Saturday, September 16, 2017
The New Song Completed, Again hr598
After a one-year-long struggle with mastering, I completed my new song
and got to open Moet Chandon. I took a long summer vacation for the
first time since I became a musician. Then I got down to post
production, starting with mastering the instrumental track of the new
song. The instrumental track isn’t important, it’s a kind of an
incidental that is prepared just in case. I was going to take it easy
and get it over quickly. That approach of mine led casual settings for
the effects and their readings. I tried an experimental setting that I
had never applied on the master track since I knew it would go
overboard. While it was easy to imagine that the resultant track would
be bad, I just did it for some sort of fun. The most difficult part of
mastering is to boost volume. To get the song to its adequate volume, I
spent an unbelievable amount of time sending the master track into the
effects repeatedly by which the volume got bigger little by little. But
as for this instrumental track, the volume got magically big on the
first try of my experimental setting. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I
saw the track’s fat audio wave. In a case like this, I knew too well
that its sound would be crushed and terrible. I listened to the track
and I couldn’t believe my ears either. The new instrumental track
sounded better than the finished master track. I tried to grasp what was
going on. The only explanation I could find was that this was the
instrumental track without main vocals. The track with main vocals can
be another matter altogether because vocals tend to complicate effects’
settings. The settings that work for the instrumental track don’t
necessarily work for the one with vocals. The problem here was though,
that I was assaulted by an urge to try these settings on the master
track. I battled with the urge by asking to myself: Haven’t I declared
the song’s completion? Am I redoing all over again? What if I bog down
into that notorious endless mastering loop again? Am I really willing to
repeat that struggle? Do I prolong this project even more? Although I
did my best and tried the limits of my abilities for the new song, I
couldn’t deny that there were some aspects I had to give in. It sounded
slightly different from what I really wanted, but I couldn’t find the
way no matter how many times I tried. What if these new settings were
the solution? If I wanted the song to be perfect, wouldn’t it be worth a
try? The urge prevailed. I redid the mastering with the settings that
happened to be found for the instrumental track. It worked. On one try,
the song turned into exactly what I had been searching for. I had no
other way than replacing the version I had completed with a
one-year-long struggle with this new version completed in a few minutes.
I felt rather chilled than happy. I experienced the inexplicable. The
very thing I had struggled to get over one year was found totally
accidentally, ridiculously easily. It was as if the date for the song’s
completion had been fixed long since. The song has been completed surely
this time, but I had already finished Moet and had nothing to celebrate
with. I was too embarrassed to tell my partner who works as the
producer this course of events. I didn’t have the nerve to tell someone
who had waited for the song with enormous patience during the
one-year-long mastering that I changed the master track to the one I
just finished in a matter of minutes. I hesitated but eventually
confessed. Sometimes, taking time doesn’t mean the best result. I still
feel that someone else was mastering the song in place of me while I was
taking a summer vacation as a reward for having done my best for one
year. Music can be after all what is given, not what one makes…
Labels:
completion,
Cubase,
effect,
instrumental,
mastering,
Moet Chandon,
producer,
reward,
song,
track,
vacation,
vocals,
volume
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