2010 April at Skating Dog Productions – - – - ||| – -

Archive for April, 2010

Mixing and Mastering “Oberer Totpunkt”

I just had the opportunity to mix and master the 3rd CD release of german Drum’n'Bass/ Electro/ Goth/ Spoken Word Outfit Oberer Totpunkt. The CD “Stiller Zoo” will be released at this year’s WGT Leipzig, The Wave and Gothic meeting.

For the first time we used the combination Reason/ Record for the entire production. Usually OT’s Michael Krueger (no relation to Freddy, though) programs the entire music content in Reason and then adds Drums from BFD played via his Staccato/ Roland Drum Kit in Ableton Live. These Drumstracks and the Vocal Tracks of writer and speaker Bettina Bormann then had to be manually aligned in the Mixing Program being rewired to Reason.

Now with the prospect to have everything in the same project looked compelling to me and i could persuade Michael to start using Record. Oh, I just didn’t know.

He went totally over the top with it. But great. He used truck loads of Combinator devices, layering sounds over sounds over sounds, added Drums out the wazoo AND came up with a gazillion of Vocal tracks, not only Bettina’s, but guest singers and almost in each and every track the mighty Tim, who created an entire choir on his own by singing bass, bariton and tenor plus falsetto on at least 16 tracks – always.

My brandnew PC was near choking when I tried to play the projects back and I was pretty devastated not knowing how to handle the incredibly huge amount of tracks. Sort of clueless sitting in front of the screen staring at the mixer of Record.

Panicking! We were on a deadline. Was it a wise decision to use Record? During the process I realised, yes, definitely. Because I found out that sometimes it is great to be thrown out of your habits. And to be forced to create your own processing devices and really start to create and not just “activate”.

In the near future I will add some practical tips and insights into various aspects of the entire production, including mastering, into this thread. But for you to get an idea about Oberer Totpunkt, here is the video.
The song is called “Vogelhochzeit” (birds wedding) and is based on a traditional german folk song.

Ladies and Gentlemen: Oberer Totpunkt!!!