Adventures in Mastering, Part Deux

[Anderton]

I finally have a "release candidate" for the "neo-" album, and I'll be posting it over the weekend. However, I have to say the mastering took forever - and the idea that you can master while mixing, as discussed in the first "Adventures in Mastering" thread, holds true only if you're doing singles. I had forgotten how different an animal mastering an album can be...

 

First was song selection. I nuked a lot of my songs, especially anything too dark or political, but retained two of Mark's - "Only Ever After You" and of course, "Black Market Daydreams." I ended up with about 47 minutes worth of material.

 

Next was deciding on an order for the songs. Because all the songs are different, I realized that whatever song I put first would be misleading if people thought it was representative of the album. So I put "New Day," my "neo-psychedelic" one, first because I figured it would be sufficiently unexpected that it would leave people scratching their heads about what to expect next. Then it goes into "I Want My Heaven Now" which is hard rock, so I hoped that would confuse people enough they'd be open to the next song

 

I tried several different orders. This means you have to listen to the whole album each time to determine if the flow works. You can skip most of the first cut and most of the last one, but still, that's a lot of listening.

 

I wanted all the songs to flow seamlessly from one to another, which added another layer of complexity. For example one song crossfades with another but the tempos weren't matched. So I took the section of the first song that crossfaded, altered the tempo so it matched the next song's tempo, spliced it to the original, and solved that problem. In another section there was a drastic key change, so I repeated a figure several times, with each repeat going down a semitone, as a transition. In another transition the next song was slightly different in pitch than the previous one because I had done the "varispeed pitch change" trick in SONAR. I changed pitch very slowly over a transitional section, but the change is so slow you don't hear it and it sounds like the songs are in the exact same key.

 

Once all the songs were strung together, things that worked well when you listened to individual songs didn't necessarily work in the album context. Because I now had a very long listening experience, I felt some of the songs needed to be truncated. I shortened beginnings, removed sections from some songs, etc. These were all done on the two-track mixes, not on the original files...another reason why mastering is different from mixing.

 

Then I needed to balance levels among the various songs and transitions. Again, it's necessary to listen to the entire album all the way through to get a general sense, then skip around among various sections and watch the average and peak levels to see what's going on. I also needed to balance dynamics. Most songs had the same general amount of dynamics, but a couple needed a little bit more compression to match the dynamic range of the others.

 

After repeated listenings I started to feel that having one continuous album was just too much. In the days of vinyl, albums had to be broken up into two sides and I thought that made for a better experience. So, I realized that the song order lent itself naturally to a "Side 1" and "Side 2," and inserted silence between the two "sides."

 

Finally, "Black Market Daydreams," being the first song I recorded after a long hiatus and written by someone other than me (hi Mark), was in a "one of these things is not like the others" position. I couldn't fit it anywhere into the flow, so I put it at the end. However, it still didn't quite "fit" because the song before it, "I Say Yes," was actually a perfect closer and I couldn't have two "closers" in a row. But I love "Black Market Daydreams" so I was determined to figure out a solution, which involved cheating . I took several applause samples I'd gathered over the years, cobbled them together, and put applause at the end of "I Say Yes" as if it was the end of a concert. But then I got two of the beautiful girls next door to overdub a few "One more! Encore!" vocals, and had the audience noise swell up at the end of the section, like what happens when a band comes back onstage for an encore. Then it segues into "Black Market Daydreams" and it works perfectly - "BMD" becomes the encore cut for the album.

 

And that's the short form of "Adventures in Mastering"! Next time I'm going to do a collection of singles

[Mark L]

Very flattered that one of my songs is to be 'A Day in the Life' on your 'Sgt. Pepper's'

 

But seriously, that sounds like an awful lot of work. Rather you than me. You must have the patience of Job

 

Kudos

[Anderton]

But seriously' date=' that sounds like an awful lot of work. Rather you than me. You must have the patience of Job[/quote']

 

Well, I wonder how what of those online "We will master your songs to perfection in minutes for $5 using Advanced Algorithms Based on the Knowledge of All Musical History" sites would do with the album...

 

This is why I still believe assembly is a crucial aspect of making an album, and is best left to mastering engineers.