YEEEEEEY a big step has been made!!! ✨
Earlier this year, some of my friends and I were obsessed with the anime If My Favorite Pop Idol Made It to the Budoukan, I Would Die (aka OshiBudo) which was airing at the time so we thought it'd be really cute if we covered the opening theme!! This cast feels really precious because not only are they my [lovely-voiced] friends in the youtaite community, but also they're all in NorCal so we used to hang out a lot! You know, back during "precedented" times when hangouts were a thing.
And then of course we were brought to life by the perfectly adorable visuals of souleheart (illustration) and Azuka (animation), bless!!! They both make such wonderful things and are really sweet to work with—would definitely recommend their commissions. ;u;
πΉ Looks like souleheart's art comms are closed right now but they're worth keeping an eye out for; she was impressively fast and communicative and just captured all of our personas p e r f e c t l y.
πΉ Azuka is incredibly multitalented and has both animation and vtuber model comms open—and she's also debuting as a vtuber on 10/24!
KT ･ https://www.youtube.com/seahorsegurl ･ as Reo
Lucy ･ https://www.youtube.com/Lyrratic ･ as Sorane
mochi ･ https://www.youtube.com/c/crunchimochi ･ as Maki
yanovi ･ https://www.youtube.com/yanoviP ･ as Yumeri
γ«γͺγΏγ’ (tamou) ･ https://www.youtube.com/c/isoperi ･ as Yuka
ε°γγͺ (chiisana) ･ https://www.youtube.com/ChiisanaChanx3 ･ as Maina
Eva ･ https://www.youtube.com/waterpixieva ･ as Aya
Kuroγ ･ https://www.youtube.com/c/KuronoCovers ･ as π
~✨~✨~
And uh, I mixed!
With the much-appreciated help from fome, mochi, KT, and Kurono for their insightful feedback! π
Yup, that's all I have to say about that.......
Just kidding, there's probably like 500 more words to follow on this topic, sorry.
When I say that I've been to hell and back with this mix, this is what I mean to be precise:
YEESH. And it's really to no fault of the vocalists at all—this struggle was all me and I truly hope I never have such a painful mixing experience again... The mix was cursed from the start since I began mixing before the lines were tuned and timed; and I had NO IDEA that the difference would be so large that I'd have to clumsily readjust and put bandages on everything, yells.........
A lot of the cause for going in circles for so long was honestly me losing my confidence in my judgment. You know like when you think you're doing okay but it turns out you're actually doing really, really bad? That broke me pretty early on and I trusted myself even less than I already did, kept believing I needed to compensate. Sometimes I took others' critique and I went too far because I thought the more action, the better. And there were definitely times when the mix was "good enough" but I stubbornly refused to settle because I had declared that I MUST finally make a chorus mix that sounds polished and doesn't make me cringe like all my other chorus mixes do; I simply couldn't leave a single syllable with regrets that I know would haunt me; if I had settled before I was certain then I'd be doing a disrespect to all the time I already poured into this.
(Laughs,, I don't claim that it's a great mix and I already now see ways I could improve it but it was a good place to stop; I felt that it was the best I could do within reason.)
Now I'm fairly sure there's something inherently wrong with my work process because whenever I change the overall sound of the mix/master—which, spoiler alert, I did a lot—it's painful and time-consuming to readjust everything to match. I typically start mastering in the middle of the mix because I like to hear how the final product is going to sound but I think for my next chorus project, I'll start trying to establish a solid mix foundation before doing any mastering and see how that works.
And then other frustrating factors like being slowed down by lag/glitching (solved midway by removing a CPU-intensive plugin), always getting ear fatigue quickly because I mostly mixed late at night after work, and honestly just really lacking the expertise to be as polished of a mixer as I want to be, so I hope my learnings throughout this prove to be meaningful ones.
Anyway, so since there's a lot of iterations and different approaches I took using the same source material, I thought I might as well compare how the sound evolved throughout the process! Reduced to this handful from, like, 50 mixdowns.
~✨~✨~
Baby ver. of the mix!
- missing the "bright edge" needed for the idol genre
- delay should be turned down
Holy shit did I go overboard with the compression lol. I felt that the previous mix was too raw and needed to feel more "packaged together" and full so I overdid...everything.
- much more aggressive mastering (a lot of multiband compression, "maximizing," widening)
Significant changes made:
Oh no I overcompensated and fried it too crispy.
For some reason after I started comparing to some references, I fell under the impression that a less bright sound would ultimately be cleaner...and then I was really lost. Cannot confirm how much of this conviction was made with ear fatigue orz
This one might have actually ended up being final had Fome not given me advice to address the issues that I still felt were there but didn't know how to solve!
We've made it to the end; this is the final that ended up on youtube!! It overall sounds richer than any other demo while being pretty clean I think and has some sparkliness throughout—at least that's the hope lol. The mono is still crap but all I could ask for was it to be not "completely unlistenable" on my phone speakers o<-< ..I'm learning.. o<-<
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