What's happening Nov 2025

So much to do. I need to write this down so I don't forget about anything.

Record "Breathe (in the Air)" with Nay. Finish the arrangement - currently it is guitar, bass, two singers. It will be a "live" play through but I suspect we will also record the parts separately and mix it against the "live" video. To a click track, of course! This is cheaty, but for us both to sing - she's a good singing, I am not - and play complicated charts - of course I have made it complicated - is not easy. It will be fine, it will be more a music video to a studio recording. The arrangement is sounding great. We will be playing acoustic because:

Muck around with the new acoustic bass. I recorded a video about if of course, which is a story into itself. I had noticed that people seem to like short portrait videos, that people like discussions on specific types of guitars, and they reckon a good thumbnail goes a long way. Well for the first time ever I made a thumbnail...and it was specifically a video about a Tanglewood TRU7ABCEBW, and while it was portrait it was too long to be a short. Worst performing video I have done in a long time! But that is neither here nor there, I make videos because I have something I want to talk about/share. The bass itself is cool, but it's an acoustic bass, which means the only thing it is good for is aesthetics (think MTV unplugged...)

Backlog of mixing recordings from my local church - it's great, every Sunday there is 4 songs, around 20 channels each time with a huge variety of musos, gives me a chance to hone my mixing skills. I normally do one every week or two, I'm building up a collection and often share them with the team for inspiration...planning on getting my ten favourite mixes of 2025 to the music director for release on Spotify.

Record/video/edit/mix a "garage session" of the band "Solstice" my daughter plays bass in. I have ideas in my head to record them live, but also to have an almost "This Is Spinal Tap" documentary feel to it. Well, less irony, but a casual chat between songs (not necessarily me). Will probably get an audience, to give it an intimate feel, so the viewer can feel more like they are part of a small group listening/watching the music. Need to organise with Nay and Lyds when they finish exams.

Record "Shine on You Crazy Diamond" and get the arrangement finished and uploaded. It's super challenging both to play and notate out. Would be the longest song I have ever taken on. But it sounds so good. I need to get it out there so I can continue to develop it. Like Breathe (in the Air) I'm sure I will constantly be changing it as I find new treasures in it.

Record "Breathe (in the Air)" and update the arrangement and upload...again. I've changed it so much since I last recorded it, and even more since I have been exploring it as a duet. It's such a great song. I've been sitting on all my Dark Side of the Moon arrangements, to release one day as a book...but I've gotta give up on that, it might never happen. So get stuff done and recorded and scores uploaded.

Other Arrangements - I've got a few waiting to be finished, recorded, or both. Who can fit all this in?!

Continue to develop a tone for my new Cole Clarke acoustic. I'm just running it through a Zoom G1 four, which is convenient because it fits in the guitar case. It is super programmable, I reckon there is not much it can't do. It's "only" 24bit 44.1kHz 128x oversampling and a 32 bit processor so the audio purists would baulk but there is a lot to love about it. I've fiddled with it a lot, there is more to fiddle with.

Android Audio App for when I need a coding hit, sit with the Chatbots and code up an Android Audio App. Primarily I want it to be able to load an MP3 and play it AND PITCH SHIFT IT. Yes, you can download them, but they are all full of adverts or they want a subscription. With the Chatbots watching over me, I reckon I could knock this up with only a minor bit of frustration. Why? Because the songs I play at my local church are rarely in the same key as the recording and it is nice to play along with them. And I like to code. It would also be nice for it to be able to do a rough pitch detect, tempo adjust - and these are all things that exist in free libraries, so it all seems doable. But this is possibly a pipe dream.

So as you can see by my messy desk, there is always something musical going on but it's a mess...if only there were more hours in a day!

Shotcut Notes

Making video content with the free open source Shotcut video editing software

This is a reminder to myself about tips and tricks I use while editing videos in Shotcut. Yet again another piece of software that is jammed packed with everything you could possibly need, and since I only use it every few months I forget how to do stuff...

• Portrait mode: when you have landscape video that was actually recorded as portrait, to get it into portrait, apply the filter "Size, Position & Rotate" and use parameters something like position -420,420 size 1920,1080 rotation 90.
• Envelope audio volume/amplitude adjustments: add the filter "Gain/Volume" to the clip, select the clip, then click the stopwatch icon to enable keyframes. You can now double click to add points. Note that you can later switch from Timeline to Keyframes in the bottom left to re-edit.
• If you want to do more than just a fade out, say a variable opacity, you will need to add a black layer, File->Open Other->Colour Black. You can then add Opacity to your video, click the stopwatch and set keyframes to envelope your levels.

Restoration: Cassette

A mate of mine pulled out an old cassette of a recording from the late 70's that he played on, and ripped it to digital, handed it to me and said "if you feel like a challenge, see if you can clean this up." I do like a challenge.

The songs were really well done - great old Gospel hymns sung by a talented dude, backed with piano/guitar/bass/drums and a Gospel choir - I could hear through the bad quality that they were pros. But yikes, how do you recover that? Armed with my ability to use an AI model to do isolation, I set about trying to separate the instruments and vocals. Clearly the model was not made for such recordings, it couldn't separate out vocals/bass/drums/other, but it did a pretty reasonable job of separating vocals and other. I then had a chat to the Chatbots about what is going on a learnt a few new things.

My main issues were the usual hiss, boxiness and lack of sparkle, but the two other things that bothered me was the recording drifting from left pan to right pan, and the times the recording seemed to be out of tune. Some other minor things like vocals too loud at times and the drums were so mashed into the mix they were barely discernible.

So far, I have used the following approach and the initial results are quite satisfying:

• Separate vocals from everything else. The lead vocalist, not a problem, but the choir sometimes appeared in the lead vocals and sometimes in the other. Kinda makes sense, it was a dense choir, it wasn't too bad I found I could volume envelope my way around most of it.
• Collapse both tracks to mono, then re-expand them with:
• a hard left/right two tap delay which gives a mud-free perceived stereo effect. Depending on the difference in delays you can tweak how much expansion you want. My ears can detect even a 1ms left - 2ms right difference, it's subtle but it is there. At 5ms - 10ms it is quite clear. >50ms is starting to sound cavernous.
• Magic 7 is my favourite reverb at the moment which adds spatiality, but also adds muddiness for me, so I dial in a room sound and then adjust the wetness.
• EQ - lows and mids: I found the bass was booming annoyingly and the low mids were too prominent. I used a normal EQ to get this more like what I wanted to hear. I wanted to do a multiband EQ compressor but I find them hard to use - I need to practise more - so where there were sudden thumps I used a volume envelope to contain them. It's brutal, but if you don't push it too hard I don't hear it "everything suddenly ducked". Hmm, I really do need to practice using EQ compression.
• EQ - highs: Cassette seems to rob us of sparkle. When I tried to push it back in I was just increasing the hiss. So I used a little bit of EQ in the areas that didn't sound like his, and a saturator to create more high frequency overtones to "artificially" add more sparkle back. This seemed to work okay - what else can you do?
• Compression and limiting to help smooth out the dropouts and dips. And this might just be me, but I like smoothness and consistency in what I listen to. I like swells but I don't like to be jarred. Dynamics in music is great, maybe my ears are already too shot, but I like only subtle dynamics, I prefer a consistent balance. I don't want everything to be the same perceived loudness the entire time...well, maybe I do a little :-)

I noticed while trying to sweep the EQ listening for what annoyed me that "it seems to ring everywhere!" When I chatted to the bots about it, it's all artifacts from tape. Head misalignment, tape speed inaccuracies and just the nature of tape as a data storage medium. I found a compromise...these recordings are never going to sound crystal like they were recorded with modern gear, my main aim was to remove the panning warble, to balance the EQ, some re-producing/mixing to smooth out the dynamics, and I had to accept pitch drifts and out-of-tune sounds.

"Old school analogue vibe."

Steve Slate VSX Listening Routine

What to Listen For, What to Check, How Do You Use These Things Anyway?

This is a reminder to myself about how to do a mix translation test using VSX headphones through the VST plugin, after doing the bulk of mixing in Linear Mode.

* * *

1. Linear (Flat / Microscope View)

Play 20–30 sec mid-strength section

• Check local loudness relative to snare/kick.
• EQ balance has no harsh spikes, not dull anywhere.
• Bass and kick drum has nice separation.
• Listen for sibilance, cymbal/hi-hat/high end harshness
• Mono check (quick flip: does vocal stay centred? Does low end collapse?).

2. Mix Room – Nearfield (Producer’s Laptop Monitors)

Play the same section.

• Vocal placement sits in the mix, not on top or buried.
• Snare/guitar/keys clarity in the mids.
• Kick vs bass relationship in low end okay?
• Does reverb delay stick out?
• Small level tweaks (1-2 dB) often shine here.

3. Mix Room – Midfield (Full Mix Perspective)

Play peak song section.

• In low end does kick + bass still feel solid.
• Panning/reverb/stereo balance feels okay, no phaseyness.
• Automations and arrangement flow - do transitions lift the energy?
• Overall size - not too thin, not boxy.

4. SUV (Car Test)

Play full chorus/bridge at a higher volume.

• Vocals still audible? (cars bury them if too low).
• Kick + bass groove not too boomy?
• Sub-bass control - does anything rattle or overwhelm?
• Harshness at loud playback - does the mix stay smooth?
• Does the song feel exciting/hyped?

5. SA-Pods (Earbud Reality Check)

Play chorus at low–moderate volume.

• Vocals cut clearly (lyrics understandable).
• Snare/guitar mids provide drive even if bass vanishes.
• Quiet-volume test - does the mix still feel compelling?
• If it works here, it works anywhere.

What's happening Sep 2025

I have spent a number of weeks compiling an album. Nah, not an album from me, it is a live album, a production of originals showcased at my local church. There are 19 songs/poems, and many have introductions so the file count is actually 31. That's quite a lot of work. The styles were eclectic! From ballads to singer songwriter pianist to grunge to rock band. Each one I painstakingly reworked from the multi-channel recording from a trusty old M32 deck with SD card module added.

I had to think about stuff I don't normally have to think about - how will the songs all cohere together so they all sound like they belonged to the same event. I think some of that naturally happens because it is me mixing each one, and unknowingly I will already have a style that will carry through. But I considered how some of the quieter ones should sound quieter compared to the loud ones, but at the same time be just fine standalone. Some sort of album cohesion.

It's all but finished, which is great, because I've run out of steam for it... would be at least 50 hours invested to date.

To make my life harder while mixing all that, because of course you'd make life harder, I bought a set of Steven Slate VSX headphones. The ones which emulate a room, so you can say "this is what it would sound like sitting in a recording studio close to the monitor speakers. Or far away from the speakers. Or in a car. Or with earbuds." My youngest daughter kept stealing my Sennheiser HD280s...so I gave up and bought a set of VSX as my headphone replacements. They aren't as easy as they sound, it takes getting used to. Initially it just sounded like different EQ and different reverb. Which I guess it kinda is in a simplified sort of a way. Which is why it made my mixing more difficult, because I was now listening for other things.

I'm still getting used to them, I find I leave then in flat frequency response mode most of the time and only switch to a room as I'm finishing off a mix to see how it translates. It's interesting, well worth the effort. The sales pitch says "best mixes you've every made in your life" but I don't think it is that easy, it's not a silver bullet, I can see that they make a useful difference though. I just need to think differently, listen differently. Listen. Know what to listen for.

Meanwhile I play "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" twice or thrice a week. It would be around 7 minutes long at the moment - hmm, I should time it - okay, done, 8 minutes. It covers parts i-iv and end at the start of v, there are a few elements not included, but it's quite nice and definitely passes the pub test. There are a few more things I'd like to put in there, but history has shown the harder I make a piece the more likely it is to later fall out of my head and I stop playing it regularly. The song is already complicated, so I think if I'm going to do anything more to it - keep it simple! Well, "simple" is a relative term.

I've played it several times on my Friday work lunchtime hangout, there's one lady who stops past for a chat quite often, she doesn't recognise many of my songs because all she listens to is heavy metal and rap! The other week I played a few Metallica riffs, which she knew, I said I've work out something for her. "Enter Sandman" is a great Metallica song, I think we all know the intro, but I was sure I could do more than that. And you know what - I did - and not only is it relatively easy, but it sounds great! It is based on a listen through from Josephine Alexandra's cover, greatly simplified but still super cool. I even played it for my youngest daughter and she had a crack at it. I think that might be the highest compliment I can get - she hears it and wants to try it for herself :-)