OK, so here I go!
I uploaded the track with my forum name even if I have an artist name, here it is:
WAV, 44.1k/16
I've made the track in less than two days, probably around 6-7 hours so there is a lot of stuff that could be better. I think I only used three audio files, the voice without vocoder, one clap loop and an 8-bit sequence I loved very much. It's a Drum and Bass production because it's what I enjoy doing and I'm getting better at it with time, so it was the genre to make in just an afternoon and a half. I completely changed the sound of the track, and enjoyed a lot the vocoder sound since I had never used it. I played TAL's vocoder and recorded it with the track playing, then fixed some stuff but it's mostly recorded parts, it came very naturally with the rhythm of the singer. Another very big change was changing the key from C major to C minor so it fitted the genre better, although that has resulted in some inharmonius notes from the 8bit sequence.
I used one of my programmed drum patterns in FL Studio, opened in Reaper, bounced and edited there. The drum samples come from a variety of sample packs: some Techno ones, others came from my M-Audio custom library, some Cymatics effects and other sources. The 909 snare in the transitions is from Samples From Mars. The bass sound is a simple detuned lowpassed superwave thing from Serum, so nothing from another world, but always effective. The strings and pianos come from Xpand, which is pretty simple but you can get nice sounds if you record your own parts, not quantizing a lot, and then stacking and panning sounds together.
I'm aware of the mess that I did with the vocals since I didn't include more than half of them, but I liked that fast (sounds almost like rap) part. Of course I had to include the Oh Tainan chorus part because, well, it's in the title. I could have done it better if I had more time but I think the result is convincing.
In the mix buss I don't have anything special either, for that big transition in the beginning I have three filters, two lowpass for the drums and the bass, and a highpass for the strings. There are several Hornet Spaces here and there, which I like a lot, and not much compression apart from some OTT multiband affecting the whole piano and strings buss, and a waveshaper in the drum buss (quick and dirty way to "compress" and saturate a sound). I didn't do much EQ to anything because the source sounds were nice as they are, and also because there are not many elements in the track.
In the master buss I have a Quadracom, a multiband compressor and transient enhancer from Sonic Anomaly. The compressors are reducing as much as 3dB in some parts but overall the sound is kept pretty dynamic. The transient enhancer is only activated for mid-highs, which is where the hi hats and snare have most of their transient part in the spectrum. Then there is a TDR Kotelnikov doing just 2dB of reduction when the bassdrum or snare hit, and it's mixed with the dry signal at the same level so it's really sort of a final glue and not much dynamic range was lost there. Finally a limiter (TB Barricade CM) to reduce some peaks and make the track have it's highest point at that sweet -0.1dBFS
. I activated Inter Sample Peak detection so I hope it does not go further than that. Edit: I think I'm around -14LUFS but I didn't check much, it's the typical loudness measurements for electronic music I think.
Overall it's the most fun I have had this month, so thanks again Hadokowa for the material and instant inspiration!
Jorge
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