Creating a Continuous Mix

[dioxide]

Yes some interesting points here! I think the Camelot system is based on the circle of fifths. There's lots of ways to approach this, whether you're piecing together tracks that have already been written, or writing them to fit together.

[raymondh]

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