Two full days of work on the album. Various little jobs; more on the artwork, and final checks of the audio and mastering, which is a simple job of volume balancing.
I never now use EQ when mastering, I've hardly ever done so. I consider a failure of mixing and general production/writing, so I tend to balance the audio in the composition stage. The balancing is more a matter of a feeling than anything more objective, but the spectrum feature on Prometheus that I've added in recent years (I think The Golden Age was the first album to involve it) really helps. I can see at a glance if any frequencies are way out; it tells me what needs changing and these results are always right. When I address them, the mix sounds cleaner instantly. The general philosophical concept is to turn the pink noise of a mix of infinite tracks into the white noise of a result which pops all frequencies equally.
As I said though, this for me is the balance of instruments rather than applying the 10-band EQ I spent so many tortured weeks developing!
Once mixed, the mastering is, for me, a simple matter of turning up the volume to the right level. For We Robot I mastered everything to about -14dB LUFS, which has become something of a de-facto standard for streaming services. This is a little quiet for CDs these days, but lots of my favourite CDs were/are much quieter, like those Queen and Kate Bush albums. I've said many times that I tend to like that, but for most people loud sounds better, and most of my Bowie albums are more like -10dB LUFS, and I like those too! A Drive Through The Town will be my first album since The End And The Beginning mastered to about -11dB LUFS. It sounds great and may become my new standard.
In practice this is about double the first peak on a song, and for several songs this is about right. I then adjust the others to sound about the same - nothing more scientific than that. I'm using my Cathedral Limiter for this, which, I must say works wonderfully. Looking at the waves of some of Bowie's tracks from Heathen, one of my favourite Bowie albums, my tracks are far less 'walled' or compressed. I generally dislike compression, not only because it's ruined my Björk albums - sob!). I never use compression on a whole track, only for individual elements like vocals or acoustic instruments that need it.
I think the album is more or less complete. I loved the first listen and feel that many tracks are destined for greatness! I'll listen more over the next few days, but the music is nearly complete. I've also adjusted the cover art. Here it is so far:
In other news, I practiced some of the live tracks for Tuesday's Open Mic. I'll perform 'Style Guru Fashion Queen' from the new album, with a solo synth and a backing track, and 'Norman Bates' from The Dusty Mirror. This is the first time I've tried playing a backing track through the Microkorg and it works well. The MP3 player is bolted on to the keyboard with a camera-clamp, making me look somewhat Borg-like when playing. Actually, it felt great to stand and play a keyboard this way; this may become my performance instrument of choice. I wondered if a second row of keys on the back that flows right to left, for the left hand, may help and make a unique performance instrument. Either way, a Microkorg played like this is already much better than a keytar; using both hands on the keyboard is important. That silly arm than keytars have is primarily for show, not function.
May is coming and I must charge into it. The only money I may have from now on is what I can scrape to make, but I'll muster my resources and create brilliant things for a world which needs brilliance. Step one is to work out the detials of my television programme, and step two is to work on a release of Argus; as well as at least a month of videos and other work on this album.
Onward!
