As reported last post, I’ve arrived at a release date for both the remastered Luminous City and the first of the two Arc albums. While parts continue to roll in from assorted dots on the Northeast Seaboard and beyond, I find there’s a bit of time to tweak the mastering methods used to make the thing sound more and more like what I had in mind, or mind’s ear.
But over the last two days, I’ve been turning my attention to the second Arc disc: hearing little things that need addressing and messing. Little things like no guide vocals on certain tracks, improper balances, even less proper equalization.
Season Song from the first disc is notable here for the pizzicato string arrangement (all sampled) and the verisimilitude I managed to achieve with it. Judicious use of the Flux STTool imaging plug-in on each channel helped me to narrow the focus of each string group—two violin sections panned to a range of the left side of the stereo image, one viola section right of center, one cello far right, one double-bass across the back. The end result pleased me.
So I decided to apply the same technique to a song from the second album, a long 18-minute piece called Requiem. That session has been up on my desk now for about two and a half days: when I got back into the session for the first time in lo these many months, I discovered that in an effort to conserve CPU, I had deleted all the MIDI I’d used to create the string section that was about to be replaced. A while ago. Further back than my latest backup from Time Machine.
So I’ve been cutting the MIDI again for the string parts, using the existing string part (the one which is about to go bye-bye) as a template and finding ways to make the parts themselves more interesting in case a real orchestra should ever chance to play Requiem (cough). At the same time, I’m reading up again on the more arcane features of the EXS24 Mark II sample instrument (it came with Logic) in order to coax a bit more expression out of the parts.
I could be here for a while. I’ve been here for a while; it occurred to me that I hadn’t updated any progress in about a month, and was due to, so this writing thingy is a bit of a break from scoring something I’ve already scored.
In the meantime, a new piece of kit has entered the Sanctum, a Christmas gift from my parents: a Focusrite Saffire Pro 24 audio interface, which I intend to use primarily for live work but also for use in performing bounces through the resident Allen & Heath GS3V desk I picked up in September.
Oh, didn’t I mention the desk here? Slau, an engineer based in Astoria, Queens (go check out back issues of his podcast) mentioned out in the fora that he was in the process of upgrading his studio and no longer had either adequate space or a business need to retain the desk, which he’d used through the 90s and had been rendered redundant by acquisition of a 24-channel control surface. Rather than put the thing up on Craigslist, and rather than research how much it was worth almost 20 years on, he opted to give the thing away to the first person who could haul it away.. who happened to be me. Not a day has passed since I was finally able to get audio running through it that I haven’t been grateful to Slau for his magnanimity, and I was privileged to be able to tell him so when I saw him last week in Jersey City at a forum-related function.
So there’s the month or so sorted. Three months till Luminous City and Over The Curve!