Post 4

FINISH

Upon reflection during post production… this track may have taken a wrong turn. I needed a vocalist asap to sing this song, but maybe I didn’t think heavily enough about getting the right one. I know Zoe-Beth and the girl can sing beautifully, but this song really isn’t her artistic style. But, I had a week to find a vocalist, rehearse with her, record her, perform all post production and complete this write up. I’m just glad to have finished product to show. Unfortunately this product consists of an overcooked vocal track. I had to do too much tuning and flex time to fit it in to the very clinical mix. And many unwanted artefacts were created during this process that degrade the quality of the vocal track. It’s not a great sound but I had to run with it knowing full well I could have done better. A lesson learnt. 

​

I will 100% ask to work with Zoe-Beth in future, but with the knowledge that it won’t be in this capacity. 

​

Still the work had to be finished. 

​

So the finish? I rolled of a little low end on my master EQ. Turned out the SSL sub had been colouring my reference point during the mixing stage and my sub needed a small gain reduction (about <150Hz).

​

I used the dynamic EQ to try and stop the mid/high-mid pushing the track off balance. The dodgy vocal track combined with the guitar track created a sharp tone which occasionally needed suppressing.     

​

Next on my master chain was an Ozone exciter. The side channels had a high-mid frequency band with a tape algorithm inserted. The tape adds a warmer distortion to that of digital harmonic distortion. And in the mid channel I used the same tape distortion but in the low-mids, which created a warm feel to the synth and drum mix

​

I set my true peak limiter ceiling to -1 to help prevent inter-sample peaks distorting the track when/if its subject to data compression. Then I started to up my threshold to start closing boosting my LUFS and set a comfortable dynamic range. 

​

Final bounce is a -12LUFS 24bit/44.1WAV file.