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.
 

Wow, fusion. Very complex, nicely done.

Superb!

Quality in depth.

Not my choice of music, but this is thoroughbred throughout (try saying that with yer teeth in.)

Two days laying down 10 tracks, blimey what kept you?

Stunning clarity, well done all.

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!

Wow--very nice!

Congrats to all involved! Fantastic! Bravo!

 Love it!! What a guitar solo and Charlie Parker keys!!!

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.

Wow. Excellent work with quality people. (Did I recognize the BBC ident song in "one of us"?)  Also enjoyed the blog notes (nice to know everyone has the same types of problems). I'm also encouraged to see the CW staff still finds time to be active musically. Keeps you grounded.

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


-TAP-

Noel,

Very nice work my friend.  Not to mention those fantastic guitar chops you have, sir.  My hats off to you.  I can't imagine being able to practice, produce, mix and master a whole album, and work as the CTO at Cakewalk all with excellence.  That's short of impressive.

Congrats on yet another great production.  Hope you had a great Thanksgiving!

Loved the Eventide H8000? in Retrospeak.

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk
]

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.


Noel, You'll notice? The people who protested the most loudly? Are conspicuously "absent" from commenting on your music? Odd? Or not?? :"-| Please keep that in mind The louder people whine? The less they actually care about good music? It's true?

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.

Loved the Eventide H8000? in Retrospeak

 
Thanks Jose! Thats just using the acoustic modelling in the VG-99 and the awesome alt tuning features it has. All the guitars on that track are "virtual" and modelled in the 99 by the way.

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

Noel,
I've been listening to jazz for 35 yrs and I thought your guitar solo on the 1st track was one of the best I've ever heard and the rest of the playing on thhe track is right up there. I'm also a big fan of James Farber and I think he'd be very pleased with the production.

Wow, verywell played.  Great sound.

Daryl

Hi Everyone,
 
Thanks for all the kind words - much appreciated.
 
Larry: That wood sculpture you did with the elephants is amazing.
 
Geno: I got the recording to the point where it sounded very close to being mastered but decided on using a mastering engineer who's work I liked. As I talk about it on my blog, since I did the mix myself I thought it was good to have another pair of ears on the mix for the mastering process. I also don't have any specialized mastering plugins or the acoustic environment for that currently.
 
Martin: Thanks thats quite a compliment that I am certain I do not deserve :) James Farber - I'm familiar with some of his stuff through Brad Mehldau's recordings. He does very nice work. While mixing I learned a lot from the sound of some recordings I like. One of them was from a great French piano trio called Prysm and also some recordings by the wonderful British pianist John Taylor. I love the use of space and the imaging in those recordings.
 

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 Borthwick [Cakewalk
]

Loved the Eventide H8000? in Retrospeak

 
Thanks Jose! Thats just using the acoustic modelling in the VG-99 and the awesome alt tuning features it has. All the guitars on that track are "virtual" and modelled in the 99 by the way.

 
Oh man!  That's amazing!
 
It totally fooled me into thinking you were actually using an Eventide Harmonizer.  The VG99 is awesome!  Can't wait to get my hands on one of those :-)
 
 
Take care!
 
 

Noel,

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

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk
]

You heard the salt peanuts quote eh? damn :)

 
 
And Ramona's "Groovin' High" in Rio Alegre...   Another great album. Excellent job on the performances and production!

Fantastic work 

Great Songs
Beautiful Guitars and Piano
J.Feitor

Really good CD Noel. Many fine moments throughout. Did Ramona like the Steinway?

The blog was very interesting also. I can relate to that feeling of being bloody sick of the music after a while!!! Always nice to come back with fresh ears and be able to say to oneself- boy, how did we do so well!

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?

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

Hey Noel. This is kinda funny. I used to go to see shows at Scullers, Wallys, Ryles etc all the time. Been checking out a lot of blues shows latley and I said let me see what's going on locally for jazz when somehow I came across your name and I said..man that name sounds familiar. Then I read your BIO and saw you worked for cakewalk. I really didn't expect too see your (Ramonas) stuff posted though. That's a surprise. I've seen that picture of you with the red walls before somewhere else online as well. Anyway the cd sounds great. Fantastic players all. Reminded me of the Methenys world spiced jazz at times . I may head out to Ryles in February as it's been a few years since I've been. Good luck with 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 :)

Mighty tasty this stuff.  Great playing.  Great mix. Gonna check out your blog before I ask to many pre-mature questions.  Like, did you record multiple musicians live or was this individually tracked? :)

"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."

I'm a big fan of the new channel strips and mastering plugs so this "scoop" is music to my ears. The bus preview tip on the blog is also invaluable. I have been wishing for it, and it already exists.

Once again congrats on the high quality album. It deserves lots of repeat listens!

Nothing more to add ... just fabulous, both of you, and all the others ! (as opposed to "One of Us" )

I loved the swing bits, and hats off to your guitar playing Noel !  Or was that "virtual" as well ? LOL

Cool !!!

Wow EXCELLENT !!!!!! Well produced,and the musicianship is bang on - super job.Time for a second listen !!
Kev

Great sound!
 
Wonderful skillful playing by all.
 
Its just not fair.
 
Noel can play like this and still have time to read all those tech books, work probably more then 40 hrs a week and fix a few bugs now and then.
 
Does he sleep at all?
 
Kirk

Top notch work, here.  Nice exploration of the NPR theme into the vast unknowns...  Lovely!