Traditional/Not Traditional

I have finished my first draft masters for the album, and told the (dozen or so) people that want to listen to it that it will be done by Friday. I have yet to really test the songs on other sound systems, but listening to them on headphones is quite gratifying. I've never spent any time learning the mastering process so the last couple days have been great for me. I don't usually think of mastering as a dramatic process but I think I've dramatically improved on the sound of the mixes; this was the missing link in my record-making chain.

One neat thing I've done is used EQ matching to try and reshape the overall tonal balance of my songs to a professionally recorded one. I grabbed four songs from the sample CDs I'd uploaded previously and tried matching the lead album track EQ to them. They were "The Suburbs" by Arcade Fire, "Nowhere Lullaby" by Built to Spill, "Losing My Religion" by REM, and "Black Day in December" by Said the Whale.

The Built to Spill track is quieter on the high end, and applied to my mix it sounded a bit dull and muffled. "Losing My Religion", with the bright string instruments, had the opposite problem. The Arcade Fire track had more low bass than the other reference tracks, which didn't make an audible difference to my mix, but it also had a weird curve in the high frequencies. Instead of following the 6 dB per octave curve (like the other three do, at different levels) they start to roll off around 10kHz and continue downward parabolically. When applied to my mix I found it made the mids sound a bit boomy. I found that the Said the Whale track to be clear and bright, but not overly so. I loved how my mixes sounded when matched to this EQ, especially with a bit of tape saturation applied as well. 

So I tried it across the whole album. Since the instrumentation varies considerably, this meant a lot of tweaking, but right now I have an album that sounds much more coherent than anything I've done before. I'll try it on some other systems and probably have to work on the bass, but for now I'm excited.