Seasons Greetings once again from the mixing desk.

I’ve had another busy week working away on ‘Containment Failure’. This week I was working through the all-important vocal takes and lead guitar tracks. This firstly involved carefully cross-editing all the chosen vocal takes to make one complete seamless vocal track. Although somewhat tedious I managed to complete this in one day, enabling me to move onto the actual vocal processing. Choosing how, how much and whether or not to even manipulate vocal tracks is known as a bit of a black art to audio engineers and producers. The human voice has a very large dynamic range (volume) and the subtleties of speech and singing fall under the heaviest scrutiny by the human ear. With these sorts of things in mind I proceeded carefully through the vocal performances making the slight adjustments for level, depth and tone that I felt best represent the record. This process took a couple of days to complete and today I was able to move onto the lead guitar tracks. Luckily not too much work was needed here, just some very slight noise reduction and some minor EQ to add a bit of warmth.

With the completion of these tasks the pre-mixing job is very near finished. All that remains is to work through the extra ”misc” guitar parts and to prepare some reverb and atmospheric tracks to add depth and body to the album. I’ll be tackling most of this next week and then hopefully not too long after the lads will be joining me for the FINAL MIXING job !!!!

…Containment integrity is reaching critical, Cascade failure is imminent.

Rob.

Hi fans, Rob here with an update from the mixing desk.

I’ve been working very hard on the mix over this past week and things are really starting to take shape. I’ve completed most of the track cleanup and initial processing for the rhythm section. Firstly I focused on the drum kit where the foundation of the rhythm sound comes from. I dedicated a fair amount of attention to the kick drum in particular, though it’s a very solid sound on it’s own I knew it would need a bit of effort to get it to play nicely in the mix. I spent a full three days tweaking the drums, fattening the kick, adding a little shimmer to some cymbals and rounding-out the toms.

After that I turned my attention towards the bass, adjusting the tone and dynamics for definition and a good solid low-end. The bass didn’t give me too much trouble and I was able to move on to my guitar tracks later that evening. I’ve just now completed a couple of full days work on the rhythm guitars and performed a few test runs of the whole rhythm section playing together. I’m confident and happy to say that we are well on track towards final mixing, though more work lies ahead as I soon turn my focus to the all important (and often most troublesome) main vocal tracks.

Stay tuned for more updates on the mixing and the impending release of ‘Containment Failure’ !!!!

Hi fans, well well it won’t be too long now. I’ve just completed work constructing the final piece of studio gear that I need before I can begin attacking the audio tracks for the album. It’s my homemade ‘Studio Super Switcher’ capable of permorming many essential tasks when mixing and mastering. The addition of this audio tool will go a long way towards successfully mixing and mastering the record. Despite being an important component in the project we have a deadline of sorts to meet so I made a slightly hasty construction of it, it took all of my spare time for about 2 weeks in the end.

Homebrew vintage goodness

So now I can at last begin the various pre-mixing tasks required for the album. Firstly this involves some track clean-up for noise and levels, followed by capturing some natural reverb for some of the tracks which will help to bring the songs to life.

Stay tuned for more…

Hello fans of the unbelievably mighty Kurodust. It’s been a little while since I’ve made a post as I’ve been busy with the various duties that our modern lives involve. I’ve also been spending some time establishing ‘The Lateral Expanse’, my project-blog-reviewing site.. feel free to check that out.

So now lets take a look at the official progress of the much anticipated forthcoming Kurodust album ‘Containment Failure’. Vocal tracking (including backup vocals) has been completed and we have handpicked and edited all the favorable takes. It was quite a process in the end but we all certainly had many laughs along the way (mostly from playing-back Ben’s more “entertaining” vocal mistakes made during tracking).

The guys left the house on the final day of vocal tracking at about 2pm. In anticipation of the work to come I went up the street, had a coffee and relaxed for about an hour. With my thoughts all gathered correctly I returned home to begin the task of converting the vocal tracking studio into the mixing studio. About 10 hours later it was starting to come together, but I still had a long way to go.

…there was chaos everywhere…

…I almost fell asleep in a mess of wires and connectors…

By the end of that day most of the stuff was ‘in’, but nothing was properly connected yet. I spent a lot of time during this last week setting everything up ready for the mixing sessions. I’ll be spending some more time this coming week tracking some final guitar parts.. and then on the weekend we’re all off to the beach to drink and have fun.

Confidence is high though, and despite the lengthy wait for ‘Containment Failure’ we are most certainly on the final stretch. Stay tuned for more…
Rob