Track Reflection: Valleys

(Cover Art I designed for Valleys, original photo taken at Arcadia in 2016 with a Nikon DSLR and edited through Photoshop)

Hey guys!

So this week I put out a new track called Valleys. It's a lot more energetic than a lot of my recent work, and it's something that as far as the arrangement goes, I've been sitting on for a while.

This is something I tend to do with good amount of my unreleased stuff is to just let them sit for quite a long period of time, and that also ties in with my older habits of working on too many projects at once rather than having a more focused goal in mind. I recently returned to Valleys, and still very much digged the vibe I had brought to it - and decided to bring it out. I definitely feel I need to start sharing more content (including music) in order to update people with what I'm doing, and start to build a little bit of momentum and keep myself fresh in listener's minds.

Today I just want to do a little reflection on the processes of this track, some of the decisions made and how the first week went in terms of response.

Critical Analysis of decisions

Firstly, it's a pretty good track. Not a great one, but I believe it has some cool elements there where I've tried to experiment with something a little different by varying the syncopation between rhythmic elements to create that bouncy/swaying movement. The main reason behind releasing the track was that I thought the melodies of the two lead instruments in the chorus is quite catchy; and that since it is a relatively busy track - I wanted to re-approach the challenge of mixing it again after gaining more technical knowledge and experience in my field of studies at SAE.

The first issues that I noticed back when I first wrote the track, was the actual sound design choice of the 'vocoded' style voiced lead synth - which is heard throughout the track and most notably within the chorus in the higher pitch - and the glitchy distorted wavetable chords which drives under the lead. In terms of design, I really enjoy the actual sound of them. However, listening to the track in mono is where issues start to be exposed. Neither of them are particularly mono-compatible. Last year when I was using Serum, I noticed this with a lot of their patches where they are all just have these super stereo-enhanced images; so whilst a lot of them sound epic in stereo, most if not all the energy and tonality is lost in mono. In the context of Valleys, the vocoded lead loses its depth and falls far back in the mix, and the glitchy chord synth somewhat retains its level however loses quite a bit of tonality when summed to the one signal due to the amount of voices which create those tones.

So approaching this issue with the base sounds I had chosen and tweaked was pretty difficult. The actual timbre and automated behaviour from the LFOs and step-through of the wavetables sound great. However trying to make that work as well in mono, by lowering the number of voices from the oscillators and reducing the stereo-enhancement effects - only takes away from the energy and impact these sounds bring to the track, and ultimately affects the overall mix. As I bring more frequency content closer to the centre of the stereo image, less and less elements have their own space to fit into the theoretical 'box' of audio that you are listening to, since you're attempting to push more things into one spot. After experimenting with this, I almost ended up with a similar result as listening to the final track in mono but with more frequencies clashing. With constantly hitting walls where I could be spending my time in other important areas on my schedule, I decided I would leave it when I got it the best-sounding that I could. My takeaway from all of this is that sound design is a very important stage of the production and that you should always mix in mono.

What did I do well? I found the low end stayed tight, punchy and present in mono and was transparent across a large range of monitors. I tested the track through one of the studios at SAE which has 12 monitors including a set of Auratones and Event Opals (amazing). I'm really stoked with that because low-end mixing has been one of my technical focuses as of late and I'm happy its starting to really click with me. I believe a side-effect of the wide stereo images of the lead melody & distorted-chord instruments, is that there is that sonic space in the centre for the kick and bass. That along with some heavy EQ, side-chaining and subtle stereo imaging of the bass to 'wrap' it around the kick, scooping out those frequencies around 350Hz from the kick to tighten it up and focus on sub information, leaving all the below 150Hz information of each element mono and some strong parallel compression on the kick to retain that presence; resulted in the relationship of these elements sounding great in both mono and stereo, and transparent across a variety of sources. However, another thing to consider here is that it probably wasn't necessary to have to do all this processing to get the sounds working well, had I made better sound design choices from the beginning (across the board). 'Work smarter not harder'.

Since this was initially a project I began in early 2016 (and have gain A LOT of knowledge since then) there was a lot of general workflow and routing decisions I made which I didn't bother going back and fixing in the final Ableton project. Things like not using return tracks for reverb or delays, there was a lot of individual FX plugins being used along with the effects racks inside VSTs (eg. Serum). This in conjunction with almost all the MIDI coming from Serum, and then using Ozone on the master chain rather than bouncing out a mix file first - ended up absolutely destroying my CPU usage (well over 100% at busy sections). When I was bouncing out the final mix + master, I would have to take my headphones off and walk away because the only playback you could hear was a loud choppy mess. I realised a lot through last year that not being organised in terms of workflow, and/or considerate with efficiency and power usage; also carries over into other parts of your project. Now this is regardless of any happy accidents or amazing last minute ideas, but basically, you should to be making good decisions on all fronts of your songwriting process in order to have a well made, successful product.

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So overall I'm just happy I've got it out, it feels like it's a lot of stress off my shoulders as fixing some of the mix issues were frustrating, and it's much better than not releasing anything. I'm in a good environment here with the Jbox project where I can just experiment and try things, see if it works and/or gets a good response. I'm not trying to push myself into a particular genre, as I want my craft to develop and mature as I do.

Industry Response

Valleys was featured in Acidstag's Single Sessions article. They also promoted the post via their Facebook and Twitter handle. This coming Monday you'll find it in their Weekly Spotify playlist and also, since the website is linked up with blog aggregate site Hypemachine, you can find the track listed on there too.

On triple j Unearthed I got a rad little review by one of the Unearthed Music Producers, Claire Mooney:

I submitted the demo of the track to quite a number of other blogs too before making adjustments. The Drunken Coconut gave some fantastic mix feedback which highlighted the fact that the high-end was a bit too much and was not allowing the rest of the mix to cut through, and that some of the percussion elements needed some spectral work. Selected Sounds and their associated accounts on SoundCloud also reposted the track and left a comment.

Streams

Valleys is out on all the major streaming/store platforms including Spotify & Apple Music, and is also available on SoundCloud and Triple j Unearthed. If you'd like to listen to the track yourself and let me know your thoughts, here is some embedded streams:

Cheers! More updates to come.

Lachy :)