Ivan Reesei'm obsessed with the musician underscores right now. her new album U is some of the best DIY production i've ever heard. (to say nothing of her songwriting, sense of melody, vocal delivery, lyrics, etc)
i'm working my way through a 10 hour stream she did breaking down tracks from her album Wallsocket. i'm only about an hour in, and i've already picked up dozens of production techniques and cool ways to use ableton. (i've spent smt like 5,000 hours in ableton, so picking up dozens of new ideas in an hour is pretty exciting for me.)
i bought her album on bandcamp so that i could get the WAVs and analyze how they're mastered. figured i'd share my findings from looking closely at the song "Music" through a bunch of meters. let's go!
instantaneous LUFS tends to hover around -7, peaking at -5, which is waaay up from the -14 everyone says spotify will nail you to. true peak is as high as +.4db.
bass is really clean under ~90hz, mostly triangle, occasionally sine for the wubs. and it's loud — peaking at -6db. and it goes quite low, down to like 28hz at times.
bass is pretty much mono under 120hz, even though the bass synth has a bunch of higher harmonics that feel spread, so overall it feels wide.
looking at the track in mid/side, it seems like the bass is mono all the way up to like 8k, then it goes wide. weird.
in the chorus, the kick, snare, crash, and vocals (especially) are the most prominent elements in the side, and pretty much everything else has most of its energy in mono.
in the verses, the vocals flip between being pure mid and split L/R (separate takes, not haas)
at 0:50 when the bass goes wide and out of phase, there's still a lil hint of bass in the mid down at 60hz for the mono mix. but we get a lot of side bass at 90hz. also, this is one of the only moments in the song where we hit negative phase correlation, otherwise it hovers at +1 for the whole song.
also at 0:50, we have a pure snare hit in side. spectrum looks like humps on a camel's back, peaks at 80hz, 1k, 8k, notch at 300hz.
looking at overall EQ, the mid is sort of a downward slope, with a gentle roll off above 10k (see image). side is more flat, roll off below 100hz and above 10k
waveforms overall look pretty slammed, but there are _tons_ of pockets of silence, and most of the energy is in the bass — both probably help to avoid fatigue. peaks all look nicely rounded.
having the kick and snare show up in the side really helps them stand apart from the bass, i guess. i also slightly suspect the bass is a few ms late so that we get clearer transients from the kick and snare.
alright, cool, that's a lot of reference for me to work from as i dial my own mixes/masters.
[did any of this make sense to an outside observer? was it interesting? questions?]
Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNYqwpx7Cys
Breakdowns: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMql4OfFJWU
Xavier