LinuxMusicians

Oscillator Studios proudly presents

Dreams of Seagulls - Lost in Tokyo

https://youtu.be/oA1PKAGxDZA

Music: Staffan Melin
Vocals: Kajsa Olsson

Soft electronic pop. I aimed for an "airier" sound, some more deep end, more automation on the soft synths, a better production (I hope!). It was fun to do.

Produced using only open source software: MusE, Surge, drumkv1, CALF fx, Dragonfly reverb.

Hej Staffan,

Great craftmansship in both performance and mixing, really nice listen!

I have some issues with the mastering though (when do I not? ).

I know you like bass but I think it takes away from the higher frequencies a bit. Also the mix didn't seem that hot, I thnk it can be quite a bit louder.

Anyway, it's saturday night so what better thing to do than do a REMIX?

I used audacity to rip the audio from youtube and there seems to be 2db headroom (unless I did it wrong, again).

Hmmm, it occurs to me now that it could be youtube that is lowering the volume due to some internal metric... in that case I'm mostly complaining about the bass heaviness In anycase I did the work so I might as well show what I did.

Here goes.

I imported the resulting wave file into MusE and added a few plugins:
- Calf EQ 8(used it to lower the bass frequencies a bit)
- Calf Multiband compressor (enabled all bands and set them to give a slight compression on all bands and pushed the two highest bands a little bit higher again
- Calf Multiband Limiter (cranked the input until it started clipping the peaks and then lowered the Limit setting a bit to push it even harder.)

There are different schools for how you approach mastering. The way I do it is to compress everything just a little bit with a multiband compressor, try to get it even frequency wise. Then increase the input to the limiter until you get clipping, but not so much that there is audible distortion (unless you want that).
You can often push a limiter so it is visibly clipping quite hard without being able to hear it distorting, on the contrary it may have positive psycho acoustic effects on the result.

After this, for more funs I added another EQ and made some EQ curves around the instrumental break. You know the kind where you remove top frequencies and bring them back after the break to get a push I wouldn't say it was 100% effective but it was a fun test.

Take it for what it is. You might not agree and maybe I pushed the mix too hot but I had fun in any case

http://spamatica.com/lostintokyo/lostin ... ixdown.mp3
http://spamatica.com/lostintokyo/lostintokyo.med

Hej!

That was really great and instructive!

First of all, the most common complaint I get is that my songs don't have enough bass freq's so I put the Output through Calf Compressor and then maxed it (almost) using Caf Bass Enhancer = my mastering skills!

Your mix sounds MUCH better, and I really appreciate not only your efforts but also that you explained what you did. I will most certainly try this on my next track (which is a Naked God = industrial song). I especially like that Kajsa's vocals was much clearer. I think I understand everything you wrote.

The stuff you did on the instrumental part/solo made me smile a lot (only thing keeping me from laughing was that it would have woken my dog who is sleeping next to me)! Sounds fantastic!

Thanks a lot for your work, I really appreciate it!

Staffan