After finishing the recent Sky High Mix this summer, focused on housey, tribal and tropical sounds, I wanted to create something more dreamy yet intimate at the deeper end of house music. Started revisiting old moody vocal based tracks on Naked Music. Yet I didn’t just want it to be another deep house tribute mix, and started weaving in electronica tracks round about the time news came in of the successful Chandrayaan-3 lunar landing.
The story turned into an electronica-house journey accompanying two lovers waiting for their flight to Chandra in the spaceport’s retro futuristic bar lounge. And how their relationship evolves as they travel towards their final destination.
For some reason, it took me 15(!) times to finally mix these tracks, discarding some and adding others along the way, only to screw up a fade or beatmatch. Yet still I didn’t really like the way the final mix looked like with volume levels between some mixed songs not feeling right. In addition the high equalizer that I decided to leave to neutral zero while mixing to make a more bassy sound, meant that I just lost the definition of the trebles for instrumental sections. It sounded muted which took the edge off the vocals too. I tried to use an online site where you could upload your track and get it automatically remastered, but after trying five times and timing out, I reluctantly entered the fabled realm of DIY mastering/remastering music.
It was the first time I learnt about Audacity not only a quick and dirty sound chopping software but as a fully fledged track remastering software. Learning about how streaming software such as Apple Music or Soundcloud lowers the sound level of your entire mix if your upload goes beyond -16 LUFS. Or how to fix volume normalization both across the entire mix, and the bits where the mix should sound continuous but just goes up and down for no reason. Plus making sure the waveform doesn’t do crazy things overcompensating for those changes, and the transition doesn’t sound unnatural. No wonder artists and their producers spend weeks tweaking albums in the studio. I spent 2 hours today just figuring out which combination of local tweak normalization > overall volume normalization > treble EQ fix > export produced the best sounding output. Only to find out that Soundcloud’s rendition was rather tinny on my laptop. It couldn’t be downsampling because I’m on the paid tier and should be high quality 284k? streaming. It couldn’t be the original as I uploaded the raw WAV file. Switced to Chrome and listened on the TV and it sounded fine… On the laptop volume still has issues, whereas other “professionals” have perfectly sounding volume and dynamic range. The difference between the amateurs and the pros it must be.
After 14 mixing flame-outs and some rudimentary EQ/sound mastering later, here it is… The “Spaceport Lounge Mix (Lovers to Chandra Edit)”. First drinks please! Don’t forget to “like” the mix on Soundcloud if you, well, liked it 🙂
Track listing:
1. Process (Original Mix) by Om Unit on Om Unit Self Released
2. Osam (Original Mix) by Tosca on !K7 Records
3. Happiness Is Free (Original Mix) by Onda on Naked Music
4. Let It Ride (Jimpster Main Vocal) by Lisa Shaw on Naked Music
5. Love Only One (Original Mix) by Blue Six on Naked Music
6. Justify My Love (Miguel Migs Deep and Salty Remix) by Ingrid Chavez on Ten Windows Records
7. Work (Atjazz Extended Remix) by Hurricane/AirBorn Gav on The Remedy Project
8. Slow Down (feat Jorja Smith) (Vintage Culture & Slow Motion Extended Remix) by Maverick Sabre/Jorja Smith on Spinnin’ Deep
9. Try (feat. Ernesto) (Fenomenon Fredahk Extended Remix) by Arvid on Naked Music
Picture:
AI-generated by Stable Diffusion, prompt by Misstick on Nightcafe
