In Heaven For A Conference – 250511

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What an awful day that was!

You’d think a track with two synth parts, a guitar, a bass and a stereo rhythm track would be a piece of cake to mix and master. How wrong you’d be…

The day started off badly with my having a mild but annoying headache. It quickly got worse…

I had to do an emergency re-edit of the guitar parts. I’d cut and paste a few loops throughout the track, but they didn’t sync up properly, so I had to redo that. Then I found a glitch in the bass parts which seems to have been a bit of bleed from my headphones on to the 4003’s pickup. EQ sorted that. I was pretty much ready to rock’n’roll after that and took a bit of time getting a decent mix together. But when I went to master the pre-master track, the JV880 Ice Hall part kept distorting. I had to do a number of different mixes to get the distortion off the monitors, but no matter how I tried, the distortion was still present in the headphones – NBG.

I adjusted levels and adjusted EQs. All to no avail. I then decided that the thing to do was to re-record the Ice Hall parts, but more cleanly – take out all the effect that were present by default on the part in the JV880. For some reason, I couldn’t record MIDI in CE5 for an hour or so. Then the software sat down on me completely – not before I had a repeat of the missing transport bar problem I’ve mentioned before.

When I finally got that sorted, I had to try and edit the Ice Hall part on the JV880. Not an easy task – it would be easier (and more logical) for an amoeba to give birth to an elephant, However, I prevailed and finally edited the part to my heart’s consent. When I finally got that sorted, I recorded the part to CE5 using the Behringer mixer and the Phonic Firely – only to find that the part still sounded crap.

At that stage, I made the fateful decision to find an alternative to the Ice Hall part. I decided to try out a few VST instruments and, after much trial and rather a lot of error, I stumbled upon the Tabular Bells voice in Kore Player. A lovely voice, but it completely changes the mood of the track and it exposed a certain clash between the MIDI part and my bass part. I had no choice but to edit the MIDI part to fit the bass.

Things sound much better (if rather different now), but I still haven’t mixed and mastered it. A job for tomorrow…

16 bloody mixes and all of them crap. Grrr!!!

Regards,

djp