Another update on Portraits of Hope

Filed in News on April 10, 2009



I have been quiet for a while regarding Portraits of Hope, and today I am going to tell you why.  I actually pressed a short run of those CDs a few weeks ago because I needed them for a concert.  When I received them, there were just little things that made me uncomfortable and I decided to take a step back.

The issues that concerned me had to do with how the mixing and mastering were done.  There are many schools of thought regarding these processes and two very good engineers will take the same music and mix and master it in ways that sound very different.

I have certain things I look for in a mix.  For example, I like to hear instruments in this rough order.

1) Whichever instrument has melody or a part I want to emphasize
2) Piano
3) Vocals (if applicable)
4) Everything else

I am not so arrogant that I want the piano way higher than everything else but I do want it to be a piano with orchestra project rather than an orchestra project that includes a piano on it.  I talked to Bret the engineer about these kinds of things before he started, and he did exactly what I asked.

The short story is perhaps I went too far and we are remixing to change the balance between some instruments.

On the subject of mastering, I had a difference of opinion with Bret that I should have caught but missed.  Mastering includes several processes but most importantly, it matches the volume between all the songs on a project so that they fit together.  In other words, a listener should not have to adjust the volume between songs because one is very quiet and the next is too loud.

Typically, today's music is mastered in a way so that volume levels are very even across a project.  A process called compression is done where the soft spots are boosted and the loud spots are reduced.  While some of that is necessary, I am not a fan of too much compression.  I do not mind if there are very soft and very loud spots in a song or even a project.  That kind of dynamic variety is a big component of my music.

So, the master I got had a bit too much of that sound balancing going on.  The main thing that bothered me was that some soft songs had been boosted to a level where they no longer sounded as soft as I wanted. 

To compound the problem, that boost started bring pedal noise to a level I cannot live with.  Pedal noise is going to be on every piano project.  However, the Steinway I used in this project has more pedal noise than normal.  I knew that when I started and we tried to adjust but we still recorded a lot of pedalling.  It is not noticeable on big songs but is there on soft songs.  A bit of it is fine but it can get distracting.

So, we are making changes.  I hope to have a new master next week and will get the big run ordered. 

 



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