Creating a Continuous Mix
Thanks everyone for all the great ideas.
I've drawn a line under the project and posted in the music forum.
The end result really wasn't what I had set out to achieve, but I learned a lot in the process.
Basically, I wanted to make a continuous mix from my existing music, that would take the listener on a musical journey.
What I found though was that all my individual tracks were really 'designed' around a 3-4 minute arrangement, and kinda resolved the tension within that short frame.
The result is that I think I failed to get a cohesive big picture journey, and it became more of a technical exercise to glue the tracks together. I doubt anyone would get drawn in to the 'journey' and sit through the whole album, as one would with say Oxygene or Tangram etc.
Never mind, I still learned a lot of really useful things and had fun;
- modulating from one key to another
- trying out different transition ideas
- extending the intros and outro's on some of my older tunes to support the transitions
- mix editing to get a bit more tonal consistency between two tracks written 5+ years apart. (and seeing a lot of missing sample windows when opening some of my old stuff!)
In the end, my workflow was;
- Edit or create an individual track in Reason
- Remove all master compression / limiting
- Export to 24 bit 96 kHz WAV
- Import each track into a 'full album' Reason project
- Put all the songs into sequence
- Add any transitions (though some transitions I added into the original song tracks)
- Once everything was in place, I routed everything to a master channel, then put a Selig Gain and Flower Audio meter on it, then played all the tracks with the FA meter set to 'perceived', while editing master sliders to approximately level-ise each track. Used the Selig Gain for fine tuning. Backed off some of the first tracks to get a 1db or so relative increase in each consecutive tracks right to the end of the album (knowing I'd lose some of this dynamic when I mastered it)
- Export the final full album to a 24/96 WAV file
- Loaded the whole thing into Ozone standalone for mastering. I figured (guessed) if I mastered the whole thing as one big track, I was more likely to get a more consistent overall sound and smoother transitions.
I'm sure there's 100 better ways I could have done it! But it worked ok!
I think if I try to do another one of these projects, I'll try to do a 'top down' view of the whole album first and then build it up from there. That could be an interesting experiment too!
Cheers
I've drawn a line under the project and posted in the music forum.
The end result really wasn't what I had set out to achieve, but I learned a lot in the process.
Basically, I wanted to make a continuous mix from my existing music, that would take the listener on a musical journey.
What I found though was that all my individual tracks were really 'designed' around a 3-4 minute arrangement, and kinda resolved the tension within that short frame.
The result is that I think I failed to get a cohesive big picture journey, and it became more of a technical exercise to glue the tracks together. I doubt anyone would get drawn in to the 'journey' and sit through the whole album, as one would with say Oxygene or Tangram etc.
Never mind, I still learned a lot of really useful things and had fun;
- modulating from one key to another
- trying out different transition ideas
- extending the intros and outro's on some of my older tunes to support the transitions
- mix editing to get a bit more tonal consistency between two tracks written 5+ years apart. (and seeing a lot of missing sample windows when opening some of my old stuff!)
In the end, my workflow was;
- Edit or create an individual track in Reason
- Remove all master compression / limiting
- Export to 24 bit 96 kHz WAV
- Import each track into a 'full album' Reason project
- Put all the songs into sequence
- Add any transitions (though some transitions I added into the original song tracks)
- Once everything was in place, I routed everything to a master channel, then put a Selig Gain and Flower Audio meter on it, then played all the tracks with the FA meter set to 'perceived', while editing master sliders to approximately level-ise each track. Used the Selig Gain for fine tuning. Backed off some of the first tracks to get a 1db or so relative increase in each consecutive tracks right to the end of the album (knowing I'd lose some of this dynamic when I mastered it)
- Export the final full album to a 24/96 WAV file
- Loaded the whole thing into Ozone standalone for mastering. I figured (guessed) if I mastered the whole thing as one big track, I was more likely to get a more consistent overall sound and smoother transitions.
I'm sure there's 100 better ways I could have done it! But it worked ok!
I think if I try to do another one of these projects, I'll try to do a 'top down' view of the whole album first and then build it up from there. That could be an interesting experiment too!
Cheers
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