A new solution

From the title it sounds a bit "Brave New World". This is from a couple of days ago, I effectively mastered sections 8 and 9. 8, no problems, although I got a little distracted by adding a line of a tune from a song in the 80s because it fitted (The Lion Sleeps Tonight).

9 was another matter, we were back to our old friend the crash, and his companion the frustration. This time I only(!) spent an hour and a half on it until I had to give up. Didn't you just know it though, only about 10 minutes after finishing I had a brainwave, the ultimate separation of Kontakt from any contact with things that might make it crash. Not just doing the Kontakt (and it was flute again incidentally) as a separate track, but doing it *without any processing*. Then I can import the audio "dry" mixdown into the project proper as an audio track, and apply the processing then. This is kind of what I've had to do sometimes when I have several guitar tracks using Guitar Rig, because the processor on my computer cannot cope with more than about 2 before it starts to stutter.

So I tried this the following morning, and in about 10 mins I was done. So general policy decision: if I have more than about 15 minutes of mixdown problems I will do this in future. So there!

More progress and another crash

Section ummmmm 5 and 6 mastered successfully - this is one Cubase project with 2 sections. No Kontakt therefore no problems, sparkled everything up to be nice and shiny and it seems OK. The addition of small amounts of reverb does wonders.

Section 7, quite a lot of work went into it, just fussing around with the sounds, getting them fitting right. I wasn't overall 100% sure I'd finished but time was ticking on so I decided it was time to stop, export out a mixdown and then come back and check to see if it's OK.

On mixdown it crashed.

So I left it.

It does have Kontakt in, but not the offending reverb. What give? So I sat down this evening fully prepared to try all sorts of tactics, but I started with the easiest - a "save as" and then a file copy. I loaded up, pressed the button to mixdown and told it to crash.

It didn't

Huzzah.

So therefore a) it's not just the combination of Kontakt and that reverb that causes crashes and b)swapping the reverb isn't the only solution. Basically it just keeps me guessing!

wrestling with a sampler

Huzzah! pass three is finished. There were not that many changes to be made in pass three, but my frustration with crashes reached all new heights.

It's the sampler: Kontakt, an otherwise beautiful piece of software from Native Instruments. My version is a few years old, and something in the combination of Kontakt, Cubase, Windows 7 and this computer is not happy. It mostly crashes when I try to mix down a section. So I have to kill the program process, reload the file, remove Kontakt, save, close Cubase, reload the file, restart Kontakt and re-put in all the settings I might have had, cross my fingers and hoe that this time it worked. Sometimes doing a "save as" and restarting with the saved as file helps. Sometimes doing a file copy of the project file helps.

And in this pass, for one particular section, I have spent several hours doing this in different combinations over and over hoping to get a usable result. I have done, finally, and after much struggle I have come to the finish of the third pass. This might be the last pass of tweaking before mastering commences. I will have to do a lot of listening before I can convince myself that it's fine.

What have I done in this pass?

• The rain at the beginning has had some flowing water sound added and altered a little to make it all work better. Right at the end of teh first track I use the beginning backwards, but the sound effects sounded weird, so while the music is backwards, the sound effects are forwards.
• One line of flute has been changed in 1.1.2 so make it less strident
• 1.2.1 has had the pitch bend restored on the recorder line - it had been lost in one of my getting rid of the crashes processes
• 2.1.3 has had some small volume tweaks
• 2.2.3 has had the most radical change - I have removed the bass drum beat entirely from the spacey section - I had tried loads of things to make it work and eventually had gone with the maxim "if in doubt take it out". It is of course different, but I think I'm already liking it.
• in 2.3.2 there are some guitar chords which are meant to be distorted and in the background. I have changed the sound processing on the guitar twice already, and now I think the sound is right, it just needed to be quieter.
• in 3.1.1 the strings I had introduced in pass one which were too quiet were now too loud, so I have made some changes, also added to the string only section so it has more melodic bits and is a bit less like the soundtrack for a Peter Greenaway film.
• I have added more notes at the end of the 3.1.1 section, and removed the discordant note. Basically there was a gap I wasn't happy about and I have been attempting to cover it. I played with lots of possible sound effects, but nothing seemed to work either musically or conceptually, so instead I did something different - extended the tune of the line by adding 2 notes, and now the gap has been shortened or removed or improved - I hope.
• in 3.2.2 there was an intake of breath through my nose while playing the classical guitar that was irritating me increasingly. 3.2.2 and 3.2.1 were all one project, and after I had managed to remove the noise with some clever editing, I then couldn't get a mixdown. This was over a week ago, and today I got a mixdown finally, possibly helped by finally deciding to separate the two sections into different projects.
• 3.2.3 cleaned up the fast classical guitar, and rationalised the processing - hopefully it is less hissy now.
• 3.3.3 brought down the volume of the flatlining beep. It was reasonable on the headphones, but there's something about the sound system in teh car that seems to push that particular frequency until it was deafening!

So, on from here - lots of listening and then mastering, which is the process of going through with a fine tooth comb and checking volume, tone equalization, stereo placement and subtle processing, so that it all sounds good, and clean, and as close to perfect as possible. To be honest, though I am going to keep a copy of how it all is now, because to some extent I have been mastering as I go along, tweaking and twiddling until it sounds, in my opinion, pretty good.

I listened to most of the previous two albums yesterday. It was interesting listening while I'm in critical mode, looking for mistakes and things that could be better - let's just say I think my standards have got even higher for this album - which I wanted to be the case.

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.