Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
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Posted: Oct. 12 2005, 08:44 |
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| Quote (bee @ Oct. 11 2005, 20:12) | | I know nothing of mastering that Korgscrew mentioned |
Simple to understand, difficult to get right!
It's basically the process of getting the music ready for being pressed to CDs (or any other format). It's evolved from being a purely technical process (making sure it would reproduce without problems) to being a partly artistic one (adding the final polish to the song/album, after it's been mixed).
One of the important parts of the process is making sure that all of the tracks sit well next to each other. Often tracks are very different in nature, and aren't all mixed at the same time, so in their raw state they might sound very different to each other. Some might be bright, others dull, some loud, some quiet...they have to be brought together so that they sound like an album, rather than just like a collection of songs that's been scraped together from the recesses of someone's tape cupboard or hard disk. Mastering them then involves running them through various processors so that they have a common sound to them - not exactly so that they all sound the same, but rather so that they sit nicely next to each other. That also involves working on fade outs (and sometimes fade ins) and putting the right amount of space between tracks. I actually also feel Light + Shade would have benefitted from a few smoother, slightly longer fades (a few track seem to drop out rather suddenly after a fade has begun) and occasionally a little more space between tracks. It's really small, subtle stuff, but it's why I say mastering is difficult to get right - it's not a case of taking a set of files, putting in a blank CD and hitting the 'burn' button!
I think a little attention in those areas could have helped Light + Shade at least feel more coherent, though it's still a long way from making it into one whole piece (and I wonder how many people would even notice the difference in attention to detail...).
I totally disagree that long pieces are a 70s thing. They're just long pieces! You could no doubt have said the same of Tubular Bells - "Oh, that's soooo old fashioned, that long stuff is what all the classical guys did, short songs are where pop music's at - move with the times, dude!". The fact is, it was interesting precisely because it wasn't like all the usual pop songs (though of course it wasn't the first 'pop' piece of an extended length...you can take my comment to apply more generally to all of those things - whoever did the first could have been accused of using an outdated form...and good luck in finding who the first was, I think trying to pinpoint one particular work may prove difficult...was it one of the prog rock bands like Pink Floyd? One of the earlier jazz composers like Gershwin? He was a 'pop' - as in popular - composer too...).
If Mike can make an exception with Amarok, he can make an exception again. I don't think Amarok is at all 70s, or at all 1900s, or at all 1700s, or whatever...it's just music, and it lasts for 60 minutes.
I think it's less a case of whether the tracks form one piece or not, but whether they form one album or not. The pieces of Tubular Bells III fitted quite nicely together, I thought. If there had been a big gap between Top Of The Morning and Moonwatch, many of us might have started thinking what a pointless track Moonwatch is, but the way which it's placed into the album's structure makes it function quite nicely as a bridging section (not to say of course that TB3 is an example of the ideal album, but rather just that Mike can manage to structure things more coherently even within his modern works).
I don't know that anyone here is really saying what Mike should do anyway - I'm certainly not. I'm just wondering how it could have been, exploring possibilities and so on, which is I think what bee was wanting to do when starting this. The fact is that Light + Shade is how it is, and nothing's going to change it now (apart from some playing round with U-Myx and a bit of work with a virtual razor blade and splicing tape!), but perhaps through discussing these things, at least some of us can learn a little more about the way it all works. I think a lot of great things come from people saying "That was ok, but I can improve on it".
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I wondered... do you think it would have been possible or would it have worked if L&S had been formed into two single pieces- each track linking seamlessly and progressively? One side Light and the other Shade.
], and OK also for a CD as an unique piece of work, but I think that pieces longer than 20 minutes do definitely belong to the 1970s and should stay there. 
Amarok is an exception, of course. 
