Neffle - In Waves

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adfielding
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10 May 2019

I realise this may be a bit of a niche thing, but me and my good friend Tom Pritchard (of Tom Pritchard Sound Design) recorded an entirely hardware-based album back in April, and it's coming out on all major platforms next week (17th May). We've released quite a few albums under the Neffle moniker over the years, but this is the first time we've had a proper dive into the recording/mixing process - which was a little different this time around. This time we ended up recording everything via a multi-track recorder, so I was able to mix everything in Reason - which was a very nice change! Anyway... it was a lot of fun, and you can read all about it here, and I'd love to answer any questions anyone may have about the recording/production/mixing/whatever process.

www.adamfielding.com/wordpress/?p=1821

As I said, the album itself comes out next week - and I can't wait to share it. It'll be a PWYW release, but you can pre-order and listen to two tracks here.

https://neffle.bandcamp.com/

Cheers!
Last edited by adfielding on 17 May 2019, edited 3 times in total.

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diminished
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10 May 2019

Hi Adam,

first of all - wow! Please give an update once the album is available, I want to listen to it while I work. I LOVE "In Waves". To my ears it's perfect. The style, the sounds, the mixing... punchy, present, calming, in the background, all at once! How is that even possible? Let me just say this is going to be my reference track for anything ambient and triphoppy. I'll even forgive you the left and right panning of the water sound, haha.
Can we talk a bit more in depth about your (music's ;)) low end please? In your blog you wrote:
"One thing I wanted to maintain across the album was a solid low-end presence without the necessity of a sub-woofer – there’s a fair amount going on in the lows throughout the album, but in a couple of places I felt as though the deeper bass parts were getting a bit lost without the presence of a sub-woofer. In these instances I ended up creating a parallel channel for the offending bass part and processing it with some sort of saturation, just to give it a little bit of a crispy touch while rolling off the lows. What this means is that you still have the satisfying subby lows that were present initially while adding a little bit of presence higher up in the spectrum. I was careful to use this effect sparingly, but it helped to give the bass a bit more presence on certain tracks."
What "some sort of" saturation? What treatment got "In Waves", what was the source material? Just... how? :D
Thanks!!
:reason: Most recent track: resentment (synthwave) || Others: on my YouTube channel •ᴗ•

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adfielding
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11 May 2019

diminished wrote:
10 May 2019
first of all - wow! Please give an update once the album is available, I want to listen to it while I work. I LOVE "In Waves". To my ears it's perfect. The style, the sounds, the mixing... punchy, present, calming, in the background, all at once! How is that even possible? Let me just say this is going to be my reference track for anything ambient and triphoppy. I'll even forgive you the left and right panning of the water sound, haha.
Oh hey, thanks so much for the kind words! That's super kind of you to say, most Neffle releases are a bit of a passion project and I tend to think that it's one of those things that listeners will either "get" or they... well, they won't! So it's always a relief to hear when someone gets it :) The album comes out on the 17th, and it'll be a PWYW release via Bandcamp though you can pre-order it now for £1 and get two tracks right away... or you can wait and grab it for free, entirely up to you. It'll also be available for streaming via Spotify/Amazon/Google Music/iTunes et al.
diminished wrote:
10 May 2019
Can we talk a bit more in depth about your (music's ;)) low end please? In your blog you wrote:
"One thing I wanted to maintain across the album was a solid low-end presence without the necessity of a sub-woofer – there’s a fair amount going on in the lows throughout the album, but in a couple of places I felt as though the deeper bass parts were getting a bit lost without the presence of a sub-woofer. In these instances I ended up creating a parallel channel for the offending bass part and processing it with some sort of saturation, just to give it a little bit of a crispy touch while rolling off the lows. What this means is that you still have the satisfying subby lows that were present initially while adding a little bit of presence higher up in the spectrum. I was careful to use this effect sparingly, but it helped to give the bass a bit more presence on certain tracks."
What "some sort of" saturation? What treatment got "In Waves", what was the source material? Just... how? :D
Thanks!!
The bass in the title track "In Waves" didn't receive any saturation, but the main bass drone was created using a Volca FM. All of the Volca FM patches were programmed initially using Dexed, then transferred to the FM via Sysex - programming patches on the Volca FM is a bit of a pain, and while the Dexed patches tended to sound different after transferring them it generally provided a good place to start tweaking. For the tracks that do use the saturation trick mentioned I typically used Saturation Knob to give it some more crispy harmonics. I didn't do this on the album (at least... I don't think I did), but something I like to do generally is to add an extra bass channel with the bass bumped up an octave - it doesn't have to be particularly present in the mix, but it sometimes helps to fill out the low-mids in the absense of a speaker setup with a solid low-end response.

Thanks again for the kind words! Really looking forward to getting the full album out there :)

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esselfortium
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11 May 2019

Holy yes, new Neffle! Everything you guys touch is gold.

In Waves is an amazing track, and the insights into the album's creation process are great, too.
Sarah Mancuso
My music: Future Human

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adfielding
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15 May 2019

esselfortium wrote:
11 May 2019
Holy yes, new Neffle! Everything you guys touch is gold.

In Waves is an amazing track, and the insights into the album's creation process are great, too.
Aww thanks Sarah! Looking forward to unleashing this curious beast into the wild :D

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