The album is complete

A deep breath

ah! (and all of the things you think that would mean). I am exhausted on every possible level. Working on a record, or to put it better, having a piece of work hanging around my neck for the last two years has been an immense pressure.

It feels as though no-one on this planet could have worked more hours over the past two years than me!

I swear it. I feel barely alive. Wow.

Ok down to business..

Mastering a 3D album

Mastering is huge subject and a contextual process, so to explain my thoughts on it fully would take about a week so I will nut-shell it for you.

When I sit in my studio I am mixing recorded audio and I am following the journey of making the instruments and that particular recorded moment, true.

True to what it actually sounded like at the time in the room. This in itself is totally different to what most people who make music are trying to achieve.

Most people are trying to achieve what sounds "good" as opposed to being a "true representation" and with me being a documentarian, aiming to make something sound "good" is completely irrelevant.

This includes writing/performing/recording/mixing and mastering.

What the mastering part is, is a process in which I have to try to make sure that the sound of the record gets to you, in as close a representation of what it truly sounds like as possible.

For example: The world cannot all experience the record in the room where I mixed it so as soon as somebody is listening to the record in their player, in their particular room it sounds totally different. Well times that by the population of the world and you can imagine the context of trying to get it to sound true over the average.

It is never going to sound right on all systems and I cannot rectify that but because "right" does not really exist then it just "IS" what it "IS".

ie wherever you are listening to it is a representation of where your listening to it too.

When I am mastering the mixed songs, I am eqing them, trying to put onto them the frequencies that the room I have mixed them in was fooling me into thinking was actually there. This is what gets lost when you get to hear them - the room acoustic that I completed them in.

Another part of mastering - more commonly known - is to get the songs to sound "loud" so that you can compete with other artists.

This is quite simply your typical macho stuff - "I am a man, I have more muscles than you therefore I am better" ie "My song is louder than yours, so it is better".

Well I have absolutely no interest in playing this sort of game. If "Where do we go from here? UP" is quieter that somebody else's album and then a person who is listening thinks "Oh this is not as good because it is not a loud" then that is their loss.

The odds for why not to make it sound squashed and loud - far out weigh the reasons of why to make it sound that way.

Transparent Mastering

The main reason that I know I have followed the right direction in this area all comes back to the album being a document of a period of time and NOT a game.

Why?

If you listen to most music nowadays it is compressed and limited to hell, it sounds terrible and do you know why?

Number one: Music is not dynamic anymore, there is no realness to it. It is designed to be on in the background at work, through ipod headphones or played in a club. There is no dynamic within the track, there is no louder parts than others, there is no "moments" that rise and fall, it is all very flat.

This is designed so that the general public can keep sitting at their computer with the radio on and there will be no sudden "loud" part to a song, nothing to distract you from the trance of your daily routine - background music.

This has basically stripped away dynamic feeling from music. The fact that you cannot be disturbed from your computer by a moment in a song that suddenly swelled (think orchestral music) is the wrong direction for music to go in, in my opinion.

Because these usual techniques make the sound flatter and squashed that is how most peoples music gets LOUD and that is what they want the "My song is louder than yours" scenario.

"Where do we go from here? UP" is as true to it's true dynamic form as I could possibly make it. So in this sense I hope that it is a fresh difference to most music that you could experience.

I have made every effort that I could to make my mastering as transparent as possible and I have been very careful with the audio.

Mastering is a contextual process and obviously if I was making "Hard Rock" music then volume and that compressed sound might matter - anyway what I am trying to say here is "Where do we go from here? UP" has been preserved as best as possible.

It is actually not a quiet record but that is not my point. My point is that people think that mastering is something that it is not. Mastering is the same as any creative scenario - contextual and in this scenario the context is "Realness".

Replicating my acoustic environment is what this mastering process has been all about.

3D

I have really tried to put the album across in it's 3D space, I have been developing as I have been going and am pretty happy with the results. Depending on where you are sitting (in comparison to your speakers) you will get a completely different experience of the record. Try it out. You should be able to "see" in your minds eye exactly where the narrator/singer is positioned and where the rest of the music is positioned, it's a deep level to the album.

There is never a more extreme version of this than through headphones. If you listen to the record out loud, directly in front of your speakers first and on your next listen you listen through headphones you will find you have two different albums.

This is intentional.

Whilst listening out loud you are invited to be a part of the room within which the record was recorded (along with the mystical magic that surrounds the room) and you can observe all the goings on in front of you but when listening through headphones you actually become the room itself, the room is you.

Try it.

The end is near

So in terms of the audio, my work with "Where do we go from here? UP" is finished.

It has taken me a great number of years to get here.

I have no firm release date to give to you yet but rest assured things are moving ahead exactly as they should.

It will not be long.

I can't wait to share this record with you.