

But there were still some things I wasn't happy with. Editing on cassette tape is a process fraught with peril - every time you try and fix something you introduce more noise into the signal - so to keep the noise down I kept edits to the absolute minimum. While this technique allowed the album to sound slightly less like mud, it made me leave some things on the tape which, with the charity of hindsight, I can only characterize as fuckups. Also, while I was investigating different, noisier, sounds on the guitar, the 128 midi voices in the Roland were not cutting it any more ("ugh, Japanese Koto again?"). The drums on the Roland were particularly poor and if you don't have drums, you simply do not rock.

So I decided that for my next album, I had four engineering goals:

1) No audible fuckups
2) No more tape hiss
3) Better instrument sounds
4) Real drums

Doesn't look overly ambitious, does it?