Looking Backwards And Forwards...

What did your 2024 look like?

After an initial gig in a freezing Stoke-on-Trent at Electric Tentacle in December 2023, our 2024 saw us play 32 gigs, travel over 1,200 miles, visit 14 towns and cities, endure 1 onstage disaster, avoid several more, have untold laughs, and form lasting friendships that will endure for years.

If it hadn't been for contracting covid in late October, I'm sure we could have hit 40 gigs this year because they're so much fun to do. This nasty little bug was a walk in the park when I contracted it a year earlier, but now it was like a completely different virus. I was in bed shivering and gasping for breath for a week, couldn't swallow, had a painful lymph node under my jaw, spent weeks in the mental "covid fog", fought for breath just walking upstairs, and ten weeks later still can't smell properly. It was most definitely NOT a walk in the park or anywhere else this time, despite what naysayers might claim.

Anyway, the year also saw me work on my mixing and mastering skills, via a free and continuing service to the community:

Mixing and mastering, always free to the community.

 

Someone suggested I should put together a show reel of "before and after" clips to show what I can do. This is in the works; I just need permission from the artists.

I've worked with several members of the community now on a one-off basis, and that has resulted in several larger mixing, remixing and mastering projects booked in for the first half of 2025 with some up-and-coming artists. There will ALWAYS be capacity to work for free for the EMOM community, though. The range of styles I've worked on is truly dizzying, from noisecore to rap to 90s trance.

Along the way, I worked out what I think is the correct way to avoid the dreaded Ableton export clicks when exporting mixes. These are clearly audible, a bit like vinyl noise, on the exported wav file. Sometimes, they're just down to the media player being used and will be different each time you play the file. I've noticed this with Windows Media Player. Rewind the playback slightly after a click, and it might be in a different place. It's just crap software. Try something like VLC player, or load the exported file back into Ableton and listen there.

If you are plagued by genuine clicks in the exported file, though, here's what I did to get rid of them. It's all about calculating the correct value for driver error compensation, and it goes like this: 

1. click Options in the menu bar, select Settings, and click the Audio tab in the resultant popup
   
2. The overall latency value calculation is (buffer size / sample rate) * 1000. In my case, the buffer size is 256 and the sample rate is 44100, so the overall latency should be 5.80.
3. Use the Driver Error Compensation input box to carefully set the Overall Latency amount to 2 decimal places. It’s a bit fiddly to get it exactly right, but well worth it. In my case, the compensation value ended up being -21.14
   
4. Export a .wav file and listen for clicks
   

After wading through what felt like hours of videos and blog posts about dithering options, I also decided to also add POW-r 3 dithering during wav export to smooth things out, just in case. Even at a low buffer size of 256 samples, I can no longer get clicks to appear in my exported files.

And remember, if you still have an issue, you can always record your mix or master to a new audio track in Ableton, save the project, close Ableton, navigate to the wav file for the recorded track in the project, and copy it to a more useful filename and place! That always works 😁!

And this brings me to a personal realisation of 2024, which is just how difficult it is to mix and master your own work compared to working on someone else's tracks. I now have an added admiration for bands who, maybe through necessity, do this. It is very difficult to remain objective and detached from your babies. The amount of extra work involved in mixing your own music, and covid, are the reasons for not maintaining this blog as regularly as I should have in the past couple of months.

So, it's with some trepidation but immense pride that I announce the arrival of Jon And Libby's first 5-track EP. "Saying Boo To A Goose", now available on Bandcamp. It's going to be available on Spotify for your streaming pleasure in the coming days, and also on Artcore when I can work out how that works. These are the full versions of the songs with all the tracks blasting away, rather than the stripped back versions we play live. We hope you like the thunderous din we've made.

Available now!

Anyway, have a great New Year and we'll see you at the EMOM!