DREAM✦SCAPE made it to the final round of Ascension Chorus Battle (2019) and the deadline was last week, marking the end of an amazing journey. I really love all three entries our team made!! Our non-vocalist staff (pKotetsu, shippa, minty⁺, neneki) are all so talented and cool; it's been such a great honor to work with them and I still feel privileged that they said yes to us and stuck with us for 3 rounds. ;u; And of course it's been incredible to be a vocal team with longtime friends Mimi, Chiisana, and Aerin 💕💕💕 The other day in our sappy feels we called each other our "singing sisters"—and I feel like that's really the best way to describe the four of us... Our vocal tones all vibe and blend extremely well together and we sing with similar amounts of energy!! And we're always on the same page; having worked together and been friends for nearly a decade (yet somehow we'd never done a quartet before?!) let us be very comfortable with each other and give/accept honest feedback and have the best support system ever. ;o; I love them so much. I got to sing with such fuqqin POWER VOCAL QUEENS.
There's a lot to appreciate—from the vocal prowess and blood-pumping energy by chiisana, Mimi, and Aerin; to minty⁺'s ever stylish designs that nailed each of our personalities every time and eye candy illustrations that I would happily eat up at any given moment because they are just my type; to neneki's persevering dedication and how she elevated us with her knowledge about mixing and audio tech; to pKotetsu and shippa's animation (and the story was crafted by them too!) with A+ aesthetics and unique effects built by them that I can't comprehend the process behind.
Thank you for a great CB run! 💕
【A-S3】紅蓮華 | GURENGE【DREAM✦SCAPE】
For the past two rounds, neneki had done the main audio mix while Mimi and I would work on the timing—but for this round the scheduling only worked if neneki tuned/timed while I did the main mix, so that's how I ended up mixing despite swearing off CB mixing after Gemini's "Innocent x Haven" for Ascension 2017, heh....... For good reason too, I found out. and reconfirmed every. single day. as I struggled to make enough progress on the mix. Struggled just to accomplish anything. Discovered that I know nothing about efficient mixing, am lacking a lot of technical knowledge. Constantly felt the pressure of the looming deadline and the high expectations for a final round entry. Was burning out because my full time job is also post production and eye strain intensive. Had trouble staying awake late every night. Ear fatigue clouding my judgment.
This was such a big wake-up call regarding my mixing process. ;; More about this under the cut.
Currently I am not well suited to mix for CBs/tight deadlines because I do nearly everything manually and it always takes me a lot of time to achieve the sounds I'm looking for... Remembering how much I struggled in 2017, I really tried to the best of my knowledge and with my limited collection of favored plugins to avoid doing e v e r y t h i n g manually... ;;
More than ever, I used multiband compressors on tracks and on buses... but still it wouldn't account for how instrumental changes affect how the vocals come through—which hopefully will be solved once I learn how to use sidechaining..! And then more than ever, I tried to do as much as I could of EQ and volumes per line....... but nope, it would never turn out satisfactory until I went in and worked on every syllable individually, carefully balancing each one and matching them to one another. I have no freaking idea how to change this extremely difficult, frustrating, painful, and laborious part of my process. :c Just EQ'ing alone costs me a ridiculous amount of Trial and Error time and I also had to spend a lot of time redoing things which is frustrating. AN EXCRUCIATINGLY LARGE SUM OF TIME WENT INTO THIS MIX....... Eight partial days (mostly after being at my job all day) and three full days u___u;;
Also, big mistake made ☠️... I set the overall compression and mastering settings based on the first chorus when I should have set them to the last chorus—which featured a more demanding instrumental, all 4 of us singing together as opposed to two, more harmonies, and a whopping 18 tracks of adlibs..... By the time I got to the last chorus, everything was being hit hard by the compressors and there simply wasn't enough space for everything that needed to all come through at once. :c It was muddy and gross and I was so scared. Any adjustment to the settings would have thrown off the very delicate balance that I'd carefully stitched together... To solve this, I sacrificed some of the adlibs that were going to be barely audible in comparison to the belted adlibs anyway and used a multiband compressor to weaken the frequencies in the instrumental that were combatting the vocals. Given the circumstances, I'm proud of how the last chorus turned out—know that it sounded WAAAAY different just the night before the deadline but thankfully it's listenable and you can hear all the important components now!!
Another thing that I highly regret is how harsh the high frequencies are, especially when it comes to the cymbals in the instrumental. ;;;;;;;;;;; I was so progressing so slowly and so up against the deadline that I wasn't left much time to test the mix on different devices.. And at that point, I was so constantly plagued with ear fatigue (in fact my ears were swollen for a few days) that it was hard to tell whether the pain was just pain I already had or from the harshness of the mix. Screams in regret. Once again, I don't plan on mixing for a CB again for a while until I've completely revamped my mix process and can be more confident about it.
But....! In the end, I'm still proud of this mix. 💪 I BETTER BE PROUD considering how much I put into it...... orz I engineered together 47 tracks and it sounds pretty cohesive! You can hear everything you're supposed to hear and I got to be a little creative with the panning and designing effects for some parts that originally didn't have any! I definitely feel that there is fruit to my labor because a handful of people have mentioned that the mix sounds clear and polished and lets the vocalists shine, so happy T_______T I absolutely was not ever expecting this many kind words, especially when mixing is oftentimes an afterthought and the lowest priority of a chorus; it's been surreal to see my mix work being highlighted like this. 💞
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