Friends

[from facebook, where I was going on about the post-mastering process of preparing an album]

BUT WAIT, MISTER DEATHBOY! YOU TALK ABOUT THIS OCD FINISHING SHIT! WHAT DOES IT *MEAN*??

ZERO PEOPLE ASK!!

I'm glad none of you asked. I will explain.

When you have made your album nicey nicey in terms of EQ and general volume levels, so you can flick back and forth between tracks and nothing stands out as being too jarring (unless you WANT that), too much louder or quieter than the surrounding tracks, making for a good listen-through, you're almost ready.

But then it's REALLY IMPORTANT to have a sample-editor and to USE IT.

Clicks and pops and noises between tracks are common and completely avoidable.

I do this (and you can do whatever you want: smear your tits with Marmite, I salute you, this is just what I do):

* Zoom in on the start of the track.

* Cut everything until the wave of the track starts to do anything properly. The first kick, the first string begins its attack, it doesn't have to be a POW moment, but if there is dead space, cut it.

* Volume fade just a handful of samples, a few hundred. Because if your track starts with a high sample displacement, it might well click. Who wants to START their track with an annoying clicky noise? Fuck that. Don't swallow the first bass-POW, but just fade in the first few hundred samples. That's a tiny sub-second fraction of that first kick. Let the wave go from zero to something, smoothly.

* Back up to the very start of the wave and add something like 0.3 of a second of silence. Because you faded your first sound in from zero, this will join seamlessly. YOU DID DO THAT, DIDN'T YOU? YOU FUCKING BETTER HAVE. This is because many playback devices are shit and they gobble up the first tiny bit of the track while working out what the fuck they're doing in terms of codec, EQ, synchronisation, etc. Just allow a tiny bit of lead-in for all the machines to get their shit together. 1 sec is too long. 0.5 sec is too long. I find 0.3 sec is barely noticeable by a human, but enough to defeat any weirdness from the playback device.

* Then, we look at the arse end. Scroll to the end of your track. Find the place WITH YOUR EARS. NOT YOUR MONITOR, YOUR EARS... where the volume has disappeared to zero. All the echoes are finished, all the reverberation is done, the song IS OVER. DO IT WITH YOUR EARS. I might have mentioned this. Then delete EVERYTHING after that point, if there is anything, because that should all be silent. UNLESS YOU LIED TO ME. So delete it. Then scroll back until the last loud thing and maybe consider putting in a "Fade out" over the top so you KNOW that it's faded from 'some' (little) sound to ABSOLUTE ZERO sound.

* Then add 1 second of silence to the end. This gives people time to know the track has finished, sound elegant in a constant queue of music, and also again allows whatever system you're playing through to return to nothing, while also not leaving it too long before the next track kicks in. It's breathing space between one track and the next.

That's it!

This is stuff I did from the days of CDs, where it mattered more, but it matters on mp3s, too, if you expect people to listen through your whole album in one go.

Nothing should click or pop, and one track should finish gracefully, then leave a short breath, then the next track starts.

Obviously, if you're doing some sort of concept album and you want there to be 4:30 of silence between your killer dancefloor CHOON and the next thing you spaff into their ears, this won't fit. Go wild.

Anyway, that's what I'm currently doing, and it's served me well in the past. Hope it's of use to you.

CHEERS!

--Uncle DeathBoy.