ballzac

https://soundcloud.com/ballzac/guppie

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Thanks, and I definitely will And for reasons that will become clear through the rest of my comment, I have a lot of respect for someone who is not particularly interested in this sort of music, but will click on the topic to have a listen, and can see value in it! Sorry for the essay response to a brief comment, but I've thought about this a fair bit, and maybe you can offer some insight... Opera is one style I've struggled to make much headway into getting something out of. I acknowledge that people get something profound out of it, so I've made an effort to understand what that is. When there's anything artistic that I get a lot out of, and see a lot of depth in---whether it's a movie, music, comedy, or whatever---when I see people dismiss something really special offhand, I think "if you only gave it a chance and let yourself see it the way I can see it, it would give you something positive that you can't get anywhere else". It's funny, because I see a lot of people who are into orchestral music, whether it's classical/romantic, baroque, or whatever, respond negatively to electronic music, and I see a lot of people who are into electronic music respond the same way to orchestral music. But I find that they can reach a similar place, but different enough that if I was only interested in one of them, I would be missing out on something. It's like every piece of music that I like reaches a part of my 'soul', and what makes a piece really special is if it touches on something that nothing else quite hits. So I look at these things that I am inclined to dismiss as having little value for me, and imagine myself in the position of the other person, and try to understand what they're getting out of it, because if there's something there to 'get', I want to understand what it is. With Opera, the only glimpse I've gotten of what it can provide is from a single Aria: Se pietà di me non senti, from Handel's Guilio Cesare. I like a lot of music from the baroque period, but with opera---and this goes for vocal music of that period in general---I often find the vocals detract from what I'm getting from the instrumentals (the most significant example of this is Wachet auf ruft uns die Stimme. I first knew only the organ version of the fourth movement, which I absolutely love, and when I later heard the original version, I thought it sounded amazing on strings, but then the vocals came in, and I was left feeling a little 'wtf'.). I also think a lot of orchestral music feels timeless, but the vocal style of that period sounds dated to me. But, with Se pietà di me non senti, it really touches me, and it gives me faith that there is something really profound I can get from this stuff if I really work at trying to understand how to get it. The vocals feel like an integral part of it, and drive the emotive qualities, rather than feeling like something that's getting in the way of my enjoyment of the instrumentals. But I watched the whole David McVicar production of Guilio Cesare, and most of the singing just sounds corny to me, and the whole theatrical nature of it seems over-the-top, rather than 'deep'...but as soon as I hear the strings at the start of the aforementioned aria, my heart skips a beat, and there's an anticipation for the vocals, which never disappoint when they start. I feel that drama is a good way to help understand music. Think of how many people say they hate 'classical' music (and when they say 'classical', they mean orchestral in general), but they 'get' the music from Star Wars and Indiana Jones, or Edward Scissorhands and Batman, or even the music from Skyrim. So I thought watching a whole production might work for me with Opera...but no luck. Language is probably a barrier with a lot of this stuff; yeah, with the stage production, I put on subtitles, but if the meaning isn't connected directly to the music, maybe it makes me miss some of the depth? But with Se pietà di me non senti, I don't need to understand it because I feel the emotion, so maybe language isn't really that much of a barrier? Anyway, every now and then I listen to some Opera and try to find more that I like, but no luck so far.

Wow, I appreciate that immensely! Mastering is definitely the skill that's lagging behind for me more than anything else at this stage. I usually start with a three band compressor (ImageLine Maximus---I wish it had more bands, but I love the sound you can get with it, so I make do) and a limiter. I didn't actually do much extra to this. My reasoning was that it sounded pretty good already, so the less I do the better, but it's probably faulty logic1. I just added a second multiband compressor (six band) and a static EQ before the limiter, the latter being my attempt to improve clarity by boosting the signal in three somewhat narrow regions. Most of the the masters I've been happiest with have been the hard trance ones (and even there I always feel like I'm making compromises), where clarity isn't as important as intensity, and the main difference in my approach here was just that I didn't add any distortion to any of the bands using Maximus, so your opinion on this doesn't surprise me. I'll PM you 1. EDIT: On this point, the master I'm most happy with as far as clarity goes is "Used to Have It", and if I'm remembering correctly, I didn't do anything to it other than add a fast limiter.

I edited out the glitches in Space 7 (which might not have bothered anyone but me). It's not perfect, but I think I can only hear them still because I know where they are and am hypersenstive to them. It was a bit tedious---I literally redrew the waveform by hand in some parts---but I was really frustrated that a track that I love had imperfections, so I'm happy that's done. I've also given it a bit of a remaster. It was tricky because I needed to compress it a bit to get the loudness up to a similar level as most of my other tracks, but I didn't want to lose the spaciousness. I think I've got a fairly happy medium here between intensity and clarity.

.

Some kind of housey vocal trance (or trancey house) kind of thing: