Well well, here we are again! Another album means another blog.
This has certainly been one of the strangest and hardest albums I've ever mixed. Let me rephrase that, its been one of the strangest and hardest experiences I've had. That's not to say I haven't enjoyed it, because I have, it's been a great process and I am proud of what we have achieved. Mary won't mind me saying this either: I was, and still am, astounded at the material she has come out with here. I love every one of these tracks, and even on mastering them (after I'd heard them all several hundred times) they still sound fresh and exciting.As usual, some of these tracks have in one way or another been kicking around for a while. I'm sure Jess has said that Mary was playing 'Once Again' when Jess was at school. Some of them came from a process where Mary was writing to picture for a television show. I think at least three of these tracks came from that session.
You'll know already how well Mary creates arrangements, obviously in her massed ranks of choral parts. But you'll have heard how she has been working with multilayered textural parts on the last couple of albums.
You ain't heard nothing yet though.
We installed some software (Spitfire, for those of you who are keeping track) a couple of years ago to allow Mary to go beyond the basic sounds in Logic. To be fair to them, those basic sounds aren't *awful* but the new software gave her a palette of better, possibly more controllable sounds to work with.
There are a lot of strings and woodwinds on this album, which are all MIDI - between us all (Mary, Jess, Morgan and me) we provided guitars, bass, and vocals. Mary played all of the parts in on her keyboard.
One of the things about MIDI is that it can sound utterly rubbish even with the very best and most expensive sampling software (the entire Spitfire suite would cost around GBP32,000 I believe, and that's just one of many suppliers available). To get these things to sound good, you have to use MIDI controllers. The basic upshot of this is that you have to play the parts in with dynamics. If you want a section to be soft, you have to play it softly (or go in afterwards and adjust the MIDI velocity). But there are other things - these software samples are very clever and have expression built in, which means that by using either the modulation wheel on a keyboard - or a lot of mouse clicking after you've recorded - you can get a french horn to play in mezzopiano, and swell to fortississimo, which gives you much more of a sense of there (almost) being a human being blowing into the horn.
Then you have to do the same with the cor anglais (I'd say this is Mary's favourite orchestral instrument). Then the bassoons. Then the violins. Then the violas. Then the celli...you get my drift. Mary worked exceptionally hard to get expression and dynamics into these instruments. I think she got a fair amount of advice from genius media composer Guy Michelmore. I was delighted when she found him, as I've been a follower of him for a long time.
There are also - shock horror - samples and loops on here. I know, I know. But the thing is, they're great if they inspire you to write. You never know what direction you'll go in. Mary certainly wasn't slave to any of the loops, and used them to develop her own unique ideas.
We tracked some more guitars to replace parts and I put down bass and The Random Note Generator (aka the fretless bass) on a few tracks. I decided to avoid putting bass on tracks where Mary had used a double bass though. Morgan put bass down on 'Once Again'. He also recorded fantastic tenor vocals on 'A Walk in the Park'. Because of the nature of the tracks with so many samples and loops being used, we were going to put down more parts to supplement and sweeten these, but eventually we decided against it - Mary had the sounds she wanted in the track and there wasn't any point in changing how that was for her. I think we struck a good balance between loops and actual human beings playing on the tracks.
As I mentioned above, and as you'd expect, there are the usual Massed Ranks of Hopkin choirs in evidence. We knew that Mary was going to be doing an album without vocals, but obviously there were going to be choir parts, and boy are there. She even got me singing at one point.
I think on average I had around 45 tracks to deal with per song (although tracks like 'Alone', with no vocals at all, really brought that down!).
As you'll know from other blogs, I export all the MIDI and audio out of Logic (because I can't get my head around Logic) and pull that exported audio into Pro Tools. I do this so it keeps whatever Mary has played as pristine, and doesn't nudge any edits she has made out of line when I reimport them into my software. Mary does all of her own vocal editing and comping, so she has complete editorial control of whatever she has produced.
For this album, I went down the same route that I did for Two Hearts in that I restricted myself to a choice of two EQs and three compressors. There is one reverb used on the entire album. I wanted to keep my bit of this process as consistent as possible, because the tracks themselves are exceptionally diverse. All the individual tracks are sectioned and routed to a bus. Every bus on every song has the same effects chain on it. That's another thing - we have so much choice with the amount of plugins available, that you can get tied in knots thinking about how and what to use. By restricting myself, I limited my choices and decision making - I think it makes for a more cohesive and pleasant sounding record, and I hope you agree.
I started the mix in June and was determined to not rush. I knew the material was diverse and I wanted to make sure I knew exactly what was going on with it!
I was mixing 'Peace and Quiet' (which is possibly my favourite track) on a warm Thursday in July, getting ready to head off and meet up with Mary and Jess, and with Morgan who was over from the States. I suddenly had a very strong sense that something was wrong, everything looked weird. Then a couple of bright flashes and my left eye felt as if it was looking through a blizzard made up of coal flakes (there's a picture for you. I can't describe it better). By the next day, my eye had got so bad, I had a semi circle of dark grey on the inside half of my vision. I was ordered to the hospital to be seen "in the next two hours". From that point, it was all a bit rapid - detached retina, booked in for emergency surgery the next day. Got to hospital for surgery, pre-assessment found lots of exciting macula complications, so instead of the fifteen minute local job, it was the full general anaesthetic, fairly invasive surgery...tomorrow.
The upshot is - within 48 hours of the semi circle appearing, I had been successfully operated upon. It was just a matter of time to see how effective the surgery had been and how much vision I had lost.
As the weeks went by, my eye got better. It was literally better every day. I managed to get a couple of mixes done (I was mixing in mono...vision), but it was very hard going. I had to cover my eye as I had horrendous double vision and looking at the screens hurt like hell. There were a few tracks that needed MIDI edits made to them, but there was no way I could do that, even with my eye covered, it was agony focussing on the screens in such detail - so I had to hand those jobs over to Jess.
By the end of August we had most of the tracks bashed into shape and almost there on the mixes, only a couple of minor mix revisions required. I went back to hospital for my post op check up, and the consultant there was really happy with how everything had gone. Not entirely out of the woods regarding pain, and a few things to watch for, but otherwise, a full clean bill of health and a full discharge.
I was incredibly lucky to have the care I did from Mr Ching and Dr Cazorla and their team at Bristol Eye Hospital. It is rare to have such positive success from the operation I had. They truly saved my sight, and I will be eternally grateful to them for that. So there was no longer any excuse, and I had to crack on and get the rest of the tracks done. Of course I was eager to do this anyway, and we eventually got there with the mixes - I must admit though it was still fairly painful for me and I had to take a lot of long breaks.
I then left the mixes for a couple of weeks before I started the process of mastering. As a rule, I don't like mastering our material, but at the moment, prudence seems like a good option.
I think I did a fairly good job with the mixing, and the mastering seemed to go fairly well. Again, I necessarily took my time as spending more than a couple of hours (with breaks) in front of the screens was still very tiring and painful. It was nothing like it was a few weeks before.
My overall philosophy in both the mix and mastering of this album was to leave as little trace of myself as possible. I just wanted to let Mary's tracks speak and shine for themselves, and just do no more than was absolutely necessary to make everything sound as coherent and cohesive as possible. At every step, I asked myself - is this doing the right job for the track? Is it right for the album?
I think this is the proudest I have been over a body of work. I enjoyed *almost* all of the process - some bits were a lot more painful than I ever imagined they would be! But it is a beautiful and astonishing album and I hope you enjoy it half as much I have enjoyed mixing and mastering it.
Thank you - as ever - for your support, and enjoy the album!
Christian Thomas is Production Director at Space Studios and the recording and mix engineer at Mary Hopkin Music
You may also enjoy hearing Mary, Jessica and Chris discuss the recording of Doodling. Click here to go to Mixcloud.