Category: Case Studies

The Challenge: Add an ad-hoc recorded acoustic track to an album of well-produced punchy symphonic metal without either overcompressing the acoustic song or dulling the majestic metal.

The Solution: The track itself was a quiet piano-and voice version of one of the main album tracks, with high dynamic range and a startlingly good performance.  However, it was recorded separately from the rest of the album with lesser gear and little production, and thus didn’t match the wide, beefy bombast of the rest of the album.   There was also an extra bit of noise at the end that needed some deft editing to remove.

Careful application of EQ was applied to surgically bring out the vocals and get a little separation from the piano.  From there, some M/S processing on separate EQ bands was used to move the piano more out to the sides and center the vocals.

Editing out the etxra bits at the end was difficult – a simple fade would’ve also cut out the actual tail of the piano and sounded unnatural, and a straight-ahead cut-edit would’ve sounded even worse.  Instead, a cut edit was applied, but the final tail of the piano to the point where the noise began was timestretched very slightly and faded, to give it a more natural tail, while some “silent” room ambience sampled from the beginning of the track was crossfaded in to provide more natural-sounding ambience.

The Challenge: much of the album was very simply arranged – singer, acoustic guitar, occasionally some light drums. This was washed with a fairly strong reverb. However, on a handful of tracks, a small string ensemble had been added, mixed very wide, and liberally doused in the same reverb. On headphones, it sounded lush and wide, but on a standard stereo system, the wide strings overwhelmed the mix, drowning the vocals. It was the kind of issue that one would hope would be fixed in the mix and not the mastering stage, but the project was beyond the mix stage and couldn’t go back, so it was up to the mastering process to deal with it.

The Solution: This presented two real issues – while it was possible to reduce the wash of reverb and strings on the tracks where it was most pronounced, it would then make the overall sound of the album less cohesive, so any twiddling done to the dense tracks would have to be done at least to an extent to the remaining tracks.

Every track was parallel-bussed and encoded into middle and side channels. The side channels were then either reduced in volume or given a downward expander and some EQing to reduce their prevalence without removing them entirely. Additional stereo-image processing was done on the side channels with the overly-wide strings to place them less overwhelmingly in the stereo image.

The Challenge: Remix albums provide a very special set of intricacies, as there are commonalities to all the album content – namely the source material – but usually widely different interpretations thereof. In some ways, it’s even trickier than a compilation, as the level of consistency is required to be higher.

The Solution: Very careful adjustment of loudness and equalization was required, along with judicious use of harmonic coloration to balance the overall density and sound of 14 different remixes of 5 tracks. The harmonic coloration (“warming”) helped give some of the more digital-sounding tracks a more console-ish sound, to help match those other tracks which had in fact been recorded on higher-end hardware. A multiple-pass on Equalization allowed each track to first sound more in line with the other tracks, as a sort of “baseline” EQ curve, which could then be adjusted to the needs of the individual track. Maintaining consistency was the key.