One Of Us: New jazz CD - Produced in SONAR 8.5

 
 
 
Wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving!
One Of Us the latest project I worked on was produced and mixed entirely in SONAR 8.5. The project is an acoustic jazz album from pianist Ramona Borthwick that I produced, mixed and play on. The CD was recorded at 24/96, mixed in SONAR at 64 bit resolution and mastered at 24/96. While I’ve done various mixing projects over the years, this was the first full blown CD production that I did from start to finish in SONAR, with help from colleague Dan Abreu. It turned out to be a trial by fire for me in more ways than one, but I learned a lot from the process. It can be a good thing to eat your own dog food once in a while :-)
In any case, my own incompetence aside, SONAR's performance was stellar throughout the entire process. Despite working on an underpowered system, over hundreds of hours of editing and mixing, I perhaps had maybe 3-4 crashes or wierd things happen - and this was all with beta builds of SONAR 8.5! All the songs were typically about 28 tracks of 24/96 audio and a bunch of effects and eq's. All the plugins are 100% SONAR plugin's on this project, with the exception of Ozone 3 on a couple of tracks for their spectral matching EQ feature, and Kontakt and the Garritan Steinway for pianos on another couple of tracks.
 
Here is a link to my blog where I discuss the conception of this project and the production process. You can preview several of the tunes in the music player there or in a more expanded format here. For a brief time I have enabled full previews of five of the songs there. Feel free to comment or ask questions if you have any.
 
The album is available in CD or high resolution instant download format in a variety of formats, directly from Ramona's Webstore here. 
The recording is good, so if you like it and have a nice stereo, I think its worth getting the CD over the download. (as a convenience we are also including the download free to people who buy the CD). In the near future am also considering producing a limited number of DTS copies of the album for those who want access to better than CD quality mixes.
 

Superb!

Very very nice. Congratulations Noel and Ramona on such a superb sounding album.

And if anyone's going to buy and doesn't already have Ramona's previous album 'a new leaf' then have a look at the bundle of both albums. It's a bargain!

Congrats to all involved! Fantastic! Bravo!

You heard the salt peanuts quote eh? damn :)
Thanks everyone for the nice comments. Two days in the studio was rushed for sure, but we didn't have too many choices or the budget to do a whole lot more.

This is really Fab...... I would love to catch her live!!!!


-TAP-

Loved the Eventide H8000? in Retrospeak.

I would love to catch her live!!!!

 
You can if you stop by Ryles in Boston on Feb 17 for the CD release gig.
We'd love to play more but it's getting harder to book gigs these days especially for this sort of music.

Noel - It sounds really really good!  Did you have it professionally mastered, or did you master it in Sonar too?

Wow, verywell played.  Great sound.

Daryl

The sax and guitar licks are very cool, outstanding performances, but the hooks are not strong enough melodically, IMHO the strongest parts are the Sax solo in 'Who's Your Mama' which certainly kicks it up a notch, and so does the guitar solo in 'Chinese Whispers' :-)

Excellent arrangements! Nice changes with superb use of dynamics, clever breaks, build-ups all very well done.

Overall production is superb, sounds awesome, nice balance of the mix although a lot of the parts tend to focus too much around the center field.

Noel,

Outstanding playing by everyone involved. Mix sounds excellent. Love it, great job!!

Fantastic work 

Great Songs
Beautiful Guitars and Piano
J.Feitor

Wow, great stuff!
Nice dynamic production.
 
Congrats on the CD! 

Hi Everyone,
 
Thanks for the comments and happy holidays!
 
>>Did Ramona like the Steinway?
 
Did you mean the Garritan steinway or the real deal Steinway D? :)
The garritan one is pretty authentic, but pretty tricky to use in a mix especially next to the real thing. I had to do some frequency matching tricks before it would sit in the mix well. Also the velocity response took her a bit of getting used to.
 
>>You mentioned a little further up that you lack specialised mastering plugs.
>>Is there any intention at Cakewalk to produce some kind of Boost64 that would be similiar to
>>Samplitude Am-munition for instance?
We've been gradually introducing various plugins that are useful for mastering such as the LP64 series plugins so its likely that we will keep doing that.
rhynosynth:
Its funny that you found this through the show posting :) It would be cool to see you at Ryles.
Believe it or not I've never been inside Wally's.
 
I've recently added some more SONAR specific information to the blog here as well, and all the sheet music for the project is also now available from the webstore.
Looking forward to messing with my new Core I7 rig over the holidays woo hoo :)