The Picnic Approacheth!

Back to my latest musical obsession...


We have been mastering tracks in the studio.  This is a sort of mysterious process that increases the volume and density of the tracks as well as spiffing up the EQ and god knows what else.  It also supposedly decreases the dynamic range, which can be good or bad depending on how it's done.  But what's funny, to the ear, compressing the dynamic range sometimes actually seems to increase the dynamic range.


So it's a weird process, but you trust your ear to figure what's good and what's not.  We are working with a very experienced Engineer and he seems to be making excellent choices.  My partner in crime also has an amazingly sensitive ear, and she has made some great "catches" in the overall sound.


We had one long, bleary-eyed session where we did most of the mastering.  Then we put the results on a home stereo to see how it all held together.  This led to some notes and recommended tweaks.


One of the most interesting problems was a track that starts quiet, and then explodes in the middle, then goes quiet again.  What's funny, the quiet times were rich and full after mastering, but the loud explosive musical passage sounded thin and trebly.  Turns out since everything goes up in volume the cymbals sort of drowned out the lows and mids.  We went back and re-did the mix on that section.


Suddenly the drums emerged much fuller and dimensional, the bass came across fuller, warmer and more powerful.  Again, little incremental changes have major impacts on what we hear.  All of this is "infinitely subjective" and I guess that's kind of what it's all about.


More work to do, but we can see that the "picnic approacheth!"