Well....new triscuit song

Excellent. i enjoyed every minute of that. This could possibly be your best so far for me, although the one you had on the darker cd takes some beating. The percussion and sound effects were just wonderful as were the choice of sounds. I loved the melody and the the playful groove it had. Your tracks to me sound as if they were made by toys that come to life rather than a human (i think )

Yeh this was quality work.

Thanks guys I'm glad you liked it. I do in fact do all my own programming on this piece. Of course there is a lot of delay which you can probably tell.


On a side note; today my choir sight read through a choir piece that I wrote....and everyone loved that too. I'm on a role today.

Ahhhh my precious ears. Oh well......

Now I have to go back and remix everything and for some unknown reason I'm getting a really sharp attack on one of my synths that I've never heard before. Bah I'll finish it tomorrow.

OK, I uploaded a new version and I think this one is better compressed. Tell me if this one is better.

Well, first things first - I had another look at the final mix waveform, and it looks much better this time. You could have probably made it even louder - the idea is not to avoid any compression, but rather to leave much of the dynamic range. Here's a screencap:



You can see that almost none of the waveform touches the outer extremes, and that's fine, but in some instances you might have wanted to pump the volume up by way of compression or limiting so that in the end maybe 10% of waveform reaches digital max, but is prevented from digital clipping by the effect - that's cool too. You just don't want a solid wall of sound, like the last mix:



Woah!

Hope you don't mind me exposing the raw waveforms here, but this is a perfect learning opportunity for "seeing" the reason why we hear something and don't like it. For those who had a problem with the first half of the song, look at the waveform. That has got to be part of the problem anyway. We don't learn if we don't make mistakes. I wouldn't even hesitate to guess how my own mixes looked years ago - and I'm still learning too.

Now, on to the song review: did backing off on the compression make a difference? Yes! There is definitely a noticeable difference in instrument volume now, and while it is still cacophoneous, all the sounds are not screaming at the same relative volume. The first half is much more listenable. I'm personally still not enthused about the song itself, but I'm not running for earplugs nearly as quickly.

I do want to stress that it is vitally important to maximize the signal level or you risk your 16 bit CD master wave being rendered as 12 or 10 bits, on average (say), if you do not complete this step. With a reduction in bit rendering comes an inverse amount of noise. So get those levels up, but not slammed so hard all the way through that dynamics (the variations between soft and loud) are obliterated. You can really spot an amateur when you play an MP3 and find yourself dragging the volume level ever upwards because the author missed the final step.

KEv
(just trying to figure all this stuff out with the rest of you ..)