It has been a while since my last update. I have been working hard to try and keep level-headed and, in this stress, and panic I put my writing on the backburner. I am unsure whether this added to the pressure, but it did allow me to solely focus on my audio work. I have since my last post finished off all my projects for the year.
I am going to briefly mention the Pirate Waltz by Ella Reid. I was told by Ella that the audio is perfect and that it created the feeling of ship. She also made the dance slower to match with the music as she liked the ringing of the music box. I have since gotten the final video and it will be published on her Instagram (@scarletwolfproductions). I have also uploaded to my YouTube and my portfolio. I have also fixed the two issues I noted in my last post for the A Quiet Place II trailer and have also now uploaded it to my YouTube and my portfolio.
I have done some small side projects during this time. Both of these projects cannot be published here as I do not have the publishing rights to them. The first was mastering a track that Guy Gray had provided. I started with an EQ which I set three parameters. The first was a high shelf boost of about 2.5dB where the singer’s vocal had the most body. This also fixed the problem of the backing vocals being hidden in the mix. The second was a low shelf boost of about 1dB just below where the bass had its ringing resonance that was unpleasant to me. The last was to notch out the ringing of the bass. I used a fairly thing Q of about 8 and cut about 6dB. This got rid of most of the resonance in the bass allowing for a more bass guitar sound. I then placed on a compressor (API2500) and it was sounding good but it brough back the resonance I the bass. I moved it down an insert and placed a multiband on above it setting to the same area as the notch in the EQ to further control the bass. This then made the compressor bring out the plucks in the bass without the resonance. I of course worked with a brick wall limiter with dither on at the end of my chain. I set it up to -14LUFS and then printed out the final master and uploaded it to the Google Drive folder.
The other side project I worked on was a mix and master of a session from Alex Mills. I started with a basic balancing mix. I usually do this by setting up VOX reverbs and delays (I also set up backing VOX ones), as well as an overall AUX and Print and Master. I send everything to this AUX and then to the print and then select all and bring everything to -∞ and then place the overall AUX, Print and Master to unity. I then balance out the drums and bass, followed by guitars and then other instruments and the vocals. I wanted to focus on delay and backing vocals as these are elements, I am less familiar with. I started with sending the acoustic guitars to another aux in which I set up a delay. I set it up so that it just added room to the guitars as it got a bit busy with the multiple layers and recordings. I wanted to try and differentiate the Lead VOX and Backing VOX. I did this by using different EQs and a different plate reverb. I am not 100% happy with this mix as I want to further edit the vocals through Melodyne but, I also was working from home and don’t have access to it here. I know that this is a poor excuse, but I will definitely spend some time doing this in the future.
For my Major Project I spent most of my time trying to get my head around the soundscape (following from the tape map we made in the studio).
I had been given a rough arrangement guide by my client. I used this to finish the arrangement on the timeline. I cleaned up the recordings as we recorded longer than what we wanted. During the second session I was told by my client that the Neve recordings sounded warmer and that he missed the warmth in the recordings from that day. I used a HRTF plugin that did the phase shifting and EQ to move it to the placement as discussed in the studio. I then took the edited vocals and duplicated the track and shifted it up a third. I sent these both to a reverb and the reverb to a 2040 delay. I then just used this wet version in the mix as it added to the space. I created a synth from scratch for this and played a simple tune in B major. I started with a triangle wave and a LPF to lower the sustain. I made the sustain only a little lower and a long decay. I layered this with a in between triangle sawtooth wave with a small amount of input. I also added a 100Hz sine wave underneath to add to the bass. I recorded out the mix. I placed this into a mastering session. I setup the SCRMST and placed a slight EQ to bring slight bit of highs and out the lows whilst controlling some of the ringing in the Himalayan Bowls. I placed on a compressor to just control the highs slightly and add some noise. I then set up a brick wall limiter. This was the hardest part to setup as it was such a long piece, and I was trying to master something that had really quiet and loud parts. I was trying to get it to -14LUFS. This took me about 3 tries to get it right. Each time I also spent it printing out the master as it took 30 minutes each time. After I finished this I edited a version that lasted 10 minutes to go with the video and also had a version with an EQ that I had research to make it work better on speakers for my presentation. I then took my video that Ethan Vandersee had done for me (which I had requested 2 weeks early) I than exported all my versions. I also made a MP3 version in which I had lowered the clip gain by 1dB.
I’m glad I was able to deliver all this work. My computer was a little angry at me with the session sizes, but we battled through it together (as I also was struggling with constant headphones). It has been a few stressful weeks with also external factors. Now that this work is finished, I can stop and reflect on the work as I am now clear-minded. It is always difficult to complete multiple projects at the same time as well as working with other people and relying on others to deliver on time. I have learnt to set deadlines earlier due to past mistakes, I still felt fortunate as I was able to work with people that provided me assets on time and were prepared. I hope that in the future I still am able to manage myself to keep this professionalism in my timelines.
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