hi everyone, good morning or evening and happy monday. I wanted to share two tracks Ive created over the past year or so. Life circumstances, the incessant vagaries of desire, and related miscellany have placed limits on my music making time. An additional factor was the reflected need, I felt, to strip down my composition style and restart from a spartan “checkerboarding” principle in the bass, with an eye toward maximum loudness for bass-heavy music. as a result of incorporating “clip-to-zero” composition, mixing, and mastering technique at each stage of the respective processes, I was able to achieve these tracks, which, to me, represent the thus-far apex of my two very different workflows.
OUTBOARD: octohedera7b - a semi-live lofi dnb jungle jam
this dnb/jungle track was created using a “take” based outboard workflow. initial composition on the OP-XY sampling OmniSphere. Resampling select OP-XY tracks into Octatrack; adding additional pieces of music to the freed up XY tracks. Designing scenes, delay tricks, and pattern changes in Octatrack. Performing a top-level “arrangement” take recorded through TX-6 (with DJ FX) into OP-1 Field as intermediate “mastering” stage; record additional “trick” takes with more DJ FX and Octatrack delay/scene fader stuff into OP-1 as well. Finally bounce OP-1 takes to ableton and re-arrange: insert the best tricks from the “trick” takes into the “arrangement” take. Re-Master for LOUDNESS using best possible approximation of clip-to-zero cascade: eq, clip, compress, clip again… etc… 1 track in ableton, excluding Master. Maxes out around -8.5 LUFS. bretty gud without multitracking.
But we can do better. We can get louder, and we can do it while retaining dynamix.
INBOX: spherebreaker - a hifi, high polish trapstyle mindmelter
A much different approach was taken for a trapstyle drop-based track. Here, Digitakt, OP1 Field, and OPXY were programmed to create TWO master patterns. each pattern’s tracks were individually multitracked into the box, and meticulously re-sampled and re-arranged down to the individual drum hit. added several omnisphere samples and synths in the box for additional atmosphere. then the most extreme CTZ cascade mixing was applied to each successive track, bus, etc, to get the final mix as LOUD as reasonably possible. 74 tracks in ableton, including busses, and excluding Master. Maxes out at an arguably stupid -4 LUFS - but to me, this one obviously sounds “more betterer,” more “professional,” etc. - but you probably need to turn the tweeters down.
these are as much concept + method explorations as they are hopefully enjoyable pieces of music. probably less danceable than one might hope for, but i wanted to try for the most consistently insane loudness i could get without compromising dynamix. i think we’ve achieved that in both cases, but you guys let me know what you think.
the difference of about 4.5 LUFs of loudness between the outboard and the inbox tracks is pretty eye-opening. sensible, intelligent clipping on each level of a multi-track recording can really squeeze a lot more out of audio than an outboard chain of musical instruments in a semi-live setting. i mean, my workflow for the so-called “outboard” track did involve editing and “perfecting” an agglomeration of takes, but, the overall dynamix of the live mixes were preserved for the experiment’s sake. i probably could have gotten more loudness out of the outboard mix by successive compression + resampling of each track within the octatrack, then respectively bouncing them back to OP-XY where needed to playback as extended samples, but it just sort of seemed like too much work at the time for little real benefit. that said, in the end 4 LUFS of integrated loudness, to me, at least, would be a real benefit, so maybe something like CTZ can be achieved outboard, depending on your setup: after all, these are all digital tools passing analog signals between their DACs!
I’ll note, though, that Octa’s headroom will become a limiting factor, i needed to use OP1 field as an intermediate master in order to get more headroom to drive the live mix before printing to wav in the case of octohedera7b.
anyway, let me know what you think of all this. i should add, i undertook these compositions under the methodological assumption that more integrated peak loudness = better recording, even for so-called ambient music. theres no reason that quiet sounds cant be brought closer to the listener while still preserving relative compositional energy levels. i wanted to share this music, as a way of staging a methodological debate in a friendly way, as it seems to me that “mixing for loudness” is sometimes viewed as a nasty business incompatible with the spirit of leftfield electronica.
but i might also just like intellectualizing my self-promotion, so.