[Dana Nielsen]

Oh MAN!! What a lush, gorgeous, emotive, electro-organic, ring-modulated, tribal-techno-orchestro TREAT! Massive and haunting and beautiful. 👏

I’m on my trusty headphones at the moment and can’t wait to crank this in the studio. Perhaps the studio listen will inspire additional thoughts or ideas, but for now here are the only things that caught my ear:

• When the percussion entered – good lordt I almost spit out my coffee! What a fun surprise that was to hear the perc and choir elements join the party toward the end. For the perc, I felt like it could benefit from some big ambience/verb to help the perspective. What I mean is… the rest of the ensemble is living in this enormous, vast, expansive mountain range of a sound stage; but then the percussion comes storming in and it feels right up close to my face, full of detail and presence and a “dryness” for lack of a better word, that makes it feel disconnected from the rest of the ensemble. Perhaps that was your intent – and if so, cool! But my natural instinct was “I want these drums to maintain all their power and low end while also being drenched in a bit of that “grand canyon verb” that the rest of the synth orchestra is living in!” I guess I kinda imagine it emanating (loudly, powerfully) from behind the orchestra, like in a traditional stage setting. But again, totally viable to break from that tradition too, so just my first impressions.
• The choir chant might be perfect where it is, level-wise, but it’s such an awesome emotional sound I’m so curious if it could be louder!!!!

FABULOUS work, homey! Wow. Can’t wait to see whatever film this is, hear the rest of the cues, and point at the TV while shouting excitedly at my family who are watching other things on their own separate devices, “THAT’S MY FRIEND @Nate WHO DID THE MUSIC! I KNOW HIM!”

[Dana Nielsen]

Love hearing this progress, Patrick! I really dig the round/deep warmth of the bass. And your vocal sounds great – nice work! I think the strummed acoustic in the chorus is nice. It could become a supplemental texture while a different instrument is featured for the choruses like a keyboard as u mentioned – that could be cool. If you kept the strumming in there, supporting the keyboard, it might a) keep from feeling like “what happened to the guitar?” and b) provide that nice ‘shaker’-sounding percussive energy a strummed acoustic can offer.

Such a sweet song and performance! Really gives me Pete Yorn / Chris Martin vibes 🙌

[Dana Nielsen]

Just listened on my studio speakers – “phat wobbles” for sure! Dude, it sounds killer! Fantastic work.

If it were for a record I’d prob say you could master it harder – hit it with the ol’ Pro-L2 more aggressively. But … being that this is for sync purposes, I think it’s perfect where it’s at. Any music editor is gonna turn the music way down anyway (even when featured) for broadcast spec. And if you master it loud like a record, it’ll prob be at the expense of that booty-ful low end you’ve got going on (sheesh!! super thick! 💜). So, all that to say, I think it sounds great and strikes a great balance between “album mastering” and “broadcast mastering” if that makes any sense.

Keep the hits comin!! ⚡️🤘

[Dana Nielsen]

Oh, and the track itself is awesome! Love it!!

[Dana Nielsen]

Royyyyyy! Love this! And love @shimmerisland‘s insights too. I’m listening in late-night laptop mode so I’ll save any technical thoughts till I’ve had a chance to crank this in the studio. But love it musically, and totally dug the half-time vibe switcharoo around 40 seconds. Head bobbin’! So many cool gear shifts and new bits of ear candy throughout the track, too, keeping me wowed and engaged as a listener! Which … of course, is no surprise coming from you, you sync GEM! 💎🤘

[Dana Nielsen]

Yooo! Ur en fuego, homey! Love that. 🔥 Gives me “hey mickey” vibes, meets Peter Bjorn & John, and lots of other great influences too.

I just gave a listen on my laptop (recent model MBP) and it sounds vast and “partytime!” I’ll have a real listen in the studio tomorrow (err, later today at this point) and follow up with any ideas.

Here’s one for now:

• The telephone bgvs stood out as a little loud, tho that could have been accentuated by my laptop speakers. Also might be fun to swap the telephone for something more unexpected/fresh … maybe push them in the opposite direction with some sort of woofy grimy dark saturation instead? Little more Strokes, little less Beatles, perhaps — Just a thought! Telephone bvs felt a bit “expected” to me, and those bgvs might be an easy opportunity for something slightly more “experimental” if ur feeling cray. 😵‍💫 ⚡️ 🤘

[Dana Nielsen]

Heck yeah, brother!! Can’t wait to hear more! 💜

[Dana Nielsen]

Haha – 1am I’m just getting started … lol. Thanks so much, @Nate!!

[Dana Nielsen]

Ayyyyye! So glad u dug it, man!

Bezos vs. Waves LOLOL! Yeah that IM Pusher is a bit of a sleeper – i never hear it mentioned ever, anywhere, haha, but it’s a handy lil’ tool I’ve gotten a lot of use out of over the years.

And the SoundRadix stuff is very good. Historically, I like to sort out all that phase stuff by ear using the UAD Little Labs IBP so I can sweep around and find what I like. But since getting the SR Auto-align plugin I’ve used it a lot for a quick and easy fix.

Also, there are many times I don’t need to phase align the Trigger and Kick tracks. Sometimes the 180º flips within the plugin do the trick. But depending on the samples, sometimes the phase is in between 0º and 180º and some heftier tools are needed, as was the case in this instance.

I would keep vocals out of the pump chain … unless it sounds cool having them pumpin’ with the track, then leave ’em in! No rules! (well, maybe one rule: you don’t want the kick bussed to the pump aux input when it is the source of the sidechain key input… otherwise you’d be working against yourself) 😉

Keep up the great work!! ⚡️

[Dana Nielsen]

Boom! Lemme know what you you all think. I’m curious:

1. if you’re into the resulting kick vibes
2. your favorite or preferred method of drum triggering, sample replacement, Splice hunting, and/or sound mining

[Dana Nielsen]

Yeah man, wild re different audio codecs for different tiers, right? I knew about this but had forgotten about it before playing around with Streamliner where they let you hear the difference between the free and premium codecs on each platform. It does make a big difference!

Another badass feature is by enabling the “Artifacts” button it will solo the artifacts so you can really hear what’s being lost (errr .. added as the case may be). It’s helped train my ears to hear that stuff and is pretty dang helpful to be able to preview those artifacts while mixing in realtime.

Tidal DOES have a hifi plan, and as of just a few weeks ago they stopped charging more for it!!!! It was such a fun day when I got that email that said “your paid plan now includes HiFi for no additional money” – i mean … gotta love when a company says “here, have more for the same price, you’re welcome”. There’s a whole lot more to love about Tidal too – it’s my fav. I even made a video about it a while back because I’m so thankful they’re surprisingly still the only DSP I know of who display full album credits.

Re platform-specific mastering … nah, not that I’m aware of. I’ve worked with tons of heavyweight mastering engineers on big budget records and there tends to be a single “digital master” and not one for Spotify and one for Apple, etc. Several years ago, “Mastered for iTunes” was a big deal and I think you had to get certified (and maybe even pay for the ability to use that moniker?), but in my experience lately that stuff doesn’t come into play. It’s just “digital master” and if applicable “vinyl master” and “ATMOS master”. That said, it’s entirely possible that after I’m done with a project the label steps in directly with the mastering engineer and requests all kinds of platform specific deliverables I have no knowledge about lol – but i don’t think that’s the case.

[Dana Nielsen]

I’m so stoked man!! Hit me up in the private Prep School Forum with any questions, requests, or ideas related to the course and/or downloads! 🙏🏻

[Dana Nielsen]

I love it! So much great progress man – sounding soooo good!

… but the kick lolol …

I’m totally sold on the idea of electronic kick on this track, Odezsa style. I just think this particular kick sample isn’t right yet – and that’s such a huuuuge part of what will ultimately tie it all together and sell the whole concept of the badass acoustic-dance banger it is!

If you’re willing to post 2 stems – mix without kick, and kick solo’ed – I’ll make a quick video demo of what I would do 🤓

But dude … fantastic job. Noodling around with electronic kicks is a piece of cake compared to the daunting feat of blending all those live instruments and vocals the way you have. 🙌

[Dana Nielsen]

right hand / treble feels a bit quieter to me than the left hand / bass. Which, again, is totally fine if your intent was to set your L/R mic pres at a matched level to capture the instrument exactly as it was played in the room (this performance naturally has more left hand / bass action going on than right hand / treble stuff, so it makes sense that it’s playing back left-heavy). But as a personal preference when it’s solo piano with no additional instruments, I tend to work toward an even Left/Right balance for the listener. These are preferences are purely philosophical tho, and there are no “right” answers, so feel free to disregard and go with your gut!

[Dana Nielsen]

Hey man!

Great questions and observations about streaming sound quality when used as reference mixes.

In general, I don’t worry too much about that since I’m not spending much time listening to the references while mixing – I just spot check very quickly, get a blast of quick inspiration about frequency response or vocal/snare balance or low end etc, and then I pop back over to my mix.

I’m also not loading my streaming references into an analyzer like Ozone which can match and apply similar settings, tho I could imagine that’s a helpful tool! If you are doing that as part of your process I understand your concern about the loss of finer audio details in streamed files.

Also worth noting: streaming services always deliver higher quality audio to paying subscribers. For me, as a paying schmuck of like half-a-dozen premium streaming services, I find they all sound pretty fantastic (and I always have Normalization setting set to OFF). If, however, you’re referencing audio from a free-tier or add-supported tier of a streaming platform you may very well hear poopy audio degradation.

For references that I really love and/or are critical to a specific job, I tend to purchase the ref off the iTunes store and drop the full-res file into my client folder where I can drag it into ADPTR Metric A/B or straight into my session timeline.

Another fascinating invaluable tool by ADPTR is Streamliner which allows you to preview your mix in realtime using all the popular streaming platform codecs, both free- and premium-tier codecs.

plugin-alliance.com

ADPTR AUDIO Streamliner

NEW VERSION 1.1 - Codec auditioning, automatic level matching, and state-of-the-art loudness and dynamics metering to get the perfect master for all major streaming services.