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Week 13 - Mastering 2

Other than the actions I took in the previous post to max gain, in the post, I'll share in further detail how I mastered each song and also combined them.

Zhi Le's: Boosted the middle frequencies to make everything sound more bright. Cut off noise in bass. Also decreased everything by -5.0dB (right bar) because his on the loud side compared to Alphonse's.

Pre-EQ modification

Post-EQ modification

Alphonse: First striking difference was the volume. So I boosted it across all frequencies. To show the contrast, there's a screenshot of all 3 sound waves later.

Zooming into Alphonse's piece. I boosted the bass as I think it was a nice bass and gave the song more depth. I also liked the instrument that is doing a panning sound (the arpeggiated one I think), but it's very soft compared to the melody, so I decreased the high frequencies as well.

Pre-EQ modification

Post-EQ modification

Vincent's: Vincent's song was also decreased across the board to better match Alphonse's volume. Vincent's bass was also too boosted, some frequencies peaked a lot (see screenshot), so I reduced the bass frequencies. Also discarded some of the random top frequencies, taking care not to chop off too much because his song has fillers that use that frequencies.

Pre-EQ modification

Post-EQ modification

And now here's how I combined them (will talk about the three versions but two main ones will be posted):

This is the first version. Zhi Le -> Alphonse -> Vincent. 

The reason is because Zhi Le's was the most upbeat and energetic, hence I wanted to start with his and get the listeners engrossed and hyped up first. Alphonse's was kind of like a cooling down after a party kind of vibe (but still at the party) so I thought it would go well after Zhi Le's. As for Vincent's it was a clear finale song because of the soothing touch (the 'ooh' voices, the slow/very few notes of flute on the melody line, the shimmery sound, and the way it loops). It was calming and suitable to wrap up the playlist. 

At first, I put the songs back to back with no overlapping (version 1). However, I really did NOT like the way Alphonse's song comes in after Zhi Le's with a long and slow introduction. 4 bars of only drums, bass comes in next 4 bars, panning fills come in next 4 bars. Then only verse starts. 12 bars of intro was to long given the sudden drop in energy from Zhi Le's song. The long time it takes to build back up to a middle-energy range did not sit well with me. I overlapped 4 bars so there was still some intro to the chord progressions (4-8th bar), and a bit of the panning sound which I liked.

From Alphonse's to Vincent's, I added a 1 bar break because both their songs ended on the dot. Anyway, here is the playlist merged as one song because of the overlap/breaks so I can't put it into a playlist (version 2).

However, I am not sure if we are actually allowed to do an overlap... And I wanted to play around with the songs more. Finally, I decided on this arrangement:

Alphonse -> Zhi Le -> Vincent.

The reason is so that I can keep all 3 songs as their original form without cutting any parts. The order is inspired by the standard story telling form! Namely, Introduction -> Climax -> Resolution.

As mentioned above, Alphonse's song has a long and steady introduction. Therefore, it is appropriate as the first song. 

Old energy level: starts on a bang -> steadily decreasing.

New energy levels: steadily increases from nothing -> peaks -> steadily decreasing

While the introduction now is less energetic, I think it's a good build to Zhi Le's and Zhi Le's piece serves as a good climax tying the songs together. The energy is more balanced through the playlist, not concentrated and over with the first song. With that, here is the final playlist.

Week 12 - Mastering

Things I did for mastering:

Put songs into 3 different tracks

EQ -

• Roll off bottom end: we can't hear the 20-30 Hz frequencies (subsonic material) but muddies track. So remove them.
• Adjust the EQ across 3 songs. Alphonse was too soft compared to the rest. All three songs had a lot of sound in the higher frequencies to I didn't want them to be too loud too.

Compression - for peaks:

• Threshold reduces signal
• Keep meter within -2 to -3 so as not to chop off too much sound
• Ratio about 1.4
• Tweak make up knob to make up for the sound that we just cut away with 2-3dB
• User a Multimeter to keep track of the overall volume and make sure it never peaks above 0 !

Limiting - allow max gain:

• Set ceiling to just below 0
• Up gain until the most we can

Will rearrange the pieces again next week and post the playlist!