#144

It’s too much to handle. Dave Llamabardo!!

2 Likes
#145

I listened to the whole thing last night while reading and it was really enjoyable! Nice work one and all.

ETA notes on my tracks:

It was cool getting paired with both recordings made by @samarobryn because it was fun to hear the similarities and differences.

The Other Night
Both recordings are stretched to the same length with no attempt to preserve pitch. As mentioned up thread I liked it just like that, but thought about other ways to play with “balance”. I thought maybe using these relatively raw sounds in quite different ways, in terms of dynamics and rhythm, might be fun. So I gated the relatively noisy night recording to make it all on/off and relatively hard, while the daytime sounds gently fade in and have a ping-pong delay that softens and washes them out a bit. I didn’t want to go all out and just smear these quieter sounds because I liked the unique events popping up.
Then I made it boring and trad by adding chords and drums. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: The “synth” is from samarobyn’s bird sounds and the drums are from my sounds of everyday activities in a small village. Something about repeating the chords with the relatively long gap in the middle felt like balance to me.

Daytime Fireworks
The main thing happening here is the two recordings through a vocoder. Samarobyn’s daytime grove recording is the carrier, my fireworks recording is the modulator.
Some amount of the original grove sounds are in the mix at the start and the original fireworks show at the end. Basically a giant crossfade, but drawn into my app based on what my ears were into.
Harmonic stuff comes from a train toot. Ping-pong looping to create movement.
The title’s a nod to the literal translation of a Chinese movie’s title, which for some reason the distributors changed entirely for English-language markets. It was an after the fact thing, though, it wasn’t on my mind while writing.

6 Likes
#146

So so happy with how this has come out, amazing work!

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#147

I really enjoyed this (in spite of it shining a rather unforgiving light on my effort!) so thanks everyone.

Particular props to @jlmitch5 for getting it to sound so consistent given the disparate nature of the source material.

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#148

Unfortunately a little problem with my ears currently prevents me from fully enjoying this latest LCRP, but I did try to listen to it and from what I can hear, it seems like turned out really amazing! But I have to listen to it properly when I get better…

What I can say so far is that the cover artwork is wonderful, great job @Olivier! It’s definitely one of the best I have seen so far.

A couple of notes on my recording(s).

My field recording was taken during a late evening on the Greek island of Rhode, in a really tiny village called Koskinou. There was some animal in the bushes making some crackling noises, but we were not able to find out what it was (hence the title). I think the overall quietness was a great pairing with the noise (and artificial sounds) from John’s Pinball Museum recording. The sounds in the latter apparently come mainly from a machine called “Gorgar”, which Wikipedia tells me, is the first speaking pinball machine. No idea where the name “Gorgar” came from (but maybe @jlmitch5 can tell us more about it?), it likely is the name of the red demon which is featured on the machine’s artwork. To me it did sound a bit like “Gorgon”, and there was the Greek thing again.
Maybe the noises in the bushes where Gorgar himself hiding from our sight.

And, a couple of notes regarding the process:

  • I have to admit that the track is more the result of trial&error than a precise concept. I’d usually try to go for something like what @Jet made (great track btw!), with a simple and clear concept, but for some reason that just wouldn’t work this time.
  • My general idea was to create a series of raw sounds from the field recordings using two distinct methods: looping of small parts which had a certain rhythmic quality to it and stretching out of some parts that had a more tonal quality. I wanted the overall sound to be a bit like Helm’s Olympic Mess, where the rhythm is mostly implied by the looping of bits of sound. I also liked the idea to use different lengths to create polyrhytmic or polymetric rhythms.
  • The night recording did of course pose some more challenges, but the crickets and cicadas provided me with some material. The pinball sounds where of course a feast for that!
  • Stretching was also quite interesting with the pinball sounds, since there’s a lot of tonal material there coming from the fx and the music. I did have to do some denoising to “carve them out” though.
  • I think I did use some other techniques as well to create the “raw” material, but I can’t remember exactly what.
  • Once I had all of that, I started to assemble things into a piece.
  • The overall structure is intended to be a big morph between the night towards the day. Layers mostly come in and fade out slowly, with some hard cuts thrown in for good measure.
8 Likes
#149

Listening now - really lovely work everyone.

Wish I’d had the time to contribute to this…

4 Likes
#150

I’ve listened to the album a couple times in chunks, and have been really impressed with how cohesive the tracks are in relation with each other. Hoping to sit down with the whole thing at once soon!

Here are some wordy but generalized notes on the process for piece Grey Earth:

  • I spent a lot of time thinking about the themes related to Day + Night. Eventually I settled on a related sub-theme of a balancing opposites. Not only were the recordings obviously opposites in terms of Day and Night, but @howthenightcame’s recording of Tokyo traffic and city noises provided a nice contrast with the natural setting of my frog choir recording.

  • I’ve always had an appreciation for the compositional processes behind musique concrète, from which this piece draws heavy inspiration. A lot of my initial work was limited to techniques that were only available at the time concrète came about. Discrete pitch / playback speed manipulation (Ableton’s warp engine turned OFF), reverse playback, simple EQing, reverb, echo, etc.

  • Once I’d gotten a few good sound snippets with pure concrète techniques, I decided to twist things up by allowing myself to use ableton’s warp engine to… well, warp the sounds. As an example, I love transposing something in one warp mode, and then un-transposing it with another. Say down a fifth with Beats mode, and then back up with Texture mode. Or up 2 octaves with Texture with low grain size and high flux and to get something super digitalized and aliased, and then bring it back down with Complex Pro. With large transpositions, this gets very wild VERY fast.

  • At some point I decided that it would interesting to warp the sounds beyond recognition, and turn the nature sounds into sci-fi city sounds, and the city sounds into sci fi nature sounds.

  • Continuing from the previous point, as I was constructing the piece I began to imagine some sort of vague story, based on the sounds I was hearing and my own (more-so than usual) personal distress regarding our planet. I pictured some kind of advanced, future world with synthetic creatures to replace the natural ecosystems they lost over time, and I imagine the piece is following the journey/escape of an individual from their home in the city to a so-called nature spot. It’s a bit reflective of my own feelings, and how I sometimes need to go out and be in nature to refresh myself, but I worry that a time may come where there’s no longer any natural places to escape to.

  • As I was working with the source material, at some point I ended up with these textural but pitched drones. While I don’t have time to play many video games these days, I had been revisiting a lot of soundtracks of games I played as a kid. One of my fav compositions ever is the music from the final hours of Majora’s Mask right before the moon is about to crash down. Given the similar dire nature of my piece, I somewhat shamelessly borrowed the cluster voicings from that piece, and used that for my own drones.

  • Finally, I also used a simple pinged resonator patch I built with Max using MC. It’s nothing fancy, just running audio through the bandpass output of 6 parallel [svf~]'s with high resonance, with some short impulses added in to excite the filters. They’re tunable, with layers of base frequencies, octave above, and a 3rd layer, which was actually my original attempt at doing this patch but I got the math wrong and just ended up with these dissonant, really high pitched pings but I thought was a nice texture so I kept it while adding in sections with the correct MIDI-frequency conversions. I ran the last nature section through this patch after I finished the form, and added it back to the piece afterwards. It’s using the same Majora cluster voicings as the drone pads.

5 Likes
#151

Omigosh! This has been out three days and I didn’t notice! (For some reason, I didn’t get a flag; I’ll have to revisit my settings.) Thanks, @jlmitch5, @disquiet, @Olivier, and @jasonw22 for all you put into it. I’ll have to wait until tonight to download and listen to it; it will likely be this weekend before I can get some notes up.

So exciting!

4 Likes
#152

Great work! Really enjoyed how you worked the tracks together and it was quite interesting reading your process!

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#153

Fantastic work everyone!

I thought I’d talk about my tracks…

desynchronosis - I thought it would be fun to play around with concepts around time and discombobulation, particularly since GoneCaving’s track is documenting their morning routine and I was pairing it with my night track. As I made this track, I also thought back to my time when I was still doing night shift and losing track of time because I was essentially operating with an upside-down schedule.

The track is bookended by two versions of GoneCaving’s track panned hard right and left respectively, one playing ~30secs after the other, then one other version running through a resonator and panning around. I did the same with my tracks about a minute in :slight_smile:

a dark grove - the original track from ermina was quite long at ~22mins, but also beautifully eerie. So my first challenge was to try and match my track (which was about 5mins) to this, and the first thing I did was time-stretch. After panning and adding resonators to ermina’s tracks and my time-stretched ones, I then layered a looped version of my original track underneath.

What you’re hearing in the compilation is the edited version kindly suggested by @jlmitch5, which neatly ends around a point where everything builds up to a lovely crescendo :slight_smile:

4 Likes
#154

Apologies for the delay, but the double CD is now available to order for $12 at Bandcamp.

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#155

thanks for uploading the cd @jasonw22. Got mine in the mail the other day, very cool to see it all come together.

I realized I had forgotten to follow up on what I did for mastering, so wanted to share a little bit about that.

I started by listening to the record with my notebook in front of me, trying to write down what I thought about the qualities of each track that stuck out to me (and also if any sounds stood out to me in a strange way to look at once I started diving in there). I used these notes along with listening to how the natural transitions would allow the tracks to flow into one another. There were also a couple cases where I asked a few of the participants if they would be interested in doing excerpts of longer form pieces, just to help balance track length across the release a little bit. I also tried to balance the tracks across the two discs (thinking in the back of my mind, since the record is about 90 minutes, someone might want to listen to half at a time to make it a little easier to consume).

Once I had the overall order down, I put things into Ableton. The first disc took quite a bit of time because I was learning a lot about various technical aspects of mastering. Most tracks had a signal chain of Ableton devices: pre-chain utility, eq8s (one stereo, one m/s, one l/r), < 2:1 ratio compressor, (if needed) soft-limiter compressor (high threshold and ratio), limiter (which I later replaced with an oxford limiter I had access to, once I learned about true-peak limiting).

A note on eq’ing: After a while, I decided that my limit of eq’ing was going to be +/- 6dBs in order to not do too much to the tracks. And almost always, I would get the notch sounding right to my ears, then lay off a little bit and increase the q, so it would be lighter touch. Almost always my goal with the eq was to balance (especially with things like the l/r eq, which hardly ever got used), and to help soften any aggressive/painful frequencies.

A note on mono’ing bass: at first I did this using a low cut for mono on my m/s eq, but after a while of a/b’ing, it was changing the nature of the tracks more than I felt comfortable, so I decided against doing it.

For the second disc, I used a trial instance of FabFilter’s Pro-Q 3. A dynamic eq is a fantastically useful thing for mastering in my experience, and this plugin’s approach to allowing an arbitrary number of curves and for each eq curve to control a specific thing (m, s, l, r, etc.) helped me really consolidate the plugins in use. I basically just used a utility, instance of Pro-Q 3, and the oxford limiter as my mastering chain on the second disc.

A note on transitions: On the second disc, I really got the hang of getting solid transitions, I think. I basically started the mastering process on that disc with just doing transitions. I would work to do tons of crazy eq automation for the various segues (I did not apply the +/- 6dB rule here), so that I could match tonality between different tracks, and also pull out/add pressure as the amplitude change with the fade. I set up the automation so that I would have a completely flat eq once the transition was over (and do any of my balancing eq tasks with different bands).

A note on loudness: if you are interested in learning more about this. I highly recommend this SOS article, especially the sections in grey at the bottom that get into the technical details. A thing I didn’t realize before doing this is that you can measure loudness at an instant, over a short time ( similar to an RMS meter) or over the whole track (which is what is used for streaming loudness normalization). I tried out several plugins, but the best (and free) to me was this Hofa 4u meter. Not only can you use it as a plugin on a track, but you can also drag a wav file on it and get the overall tracks LUFS.

One other important thing to note is that mastering engineers do not normalize everything to the exact LUFS value. After doing analysis, I found it is common for albums to have +/- 5dBs of range between various tracks’ lufs levels.

The way I used loudness once I understood for the second disc was as a starting point (I probably wouldn’t do this for a non-compilation-based project, but it worked okay for that). I set everything to -16dB lufs, and then as I listened I moved from that point to get it to feel right. For the nature of these recordings being sort of “experimental” field recording based, some were full spectrum, some were very simple and constrained to a part of the spectrum, so ear was definitely need to get it right.

I could keep going, and I’m happy to if anyone has any specific questions, but I think this covers the main points. If you read this far, thanks for dealing with my rambling hah.

7 Likes
#156

Thanks so much for sharing @jlmitch5! Really helps me understand your thought process as you worked.

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#157

Huge thanks for the insights into your process! Very interesting to hear how you made this!
Out of curiosity, did you also try the Youlean meter?

1 Like
#158

Yes I did. The free version didn’t have the offline “drop a wav file for instance analysis” feature

#159

Oh right! Well I’ll check out the Hosa one. Being able to see the overall loudness seems like a very useful thing! Thanks again!

You really put a lot of effort into mastering this! Which I guess is not even remotely something one should give for granted, so thanks again for all the hard work! I really think that it shows in the results. The overall listening experience is very smooth and consistent!

4 Likes
#160

thank y’all for the kind words!

It was a really good project to take on because I believe that I learned a lot, and I feel like whenever I do this again, I’ll be able to have a lot easier time getting started and it should be less difficult.

One takeaway I forgot to mention is that if you are mixing music yourself, focus on getting things right in the mix (and don’t use the crutch of having a bunch on the master bus as you mix, heh). There is so much you can do with space and perception when you have tracks split out. I’ve been doing a bunch of tests and experiments with running my stuff through transformers, colorful preamps, etc…and all of the changes that stuff makes is so nuanced, that I’ve started to realize, the mix is where you can really make a difference.

The other takeaway (and this one is potentially controversial and is totally my opinion), if you are interested in getting something mastered, don’t feel like the only option is to pay a ton to get something mastered by someone with a lot of fancy analog stuff and a lab-grade listening room. I got my last tape mastered by someone because I really liked how a tape they did for a band sounded that I looked up–I know they used izotope and nice, but not like extremely fancy near-fields, and I was definitely impressed with what I got back (and it wasn’t super expensive). I am getting the a-side mastered for my next one by a local friend who has done some really cool records recently and doing the b-sides of demos and stuff myself. Not to discount people who do this professionally and do an incredible job, but it is totally fine to support your local community and the people who are in it (or build your own skills) with your art. (Caveat: if you are getting records press, make sure you get things mastered by someone who knows how to do this, as that’s a finicky medium with some special rules)

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#161

This is one reason I’ve tended to avoid getting too heavy-handed with mastering. But I love what you’ve done here!

The trouble with getting it right in the mix is that we don’t have a booth in this here situation. There’s no recording engineer. Engineer + artist are one in the same for LCRP. And while art is something we can only learn through experience and personal exploration, engineering is something we can teach.

Anything you (and others) can share about the details of this, will most certainly help us all. Let’s help each other become better engineers! And since we’re all artists as well, we can explore it from that perspective. It’s not about what is technically “correct” or “best” but about what helps us express the nuance of our creation more effectively.

I’m going straight to you!

3 Likes
#162

Thanks so much, @jlmitch5, for sharing your process. I am grateful for the generosity of the work you did and of the knowledge of how it was done.

In reading your notes, I was struck by my ignorance of my ignorance, if you will. It’s an established effect that the less we know about a thing, the harder it is to assess our ignorance of it (leading to overestimations of our knowledge). I “knew” that mastering was a whole art unto itself, but really had no sense of what that meant. Even what I know of mixing has come almost exclusively from twisting virtual knobs and mashing virtual buttons on DAWs until I heard something that sounded okay to my orchestrally trained ear. Nuances like bumping up or down by a few dB narrow bands of frequency within whole pieces in service of creating continuity within a compilation are lost on me – I’m not even sure what to listen for in that context. So your explication of your process helped me identify what I don’t know in new ways.

Or, in my case, be introduced to what engineering even means!

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#163

Echoing others’ thanks for both doing the mastering and “rambling” @jlmitch5 :slight_smile:

On the general topic, there’s a lot to digest in here:

I have found the above thread a bit stressful in that regard! :wink:

When I’m in the wrong state of mind, waves of panic run over me, like “does everything I’ve ever released sound rubbish because of my own ignorance?” But of course we could have a more @jasonw22 take on it and learn how to make our music more the thing we want it to be. (WWjasonw22D?)

On that note, a friend studying audio engineering told me his class was played Black Eyed Peas’ I Got A Feeling as an example of badly-recorded vocals. Two reactions to that: first, is that your only criticism of that song?" :wink: and, second, did this engineering problem stand in the way of millions of people loving the song?

4 Likes