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Pressure Fractures: mixing and mastering the album, finally.
Summer-2012 was running fast. As Mac Mavis had warned us that we
must be able to finalize album before his summer holiday, we
really had to start to do decisions of final sounds, not
last-minute-changes in the tracks any more. There would have been
a lot of tracks that could have been better to drop and record
them again, but then I would have destroyed our project.
Harri and Tontza visited Herttoniemi at June, we got a lot of
valuabe ideas, what to change. Harri listened very carefully drum
sounds and so on. After this session, Mac did "proto master" which
was listened very carefully with Sami and Harri together. After
this, final mixing was done almost 99% ready.
As I had promised to my self, I tried to keep low profile,
pointing out only few details that were disturbing or were clear
errors in some tracks.
Through the June, Mac wanted to finalize the tracks, using a sort
of "light-way" of mastering through Samplitude program. Always,
when some major change was done into the tracks ( adding more
compression to the drums, or so. ) he made stereo track through
mastering filters ( or plug-ins what ever ) so we had more idea
about the final tracks. But soon we decided that professional
mastering would be best solution. And then we just concentrated
again only into the mixing phase, we were convinced that in the
mastering process we could have more dynamics and clarity also.
Our mastering was handled by Studio57. Marko´s wish was that
he would be able to hear how much pro-level mastering would effect
to finalized mixing, and it seemed fair solution for us also to
use them. Perhaps the mastering is same than polishing and
cleaning brass instrument, the instrument is same, but it sounds
better after the cleaning.
( I will do a short interview with the mastering engineering
later, if he is willing to explain the art of mastering to mortals
like us. )
But we finally ended the mixing and send the valuable data for
mastering ! Masi Isohanni from Studio57 started to work with
"Pressure Fractures" in the beginning of July-2012. We had
no experience about professional mastering, but "everyone" said it
is important ! . Several weeks ago Janne met Mika Järvinen
from "Crazy World"... in the sub-way of Helsinki . He told that
his band was finalizing their album. Mika said: "put effort
into the mastering, it really pays off." So we did.
next phase: creating the
CD
booklet and covers.