THIS SONG IS SO GOOD!!!
Green Dog, you will land a hit! I would love to hear the whole album.
And you have super pristine analogue synth sounds!
Dance to the Pulsar. Sway with the deep drone sounds of the warp drive engine.
Sing with Princess Leia in the small navigator booth.
Get the crowd in the dance hall addicted.
Make it loud and rave. ^_^
Ok, this is it, I beg you to enjoy!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nLng2S ... sp=sharing WAV mix
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UYulMY ... sp=sharing mp3 - check it, behaves well!
screens:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing
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There is so much other reference to recall, Robert Miles, Goldfrapp, Hikaru Utada, Fiona Apple, Krieger, AND ONE - Wasted (found it a couple of days ago), of course Kraftwerk, and an endless list of Trance, House and Rave stuff I don't know the names any more.
It was a challenge for me, but not for my notebook. It laughs at me with 45% CPU load, and everything on and live.
This time I had to use a couple of commercial plugins, got them for a bargain.
The project grew to a hundred tracks, including many bus channels.
To keep all these little elements under control, and create the bigger picture, and maintain the flow, in my local idiom people would say, this is like "herding a bag of flea"
After judging what every recorded track means to me, and grouping them accordingly, I decided, what should keep the whole thing together, and it was a snare, vocals, and the "bass concert". Bass needs to be warm and rhythmic. We need to dance here, don't we?
I formed the snare sound with that Neve emulation by brainworx, using the gate and their incredibly expressive EQ.
I called it the pulsar, because there is an LFO in the DAW that sways the treble knob with a sinus. The plugin can digest this smoothly. So within every 2 bars, the sound is swelling up and down.
I left many sounds quite original, they were perfect already. I used all printed effects, where existed.
The guitars had a serious hum, I sent them all through a de-hum system and reprinted these tracks before loading into the DAW.
I put these guitars in an "orchestral" section, together with Soundscape, EBow, and Moog.
Also for the start of the orchestral interlude, I had to cut the timing a little bit.
Orchestra has its bus treatment with a crazy Lagrange-delay web, a saturating comp (Thrillseeker LA), and a little EQ, boosting midrange, and shaping bass and treble into a softer area. (between -1 and +2 dB only)
Only GTR v3, GTR C, and GTR Intro are receiving some minimal regular guitar treatment.
Vocals got a "spaceship pilot cabin" sound with a special reverb impulse, that I had created from scratch, 100% electronic, some years ago.
Male vocal got autotuned.
Some
understatement or
underground attitude is by design.
De-Essing and breath control are partially manual, additionally to what the plugins could do. I left some in for the sake of some imperfection.
There are 3 automated IR reverbs, one is auxed.
The bass stem has the bass guitars, the subsonic synth, and the pulse bass synth. It got a sidechain ducking from the kicks.
I call it its own concert, because it needed a conductor.
But I had to create one special track: Sub-sonic to the regular bass guitar, that always plays quite high, and I had to automate this very carefully, to enhance the fullness of the sound at the right moments.
This gave me the right amount of LF drone sounds and saved sonic balances in the direction that I was aiming at.
So this deep sub will hopefully stand out from most other mixes.
Keybord bus was one of the Vitalizer targets. Lead Vocals was another, Soundscape was another.
The acoustic piano sound got the NastyDLAmkII, a very vintage and spectacular delay with modulation. You think you can't hear it, but it totally carries the overall sound.
Synthesizers were sorted into different roles, like my loop+sequencer+percussion section, or bass stem, or melody.
There is massive EQ on some synths, and often a Haas delay (ADT by AirWindows is a bliss and game changer).
Bus strategy is as follows:
A dry drums
AA percussion + sequencers + loops
B drum room and overheads
C basses
D guitar
E orchestra
EE orchestra melody
F keyboards
G BG vocals
H lead vocals
Stereo bus has Elysia Alpha compressor, pushing 1-3 dB, and an instance of Ozone 8 with the maximizer off. The Ozone autopilot had suggested some minor EQ correction that I adjusted a bit further, but it is within +- 0.8dB
I tested loudness with Limiter6, it digests quite well, the brick has still fat punch and ends up at ~ -10dB.
Good luck everyone, have a great day!