Over the weekend I finished another track, called “Kosmos”, or so I thought!!
I must admit, I was very happy with myself that I had achieved a very good mix so quickly. So I headed down the pub on Saturday night, armed with my ipod to test it out on friends. I was very surprised to find that it went down really well, especially because the friends I tried it out on are not hardcore Drum n Bass fans. I was a bit worried that they would find the distorted bassline towards the end of the track too much for them, but this did not seem to be the case.
At this point I was still well happy, it sounded great on the ipod, studio monitors and hi-fi, but then I had a listen in the car. Ahhhh, my worst nightmare, it sounded crap. The bass kick was punching that hard, it was going to put a hole in the car doors and the distorted highs on the bassline (yep a weird mid-bass with gnarly highs) had fallen into the background of the mix. Oh no, back to the drawing board.
On Sunday, I worked on the mix, splitting the Bass track into two parts, applying a bit of EQ and changing the compression settings. I made plenty of mixes and got it sounding much better in the car, but I soon started to realise that I was not happy with one of the basslines ,so I decided to watch a bit of TV and then sleep on it.
The next morning I listened to the track again with a fresh set of ears, and yep I’m still sure that there is an issue with the second bassline. I am though really liking the track, it is designed to become gradually more and more aggressive and distorted, really pushing the boundaries. But it is this nature of the track, that makes it a very tiring process to mix, as your brain can only take so much distortion played back over several hours. That’s why I will have at least a day off, before I go back to the mix again. This will allow me to listen to it with a fresh perspective.
Oh yeah and I forgot to say, I found a fantastic vocal sample that I have used in the track. I am really looking forward to sending my final mix to the guy who originally sampled his voice. His voice does not now sound anything like the original sample, so it will be interesting to see his response, lol.
I also added a new rising, rushing sound towards the end of the break section of the track to provide a build up of anticipation to the coming change. I knew what sound I was after and thought that I had heard similar sound presets before. After searching through the preset lists of some of my software synthesizers, I decided it would be much quicker to make the sound myself. To create the sound I used one of my bread and butter synths, Native Instruments Massive. To be honest, I should have done this from the start, as it did not take me long to make the sound, certainly a lot less time than it took me to search through presets anyway.
So this it what happens when you are smug with yourself too quickly, lol, I was hoping to have uploaded the finished track to soundcloud over the weekend, but now it looks as though it will be a couple of more weeks away. It’s all fun though, part of the journey 🙂