| ATOR wrote on Thu, 19 July 2007 05:14 |
I'm curious how loud everyone got their version. I hope I don't have to wade through too much obliterated tracks but still have some fun listening.
|
Well the mix as it sat - dark to the point of muddy, with an extremely dense arrangement to boot - certainly doesn't "want" to be "loud" at all. Getting it to sound even remotely as "loud" as a much sparer mix with individual elements having time for more prominent places in the mix was extremely difficult without lots of lost transients from limiting, or introducing distortion and crackle from clipping.
Still -
As an experiment and an excercise, I went for as totally & completely obliterated and pancaked as I could get this without introducing substantial artifacts, as I think a lot (and possibly most) clients doing this type of "black metal" would want it to blast out of the iPod in shuffle mode and not sound substantially "softer" on first impression than nearly any other track the end listener would have.
While I do believe that there are a number of bands in this genere that would definitely be into retaining all natural dynamics, to think that a lot of clients in this genre would not want to participate as "winners" in the loudness war would be naive. In some ways I found that the extra distortion the "obliteration" from the pancaked mastering gave kind of gave it some more energy. The key to me was finding a place where the drum transients still were present, where there wasn't crackling during the sparer sections, and most importantly where there was still lots and lots of "meat" in the guitar chugs, and to keep the high end down to a place where it's still crankable. I'm really not sure whether I succeeded in this balancing act at all though - given the goals I put on myself I found this track was very difficult to get to them. I haven't listened to any of the other submissions yet but look forward to hearing other approaches, as I'm pretty sure there's probably some good ideas among them.
Best regards,
Steve Berson
