Quiet One // Updates (10/04/14)

Hello,

It's been a solid few weeks of mixing for me and it's been really enjoyable. It's strange, for the last five years or so I was finding mixing a chore and therefore found it hard to really put my heart and soul into my output, that is no longer the case. I've been blessed (not religiously) that my pro audio friends have been so kind in their endeavours. As you may know, I'm a Pro Tools guy, I've been using it since it first entered the market place and I've loved every update that it brought. The problem is, Pro Tools was updated a lot (We are on Pro Tools 11 now) and it's been a stress keeping up with the updates and the processing power. Fortunately now I'm using the HDX-3 system, the processing issues aren't so vast. The issue now comes with the physical storage of the albums. 

I don't want these things to ever get 'technical' so I'll keep it brief. As you probably already know, we offer four main formats on Hurt. MP3, M4A, WAV 44.1kHz and WAV 96kHz. With the exception of the 96kHz format, the others are fairly standard nowadays. The issue now is that the Quiet One album was recorded in 192kHz which is the best quality that is available in audio. It's essentially the 20K of audio media. (10K does exist btw, we saw a screen in Orlando and it was just stupid)

So for instance, Sink (which is kind of a small song, vocals, acoustic, a couple of vintage synths) is approximately 300GB large... 300GB large... Sorry... Just incase little Timmy at the back can't see... 300GB LARGE. That's quite large. I don't even want to know what a song like CTRL+DEL weighs in at as it has an entire orchestra, a drum kit miked with 12 mics and so on... It will be many, many TB. It's just ridiculous. The funny thing is that all of Quiet One is going to be mastered to my Studer reel-to-reel as I want a tape vibe on the album. The very fact that the album will be mastered to tape kinda makes all of this obsolete, but fuck it, I'm too deep.

I've finished recording for the album (You would have known before now had I not deleted the internet) and it's sounding fragile, which is perfect for me. I don't really want to go to deep with the mixing as I find that you end up thinking of the songs as stale even before they get released, purely from the fact that you've played them 400+ times trying to mix them. I have called upon a good friend of mine called Dan to come and help guest mix the album.

Dan was a bassist a long time ago but unfortunately was diagnosed with Cancer and the Chemotherapy killed his higher end of hearing. This isn't really an issue considering the highest pitched instrument on the Quiet One album is a cymbal. He is an amazing Pro Tools engineer and I think that another set of ears on the project will bring a new light to it.

I will be bringing a few more 'Fly-on-the-Wall' videos to you in the near future so keep an eye out for those. 

Anyway, I hope you are all well.

Be good.

B