Sneaky-peaky Review No. 1 – Vichy Circles

Sponsored by the letter P.

First song out of the traps for pre-release review is Vichy Circles – the song that only took me 4 years to record.

Hope you think it was worth all the effort…

Regards,

 

djp

“In Heaven For A Conference”/”Vichy Circles” – 220711

Sponsored by the letters B and C.

Remixed/remastered both tracks in CE5, Cubase VST/24 and AA3.

VICHY… has been re-edited to lop some of the beats off the start (I was becoming conscious that a lot of the tracks on the album start with beats, so I decided to vary things a little) and I tidied up the last Rickenbacker 360 part which allows me to have a more “natural” fadeout .

Dropped the guitar part in …HEAVEN just a tad.

Now I need to do up yet another version of the tracklisting for evaluation purposes. Who’d be me, eh…?;-).

Regards,

djp

Tracklisting/Location scouting/”The Cop Car Hand Heel Wheel Turn”/”In Heaven For A Conference”/”Vichy Circles” – 220711

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Burnt a new CD with a revised tracklisting (minus …COP CAR…). Works fine and comes in at a tad over 50 mins. I’m going to have to tweak the mix for …HEAVEN… – the guitar part is that little bit too high in the mix. I also want to take another look (as it were) at the fadeout for VICHY… – a bit too drastic. I’m very happy with everything else, so we’re nearly good to go.

Spent a lot of the morning touring around, scouting locations for a photoshoot. I was going to take shots at a beach, but the nearest likely location is at least a 120km round trip from here, and I want to do everything discreetly, and being missing for the guts of a day is not “discreet”. Looking locally, I have found three spots where I should be able to take some interesting shots. Camcorder all charged up and ready to go – hopefully on Monday, if the weather holds up…

Regards,

djp

“Vichy Circles”/Potential tracklisting/”In Heaven For A Conference” – 110711

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On reflection, I’d faded out VICHY…too early, so I remastered the track in AA3 and lengthened the fadeout a bit. Sounds grand now.

All the tracks being in place, I decided I’d put together a test CD-R using Audio Cleaning Lab so that I can review the album as a whole on my car stereo. And this is the current tracklisting:-

1. King Fidget
2. The Tree Of Idleness
3. Flood Plain
4. People Who Look Like Other People
5. Hosanna In The Hiace
6. Vichy Circles
7. Private Sector Weather Forecast Service
8. Fly Me To Hecuba
9. A Truth You Can Happily Accept
10. The Cop Car Hand Hell Wheel Turn
11. In Heaven For A Conference
12. No Position To Argue
13. Perp Walk
14. Future Plans For Yesterday
15. Whatever Happened To The Citizens Of My Abandoned City?

Total running time comes to 52 and-a-half minutes, which compared to that of HAPPY DAYS IN THE GULAG (a tad over 74 mins) is like a gentle stroll through the park.

The idea is to group tracks together in “threes” and have a bass-driven track followed by a synth-driven track follwed by an ambient track. It doesn’t work all the way through the tracklisting, but I took it as far as I could.

Re. …HEAVEN, I’m going for the Ice Hall version rather than the Tabular version. I know a lot of people preferred the latter over the former, but it strikes me, on mature reflection, to be rather too “tinkly” and that ultimately it might irritate the casual listener. I had thought of combining the two versions, but not with any great enthusiasm, so I never got around to it. I’ll put out the Tabular version on an EP at some stage.

My initial reaction is that the tracks sound great over the car stereo. I already know they sound fine over the monitors and headphones, so I think the mixes will work alright.

I’m going to listen to the tracklisting for a while and see if I can live with it. At this stage, there are no cross-fades between the tracks, just the standard 2-second break. Cross-fading causes problems when you try to stream tracks off the internet, so since the album is going to exist in virtual form rather than physical, I may just forget about cross-fading. Saves a load of time for me, I should say…;-).

OK, things are going to be quiet around here for a while. When I have something to report, I’ll be in touch…

Regards,

djp

 

“Whatever Happened To The Citizens Of My Abandoned Evony City?”/”Vichy Circles” – 080711

Sponsored by the letters F, H, I and J.

Spent yesterday evening remixing and mastering …EVONY in CE5, Cubase VST/24 and AA3. For a track that isn’t hugely complicated, the mixing took me an age – sorting out the various competing EQs was a bit of a challenge, but I got there eventually.  An improvement on the previous mix. One valuable lesson I learnt (accidentally) while mixing was that a lot of the pops I hear in tracks on playback are caused by the Phonic Firefly. If I don’t route my audio via it, but via my PC’s default soundcard, the pops go away. Don’t know why, but it’s one to remember for the future…

Spent this morning remixing and mastering VICHY… I still haven’t fully removed the bass rumble at the start of the track, but it’s sounds fine over earphones, so I’m not too worried (when you hear how badly a lot of modern music is mastered, VICHY…sounds perfectly fine to me). The remix is significantly different from (and better than…) the original mix. Another lesson I learnt during part of this process was that there are limits to the compressor/limiter I use in Cubase VST/24. It adds a certain strange audio effect to bass parts (something I’d noticed before, but which I thought was caused by unsympathetic MP3 encoding). At a loss for something to use as an alternative, I experimented with the processing presets included in AA3 and found a nice multi-band compressor which I will use in future (it’s not as if I actually know what I’m dong when I’m mastering, but this compressor sounds “nice” to me, so…).

Right – that’s it. I ‘m going to spend a bit of time putting together the album running order. I have a fairly clear idea of what I want to do, but I need to hear the finished tracks to be absolutely sure.

Nearly there now…

Regards,

djp

Monitor listening party/”Whatever Happened To The Citizens Of My Abandoned Evony City?”/”Vichy Circles” – 070711

Sponsored by the letters D and E.

Played back all the mixes on the monitors, and it looks like I’m going to have to remix …EVONY and VICHY… The former is just too dense and is causing problems for my monitors, while the bass line in the latter needs to be dropped down a bit. Thought I could get away with re-mastering both tracks, but after a number of attempts, it became apparent that I’d just have to bite the bullet and go back to the drawing board (as it were…) with the tracks.

Mild bummer, but I do have plenty of time to sort this out. So that’s what I shall jolly well go and do…

Regards,

djp

Vichy Circles/No Position To Argue – 090611

Sponsored by the letter E.

Managed to mix/master both tracks successfully in CE5, Cubase VST/24 and AA3.

Each track had a particular challenge. VICHY… had a “mess” of instruments fighting for the same frequencies, so a lot of EQ-ing was required, especially for the Godman 12-string parts, while the problem with …ARGUE was the Fender Jazz Bass parts. Again, EQ-ing came to the rescue – the bass sounds rather different from what I had in mind, but it needed to cut through a rather dense mix, so needs must…

I should say at this point that it’s only taken me four years to finish VICHY… I’m very pleased with the results, which I think justify all the time and effort taken to complete the track.

Just checking, and I find I have four tracks left to mix/master and then the album is done. There’s a pretty good chance that the audio will all be put to bed by next Tuesday. Don’t want to jinx meself, but it would be nice to be finished…;-).

Regards,

djp

Rough mixing – 070511

Sponsored by no letter at all

Finished off the rough mixes:-

1. Private Sector Weather Forecast Service
2. The Cop Car Hand Heel Wheel Turn
3. The Tree Of Idleness
4. Vichy Circles
5. Whatever Happened To The Citizens Of My Abandoned Evony City?

Had a minor panic when I discovered that although I had completed editing …IDLENESS, I hadn’t actually saved my work properly, so I had to do an emergency edit. Luckily it was a quick and straightforward task. The track sounds particularly fine, especially towards the end – spine-tingling

I also decided to do a quick re-edit to …FIDGET. One of the guitar parts was annoying me, so I found a neat little workaround that saves the day. Huzzah!

On a quick tot-up, I have about an hour of music (honestly didn’t think it was that much…) but taking out the tracks that aren’t going to make the final cut, I’m probably going to end up in the mid-50s. I’ve no problem with that.

Going to take a bit of a rest now. Off to NYC next week for a few days. Recharge the batteries an’ting…

Laters,

djp

Vichy Circles – 250411

Sponsored by the letters G, H, I and J.

Edited the track in CE5. Started off trying to match the bass parts (of which there are 2) to the “live” 360 part I recorded back in 2007 (hard to believe, that, but it’s twooo…). Much tweaking of the synth and Godman 12-string parts also.  The joys of non-quantized incompetent musicality…;-).

Still, the track sounds great. Hope it’ll be considered worth the wait…

Time to move on (again).

Regards,

djp

People Who Look Like Other People/Future Plans For Yesterday/Flood Plain/Vichy Circles/In Heaven For A Conference – 050411

Sponsored by the letters W and no letter at all.

Christ, what a day…

…and it all started so well…

Finished the audio cleanup for all the tracks in Cool Edit Pro. When it came to FUTURE… I found I had to record some MIDI parts to audio. This I did. As I suspected, all the audio files that I was going to recycle for VICHY… had been cleaned up back when I was putting Raw Mesh together.

The fun started when I thought I’d start editing HEAVEN… in CE5 .Very long story very short – I had a recurrence of the issue I’d had a few months back with the disappearing transport panel. Although you can play a project file without the transport panel, I can’t really edit without it. There was a workaround which I couldn’t remember straight away, but when I did eventually remember it, it wouldn’t work for the HEAVEN… project file, although it did seem to work for other files. That lead me to think that maybe the project file was corrupted in some way, so I created a new version. But still I had the problem with the transport panel.

I tried the workaround a number of times – no joy. I then got the bright idea of uninstalling and re-installing CE5. Which worked, up to the point where the Steinberg eLicenser USB key kicked in and, basically, started acting the maggot on me. CE5 would not work.

Luckily, I also have CE5 on my laptop. That worked perfectly when I inserted the key. I copied all the necessary data files onto my laptop and opened up the HEAVEN…project file. Guess what? No transport panel.

I also have CE4 on the laptop. Now, for some mad reason known only to Steinberg, CE5 project files cannot be opened in CE4, so once again I had to recreate the project file, but this time in CE4. This worked fine – transport panel there for all to see. I had to copy plugins and presets from CE5 to CE4, but that seems to have worked OK.

For pigiron, I tried to see if the new CE4 project file would work in CE4 on the PC. Dang it – CE4 won’t open properly, again, seemingly, because of the key.

In the depths of desperation, I actually attempted to see if I could do the editing in Adobe Audition 3. That would have been the height of madness, like trying to learn Swahili in 24 hours for a vital job interview. That idea was dropped very quickly.

So for the moment, it looks like I’ll be working off my laptop from here on out. I’ll have a go at re-installing CE4 and CE5 on the PC, but not now. Sometime when I’ve bugger all else to do.

Long time since I’ve had a “technical” day. Thought that had all been sorted. Grrrr!

Thank God I’m going back to (real) work tomorrow…

Regards,

djp