Song#4 Reaching (out for you) waltz - Recording & Mastering Stage

Back to recording!

1. Idea Stage
2. Composing and Arranging Stage
3. Recording & Mastering Stage
4. Final Product

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Recording

This song required a different workflow compared to the previous few. The generated music from Finale was rather expressionless and lack the human mistakes that is inherent in orchestral music. Such mistakes include slight off-timings, difference of instrument sound quality within each sections and the conductor's directions. The tempo and dynamics were also constant. Also lacking was the reverb of an actual concert hall.

To humanize the playing, I manually recorded each instrument with my MIDI keyboard, with auto-quantize function turned off. One by one, I added the layers of instrument to the overall mix.

Sometimes when the delay between playback music and recording becomes obvious, I had to edit the MIDI data. The only quantization I applied was to the snare drum playing, which was quite constant in its scoring.

For the groupings, I grouped them into their family/sections such as Strings or Woodwinds.

Groupings

I used the Ableton Orchestral Packs for this mix (which are pretty large overall). You could download them from their official website after paying a pretty steep price. Or you could be resourceful and get it free through other means :) The packs are:

• Orchestral Brass
• Orchestral Mallets
• Orchestral Strings
• Orchestral Woodwinds

As you can see in the mix above, only two instruments were not in the packs. So I had to use the stock instruments like "Selector Kit clean" drumset and Harp2 Tube as the harp. 

During playing, I paired the Mod Wheel of my Korg MicroKey to the Macro knobs on each instrument devices...

Mod Wheel

Macro knobs

 so I could humanise macros like motion (which controls the vibrato of strings) or change the articulation of the instrument (which is usually divided into legato, staccato in the RH window). The envelopes of the final product looked like this:

Motion envelope for Strings

 I also paired the MIDI control with the Pitch knob (the leftmost on the MicroKey) for the tempo. In this case, I had to set a upper and lower limit for the knob (it defaults by spring action to the centre) with my original tempo at 175 bpm. That way, I recorded the changes in tempo between each music sections as well as the slowdown at the end.

Lastly, I used my Novation Launchpad as a real-time mixer to record changes in individual instrument/sections volume throughout the music.

Mastering

Mastering the Master channel

 For the mastering part, I opted for simplicity with just a general Reverb preset "Concert Hall" and put the Dry/Wet knob down to 41% (100% is basically the echoes) paired with another useful stock preset "Mastering - gentle limiter" to fix the final volume during the loud sections. The limiter is basically a souped up glue compressor, and I didn't want to normalise orchestral dynamics too much - I toyed with the Threshold until the needle wobbled a little, with Makeup gain to a mere 2.00dB. Dry/Wet was set at 80% too.

That's all with this section everybody!

Stay tuned for Part IV of  IV for this song!