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snoozefestaudio7F out there, with partly blue skies, going down to 3F tonight!
I spent a good couple hours last night, setting all the faders for never rains, and even caught some mistakes in the music that I fixed. So... very productive!.. UNTIL... I closed the entire file accidentally, only to realize I had not saved any of that work!
This is the danger of drinking while mixing on a weekend night!
Right now I'm just sipping my coffee, waking up, and happy that I don't have to get gas or groceries today, with a wind chill of four below!
Okay, so yesterdays rogue masters didn't sound so great.
Basically, the gain staging resulted in the main body of the music being fairly quiet, because there is such a huge dB gap between that and the loudest peaks.
Using serial compression and limiting was an attempt to get that volume back, and it sort of worked, but it's not a silver bullet.
So, I accepted that the real issue is with the velocities themselves.
I opened the old Reavis and saved it as FNMX, to start the gain staging over from scratch, this time putting the channel rack volumes all to 100%, so that I can ignore the channel rack and focus only on the mixing board (in the last attempt the channel rack volumes were at 75%).
After this I focused only on the drums, because with the drums, the velocities are not as exaggerated or unpredictable as they can be with the instruments.
So, ignoring velocities, I adjusted all drum faders to have them peaking just below 0, and then adjusted the master fader until that whole drum mix was peaking just below zero (around -2dB).
This put the master fader at -22dB.
I did have one stubborn pattern where the kick, snare, and crash all hit on the first beat together, so for that I went in and pulled down the velocities to keep it from peaking.
So, now I'm gonna focus on the bass, guitar, cello, violin, and xylo... one at a time, and for those I will go in and tweak the velocities in offending patterns for the sake of a higher overall level for each of those faders.
I did learn, in my research today, that there's a fairly easy way to select all the notes in a pattern and scale down all the velocities at once... so that the relationship between one note and the next remains the same, but the peak is brought down.
And this is just what I'll have to do for every song.... slowly gain staging and velocity editing until nothings peaking above 0dB, but everything's as loud as it can be.
And that won't do much for the sound of the mixes, it's just ground work for the next stages of spectral analysis and compression on each instrument and drum.
However, this work will give me yet another chance to comb through the songs and fix little mistakes or oversights, so there's that... and this is also the first stage of the FNMX infrastructure... creating FNMX versions, and populating the WORK04 folder with FNMX AUP3s, etc.
So... in the single digit cold of mid January, as the moon slowly waxes, the final mix begins with the unglamorous work of gain staging... which could take a couple weeks.
Talk to you later tonight.
Okay, so everything's balanced except for the xylophone, which I'll get to after the laundry's gotten started.
Rather than listen in headphones, I've been doing this with the near field monitors at low volume. Low enough, I think, that the neighbors can't hear it.
And if I keep up with that practice on work nights, I think it could give my ears some good training. Hearing the mix at a low volume, and also knowing that everything in that mix is as loud as it can be, and no louder.
This could help me down the road when I'm in the compression stage, to usefully monitor near field late at night.
Like, I'll still do most of that work in headphones on work nights, but I may be able to compare to low-level iLouds on occasions to get a clue, rather than doing that exclusively on the weekends.
At any rate, my strategy for the bass and guitar was somewhat to pull the faders down, but also to go through each pattern, solo it while watching the mixer, and then scale down velocities and slightly tweak, to get their peaks below zero.
I also selected each pattern and did, "show in playlist" to make sure they were actually being used in the song! For the guitar, there were seven unused patterns, so I colored them gray, and grouped them at the bottom of the guitar section of the list.
Unused patterns are the result of all the WekBrek tightening, where certain patterns were quickly cloned and then the clone was improved and deployed into the song.
Checking like this, saves time. No point in velocity tweaking seven unused patterns! Graying them out keeps them around in case for some reason I realize I need one or the other of them.
For the Cello and Violin, I left the faders exactly at the default position and did all the volume control in the velocities of the patterns themselves.
This is because, unlike drums, bass, and guitar, the strings are not rhythmic. They play longer, more sustaining notes, so I want to retain as much volume as possible with them.
Also, velocity itself is not as much of a thing with strings. There doesn't need to be much volume difference between one note and the next.
So... in conclusion here, before I get into the shower, the work is kinda slow going, but the resulting gain staging makes more sense than my first attempt, which was just to keep pulling down the faders until they stopped peaking over 0.
And there's a technique developing, so that'll make things flow better as this process continues through all 12 songs.
Lastly, yes, I've been obsessively saving the work as I go!
Talk to you later tonight.
I'm all clean & shiny with a trimmed beard and the laundry's in the dryer.
Gain staging is done for Reavis. What I learned is that after every individual track is optimized to stay just below the zero mark, the master levels will still show peaking above zero, thanks to the combined effects of different tracks all going hard at the same moments.
This happens in the more intense parts of the song, naturally.
But my decision was to hold the line with the master fader at -22dB, and just go back through velocities for those problem beats and tweak them down.
Mostly this was done with drums, whose velocities I had not altered, but occasionally I had to tweak everything, bass, guitar, strings... just for one or another beat, and just a hair.
So, that informs the routine, going forward.
I really should strive to keep the master fader in all songs to -22.
And ignoring drum velocities until the end is also a good idea, I think... and then only tweaking this or that offending beat.
The hybrid approach for bass and guitar seems to be the best. They are rhythmic, they do need to have variations in velocity. For example if either one is pumping on a single note or single chord for a few measures, you absolutely have to have that velocity variation to avoid it sounding totally robotic.
For all the orchestrals, however, I think unity with the faders and full velocity tweaking is the key. Because for all of them, doubled up notes really affect the peak.
You can have a xylo, or a violin playing one note at a time, and have it at a fairly high level, but if they start doing two-note chords, that spikes the meters. Velocity is the best way to deal with that.
I don't want the entire violin track to be at -12db, just because of a few spikes in one pattern.
So, the new Reavis test WAV was saved, and I think I'm gonna get a fresh start on Never Rains for the remainder of the evening.
Though I do need to create a prompt to establish a new decompression chat with DeepSeek, for the coming weeks, and get that AI up to speed with things.
After a two-week haiatus, this long weekend was a bumpy start to the final mix.
Saturday was eaten up by building checks, errands, and the weekly phone call, such that the only accomplishment was just the listen to the Ruff Record in the iLouds.
Sunday was very destabilized by the hours long protest across the street, making so much noise it was difficult to concentrate on anything, much less audition music in the loudspeakers.
I did get a start on gain staging, but it was an unfocused start.
Today was where I fianally found that focus, by going back to the drawing board with the gain staging.
But the low-level near field monitoring, I think will be something of a game changer going forward.
Especially in the gain staging phase, it's more about eyeing levels than hearing. Even if it's whisper quiet, that's enough.
On that count, however, I'll say the extreme cold is a help. When it's down in the single digits the silent radiator stays on constantly, so there's no need to cycle a space heater, with it's white noise.
Also the world outside at night is just quieter, because everybody's hiding out at home.
Okay!.. that's how the final mixing phase begins!
An awkward, bumpy start after two weeks away. But we're finally off the ground.
Talk to you next Saturday!
°¦}
