Ascent - What the Crows Know - Remixed and Remastered
New and Improved! "What the Crows Know" by Ascent! The MP3 is available here for a limited time. After that, you can hear it streaming at AscentMusicOnline.com. Please listen and please let us know how it sounds!
The recording of the Ascent CD has been a long journey, and now that we're getting closer to completion, it was time to take a critical look back. I've learned so much about that black art called "mastering" during the past year or so, and I've finally learned enough to know that some of these tracks didn't sound nearly as good as they could. I have begun on the daunting project of remastering the songs we've completed for the CD so far.
I was already dissatisfied with the final mix of "What the Crows Know," and after Christina and I worked on the much-brighter-sounding "Hiding From Reality," it sounded like it was under a foot of mud. So, I went about trying to fix the final master, only to realize that I didn't have an "unmastered" final mix to work from. How silly of me. Worse yet, when I loaded the original files back into Sonar, I discovered that I couldn't just mix it down the same way again, because I no longer even had some of the effects plug-ins I used the first time. So, I created a brand new mix, but stayed relatively true to the original version. In addition to changing the effects slightly, I systematically removed some low-end noise from the vocal track.
The real magic was in the EQ after the mix. I've come to rely on using an audio spectrum analyzer (Voxengo SPAN) to compare the frequencies of the final mix to the frequencies of other songs. In this case, I looked at the dominant frequencies of "Hiding From Reality" and "Talking in Circles" and boosted these frequencies (using a parametric EQ) where they were missing in "Crows." After some hit-and-miss attempts, I discovered a few sweet spot frequencies that made all the difference. Add a little compression, add a little limiting, and voila!
After a few dozen listens, we are delighted with the new final mix of "What the Crows Know," and it's our new standard for what we want our CD, "Secrets of Flight" to sound like. There was a whole world of detail hiding in there, waiting to come out. Sounds that I'd forgotten that I'd even recorded!
Check it out!
The recording of the Ascent CD has been a long journey, and now that we're getting closer to completion, it was time to take a critical look back. I've learned so much about that black art called "mastering" during the past year or so, and I've finally learned enough to know that some of these tracks didn't sound nearly as good as they could. I have begun on the daunting project of remastering the songs we've completed for the CD so far.
I was already dissatisfied with the final mix of "What the Crows Know," and after Christina and I worked on the much-brighter-sounding "Hiding From Reality," it sounded like it was under a foot of mud. So, I went about trying to fix the final master, only to realize that I didn't have an "unmastered" final mix to work from. How silly of me. Worse yet, when I loaded the original files back into Sonar, I discovered that I couldn't just mix it down the same way again, because I no longer even had some of the effects plug-ins I used the first time. So, I created a brand new mix, but stayed relatively true to the original version. In addition to changing the effects slightly, I systematically removed some low-end noise from the vocal track.
The real magic was in the EQ after the mix. I've come to rely on using an audio spectrum analyzer (Voxengo SPAN) to compare the frequencies of the final mix to the frequencies of other songs. In this case, I looked at the dominant frequencies of "Hiding From Reality" and "Talking in Circles" and boosted these frequencies (using a parametric EQ) where they were missing in "Crows." After some hit-and-miss attempts, I discovered a few sweet spot frequencies that made all the difference. Add a little compression, add a little limiting, and voila!
After a few dozen listens, we are delighted with the new final mix of "What the Crows Know," and it's our new standard for what we want our CD, "Secrets of Flight" to sound like. There was a whole world of detail hiding in there, waiting to come out. Sounds that I'd forgotten that I'd even recorded!
Check it out!
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