GREGORIBREK DAY 03
Friday, January 2nd, 2026 04:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snoozefestaudio20F and overcast today.
Last night (this morning) I listened to side 2, twice in a row, then played the whole record through once.
The album right now has a runtime of 52 minutes.
The overall flow is just great now, with the sound design sequences between songs.
The song order is perfect. The songs themselves are much stronger, with all the changes that have been made, and in terms of overall clarity.
And the vocals all sound great... no bad notes, nothing poorly executed... and they're mixed well.
The balance of things from song to song does need work. Mostly it's the drums, or certain drums or cymbals, that tend to get lost. Ocaccionally the guitar or bass will also get lost.
This seems more of an amplitude issue than an EQ issue, pointing to compression as the missing element, but there still is some EQ fine tuning to be done.
EQ is more of an issue with the orchestral instruments, whose settings have all been done on the fly, just eyeballing and earballing the parametric eq screen.
The sound effects, however, all sound great! They belend with each other well. And the reality they created doesn't seem to conflict with the world of the band.
The thunder, in Never Rains, would be the one exception. It sounds good, but, running through the song, for dramatic impact, it should probably be EQed and compressed.
All of that said... I am still monitoring only in headphones, and I have been very close to all this work for two months, so my brain and my ears are fairly biased right now.
I will need to take a break from it all for a week or two, and then start hearing it out in the air, to get a real impression of what the Ruff Record is, and what it needs.
But, this is still Gregoribrek, and Archeology, the song needs another pass.
Recall that the discipline of keeping notes, and saving presets, for vocal mixing, was established with Reavis 309, at the onset of the Standard Grind... after Archeology, in it's current form, was mixed for vocals.
And you can tell!
So, tonight I'll revert it back to the dry vocals for both the lofi and the HD parts, and work them again, with the newly established techniques.
For the tape flip and tape end sequences, however, I need that old sound when a cassette reached the end, where you'd hear it tighten up a bit, with a squeak, before the play button popped up.
I do have an old tape player I bought at a resale shop last spring, so we'll see if that can do the job. If not, I may go BACK to Thrift & Dollar to see if they have one that will do it.
I also need the sound of ejecting the cassette, flipping it, etc.
Presuming I can obtain the sounds, then in the two sequences, I guess we'll have that Gmaj7 glowing in the background, and the little mouse squeaks in the crypt, with the graveyard ambiance outside the crypt door to the left... same as we heard at the start of the album.
Tape flip will be just that, a tape flip in the crypt and they hit play again for side two, which will start with tape hiss as on side one until the crickets come in for Suburbs.
Tape End will be the tomb raider stuffing the tape into their jacket and emerging back out into the cemetery and walking away, with a slow fade out.
So, we'll see if it can get done before Monday.
Other than that, it's just nice to have a day off... with the holidays behind me... and with the bills paid.
And I won't have to leave the flat today!
Okay, talk to you later in the evening.
So, I started with the music in FL studio. The guitar lead at the end had sounded muddy, so I wanted to fix that.
It's assigned to GUITAR 2, and is the only instance of GUITAR 2 in the song, so it seemed like an easy thing to tweak the knobs in Sakura to brighten it up, but after doing so, I realized that I'd lost that glowing sustain on the final GMaj7!
So it took a while to recover that all important sustain, but I did it, while retaining the brightness of this lead.
But then I wound up tweaking a lot of other things, EQs and volumes for the orchestral... some of the main guitar patterns were getting lost in the mix, so I adjusted velocities and/or changed what was being played.
All the changes were being done to the HD parts of the song, and when I was satisfied that the overall mix and flow were better, I exported a new HD stem.
Then it was over to Audacity.
The latest AUP3 for Archeology was still a WORK02 file, so I re-saved it in the WORK03 folder as, 26-01-archeology-260102-work03.aup3.
I imported the new HD music WAV, and then, muting the vocals, listened to the song. The LoFi mono stem, as EQed over Thanksgevbrek still sounded fine, but it was a bit too loud, so I lowered it by -6db.
The transitions between lofi music and HD music felt clumsy, and it was because of two things; 1) I'd somehow lost the ground buzz track for the transitions, and 2) the tape hiss track was for some reason out of synch with the transitions, and was also doing fade-ins and fade-outs, which felt stupid.
So I deleted the tape hiss track and opened the original WAV of tape hiss digitization, which was actually a lot fuller and louder than the one I'd been working with.
I copy pasted clips of new tape hiss into the main AUP3. I made sure to get that sound of the tape leader giving way to tape at the start, and time it so that it happens just before the lofi music starts.
I also made sure to cut the tape hiss right at the transitions with no fading! (so stupid!)
Then I found my original WAV of ground buzzes, and worked in new ground buzz right at the transitions. I EQed that and doubled it, to make it feel a bit more cinematic.
The result of all that work was great!.. lofi music full of tape his transitions perfectly to HD, with nice sounding ground buzz!
So, now my muted vocal tracks were labeled, OG VOCAL, VERSE, BRIDGE, CHORUS. So I kept OG Vocal, and deleted the other three... thinking I would create new dry verse, bridge, and chorus stems from it.
HOWEVER... it turned out that the OG vocal track was the ORIGINAL track recorded on March 1st, long BEFORE the summer of vocals! All mixed and EQed poorly! WHAT?
So, the three tracks I'd deleted had actually been the DRY stems of the final, comped verse, brige and chorus!
I guess I separated that final comp into the three dry stems on Thanksgevbrek, without keeping the un-stemmed track. And I guess I must've done experimental conditioning on them in a different file that was deleted after exportation of it's test FLAC, on Thanksgevbrek, but saved the dry WORK02?
It's confusing, but suffice it to say, the dry stems of the final vocal comp were still there in the WORK02 file, but I had to export each of them separately as a WAV, and past those WAVs into the WORK03 file... for the timing to line up!
I deleted the stupid, OG VOCAL track from March... (so stupid that it was still there!) and now the new WORK03 version of Archeology is worthy of it's WORK03 status!
Better lofi music, better HD music, better ground buzz, better tape hiss, three dry vocal stems... NOT TO BE MESSED WITH... and no misleading, and useless OG VOCAL track from the pre-Elgym era!
After this break, I'll get to work on a copy of the verse vocal stem, making it lofi, and blending it into the lofi mix.
Then I'll work on the bridge vocals, which are the old-man ghost, and then the chorus vocals, which are the young man resurrected in the modern day.
Should be a fun night.
Well, this was a real barn burner of a session and I can't say it ended with 100% success!
The first big challenge was getting the lofi vocals to sound right... to truly be in the same room as the lofi music. I created whole recipe that seemed good until I heard it all back and realized I needed to double down on everything I'd done.
So I started over from scratch with it, and the result sounded much better.
I went on to do the bridge (ghost) vocals and the chorus vocals, and they seemed great.
But then in the final listen through, I really had misgivings about the lofi vocals and did them all over again from scratch, a third time!
They were much better, but something was still wrong.
It was the stereo tape hiss! I created a new track of hiss with both channels bounced together as a mono track and that really did the trick for the lofi part of the song!
But then I was still not happy with the way the outro guitar lead sounded and that triggered a very time consuming back and forth to FL, then exporting back to audacity... no!... back to FL, and export again... no!... back to FL a third time!
That third time in FL, I just copied the pattern for the G2 lead and pasted it into a GUITAR 1 pattern, because G1 was sounding fine!
That worked!
NOW... the way the outro guitar lead works is... it ends on a chord strike, and then it repeats that chord strike two more times, with the third being the one that sustains out into the time travel sequence.
So I kept G2 doing those final two strikes.
It was getting late by the time I pasted that final export into Audacity, but the result was *pretty good!"
The problem with the guitar lead had been solved. The G1 outro lead finally sounded good!
The lofi parts of the song had also been resolved.
The chorus parts are perfect.
My final misgivings are these; 1) ghost vocal reverb is a bit too much. 2) HD music has issues with being to tinny in the orchestral parts (including the outro). 3) final GMaj7 from guitar2 has too much distortion!
So, I WILL have to spend another day on, Archeology, to get it to be acceptable for the Ruff Record.
As for the ghost vocal, while the reverb is just a bit too much, it's nearly perfect! It does sound like he's a little detached from the main recording, coming in a half-beat before lofi/hd transitions at some points, or in other places, his reverb tail lasting into the next lofi section... which is all great!
It's just a little too much.
I did export tonight's final result to FLAC to add to the ruff record for the night, but then ran into another issue!
In the Ruff Record, for Side 1, Crypt Sequence, Song, and Time travel sequence were all baked together as one track!
I could not just erase the old version of Archeology and place the new FLAC in there!
I had to delete the whole Arche sequence, and then import, just the crypt sequence WAV first... then the new FLAC... then the TT sequence WAV... which had to be realigned to perfectly end on it's final tick with the school bell of Reavis.
And then the new GMaj7 had to be faded out properly, so as not to dominate the whole of the TT sequence... and that's also why I said it has too much distortion... it needs to be cleaner.
But at any rate... I ran up against yet more sins of Thanksgevbrek, with that original Archeology sequence being all baked together... just like the OG vocal from March still hanging around in the WORK02 file!
So... that's been fixed!.. so tomorrow, and in the future, whenever there is a better mix of Archeology the SONG... I can drop it in between the Crypt and TT sequences without having to do major surgery!.. goddamit!
Final take for tonight: 1) Thanksgevbrek Pat was still a total idiot, compared to Standard Grind Pat. 2) Archology the song is a tough nut to crack, even for post holigrind Pat!
So... one more crack at it on day 4 of Gregoribrek!
Sheesh!
See you in the *morning*
°¦}
