A very restless night. I dream of playing a complex Nintendo Wii game of the Genesis album Foxtrot, which involved characters climbing a clock with mice and other such wonders. Phil Collins was present.
My mind was occupied with the spectrum analyser. I thought that trying to balance the values to be equal was a silly idea, that it would be better to have two scans, A and B, because most of the time I work by comparing what I have with a target sound. The dB calculations took longer than expected. I realised that these aren't based on the difference between two values, but one divided by the other. 3db (well, 3.01029) is double or half, for example; the absolute values are not relevant.
I fed in some waves. In an experiment I used The Game by Queen, a song with similar production to Otesanek. I fed both tracks into the analyser and the differences were displayed:
I used this to adjust the balancing, and to my genuine amazement and megalomanic glee, it worked; the balancing of one song became magically mapped onto another. Of course, this is not a perfect science. Balancing one song 'sort of' like another will, for example, never result in a match and all zeros, but it worked better than expected.
This made me think of when and why to apply EQ, something I rarely, if ever, do. I prefer to balance by production and writing, choosing instruments that naturally gel, and setting volumes. I realised, that I rarely ever boost anything when mixing, only cut. For vocals, I cut bass, for example. Anything which toys with frequencies (filter fades etc.) is often part of the instrument design rather than something used for the mix. The mix works easily due to this efficiency of the spectrum. Perhaps I can use this philosophy; that once this is done as best I can, any final boosts are done once at this mastering stage.
Or I may just use this new tool for learning. With any new tool I never really know if it will be useful, useless, or indispensable; so it's worth trying everything.
In the afternoon Deb and I went to Nantwich to see the exhibition as visitors. This was to be the poetry reading day. It was nice to be there and take a few photos for posterity.
After that I programmed more features, tidied up today's code. There is more to do. I want a way to save and reload frequency profiles. I also coded a new effect; Dual Band Distortion which is like two parallel band pass filters with some bonus growly power. It may come in handy.
