Saturday 5 June 2010

The Curse of 1.1.2

The last few times listening to what I have so far have led me to believe that I have a problem with the transitions between subsections - some of them are just too abrupt.  This was a criticism that my wife made about Binary Tree, so I was fairly determined to do something about it.

I had a listen and made some notes, the problem transitions were between 1.1.1 and 1.1.2, between 1.1.2 and 1.1.3 and between 1.2.1 and 1.2.2 - in fact all the transitions except between 1.1.3 and 1.2.1 - which is an abrupt transition but I think it works, and less of a problem as it is the break between two "sections".

So the plan was

  1. extend the hangover from subsection 1.1.1 so that it is longer - better transition.
  2. change the playing out of section 1.1.2 so that it segues into the theme from the next subsection earlier
  3. bring the clock winding noise in a little earlier for subsection 1.2.2 to cover the break, and give a smoother transition

1 and 3 were easy.  2 turned out to be nearly impossible, as the curse of sub-section 1.1.2 kicked in.  I could not mix down without it crashing.  I have spent about a total of 6 hours on it today.  I have no idea what causes the crashes.  I tried rebooting (several times).  I tried creating a new project and laboriously copying stuff across, recreating all the settings and guess what - still crashes.  Finally I tried splitting it into the first part and the second part.  Even then I was getting crashes but they were intermittent so I managed, finally to mix down the two parts, recombine them and mix that down, and combine with all the rest and mix down.  For now the problem has been overcome, but I will no doubt have to go through all this again when properly mastering.

I'm now listening to the combined mix-out on mp3 and it sounds pretty cool - I think the transitions are better.  I do however have a small problem, I have managed to butcher a couple of notes near the end of one section.  I bet you can guess which one.

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