Working remotely, Paul Sirvatka and I recently finished the final mixes for the special edition re-release of the St. Petronille Contemporary Choir’s 1995 album, A Time Will Come For Singing. Here’s the latest.
[blockquote]This is Part 6 of a series on the production of A Time Will Come For Singing (Special Edition). See All Posts[/blockquote]
The “heaviest lift” on this project, without question, was the process of re-creating the instrumentation for each track on the album. None of the original MIDI files were available, so each time we replaced a “vintage” sampled instrument with a newer version, we had to recreate the MIDI data stream used to create the original performance. This is another area in which Celemony’s Melodyne app really shines. Melodyne can “listen” to an audio file and create a new MIDI data file based on that recording. The technology is by no means perfect, but it provided a great starting point. With a little human editing, the performance on the final tracks sounds just like the original — even while the instrumentation used on those performances is now radically better.
The most challenging track to mix, without question, was Paul’s epic, 10-minute long “Christmas Medley.” The track features 11 different Christmas carols, each performed in a different style and mood. There were over 400 individual tracks in the mix! Even when we got things nicely balanced and sweetened within each section of the track, it was still a huge challenge to set the volume levels between each passage. You want the transition between each section to be as graceful as possible without being too loud. On modern streaming platforms such as Apple Music and Spotify, there is a so-called “loudness penalty” if you deliver a master track that’s too loud — the services will essentially play out your track at a lower output volume in order to avoid jarring changes for the listener from one song to the next.
[blockquote]Paul Sirvatka’s epic, 11 movement, 10-minute long “Christmas Medley” featured over 400 separate elements in its final mix.[/blockquote]
Rather than send a full 10-minute mix to our mastering engineer (Rob Stewart at JustMastering.com), I simply sent him a series of 11 WAV files — each 10 minutes long. That way, he could just load all 11 files up as one big block, with correct timing from one passage to the next, but still make subtle adjustments in level, compression, and EQ between each section as needed.
As for the album’s graphic design, Paul and I agreed very early on that since this new version is a “special edition” of the 1995 version, it would be nice to have the 2018 version draw from the original graphic design as much as possible. Back in 1995, St. Petronille Contemporary Choir member Michelle Litos handled the graphic design. Unfortunately, Michelle doesn’t still have the source files for the project, so anything I wanted to use would have to be recreated from the existing CD’s artwork. Given how much “recreate the original from scratch” we’ve done on this project already, I suppose that’s fitting. In any case, I do enjoy a good graphic design challenge.
The original album featured a subtle “holly and ivy” background pattern. I decided to recreate that pattern from scratch in Adobe Illustrator, and use that as the primary design element on the new artwork.
It’s become a lot easier to automatically identify fonts from a printed sample, so the new artwork will use the same fonts as the original. That, along with the holly & ivy motif, goes a long way towards making the two projects feel related.
With the final art design finished, next came editing and mixing a couple of short videos that we’ll use to promote the album. First, the “teaser trailer”:
As I mentioned back in August, Paul and I recorded a short conversation where we talked about how this project came to be. That video has now been edited and mixed as well:
Paul and I are planning to host an album release party in Chicago coming up in early December! Stay tuned!
