Final Stages

I'm just making my first test mixdown of my remix of Binster's Steve's Lament.

Thanks to the wonders of my new laptop I can actually blog while my behemoth computer renders 70-odd tracks of jiggery-pokery into a single, solid slab of WAV.

I usually make a few different mixes and A/B them against other things I like. Today, I'm going to be testing with Washed Away by Rain by Miikka Leinonen, This is That by Gareth Emery and Angel Falls by Lange.

I picked these three because they're all different, although I dearly wish I could get hold of unmastered copies - trying to factor out the effect that limiters have is a bit difficult sometimes. A lot of digital limiters, like Waves L2, really seem to accentuate high-end brightness, so I tend to assume that the mixes of these tracks will be slightly duller.

Emery's mixes are always very harsh-sounding to me, but then so is a lot of trance, and it's a bit hard to get away from that if you're pushing everything hard. I do object to some of the crazy screeching in Martin Roth's really hard-limited material though, for example.

Lange tracks are a bit softer - Angel Falls is an odd one because it sounds like there's some side-chaining going on with the main chord / riff sound. Every time that "dung-dung-dung" sound comes in, the level of everything else drops - could just be a limiting artefact but I doubt it.

Leinonen is a contrast again - Washed Away by Rain is a track that made me start wanting to write trance again seriously. I first listened to it on the Gareth Emery podcast walking up a hill in Cambridge (fittingly, in the rain) and it managed that great-song trick of seeming to capture my mood. I was suprised when I bought it recently that it sounds quite a lot quieter than a lot of other tracks, even Leinonen's own Shadow Hearts, so maybe it's a conscious attempt to buck the over-limiting trend.

Anyway, the machine is ready for me now, so I will be back later.