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Kyouiku REDUX
1) Yume no Ato
2) Sounan
3) Service
4) Gomatsuri Sawagi
5) If You Can Touch It
6) Kao
7) Jyuusui Negai
8) Crawl
9) Bokoku Jyoushou
10) Gunjou Byori
11) Ekimae
Tokyo Jihen is a Japanese rock band conisting of Hata Toshiki on drums, HzM on keyboards, Kameda Seiji on bass, Hirama Mikio on lead guitar and established poplular rock star, Shiina Ringo on vocals and guitar. In 2004, this band released their debut album, Kyouiku. Fans enjoyed the album...somewhat. Something was not right with the album. It was produced to be “loud at any volume” (ie: allowed to clip, exceed db threshold, at will) and is one of the more offensive implementations of this production choice. Songs like Juusui Negai and Crawl are nigh unlistenable. Staticy, distorted, a mess. Months later the band would tour the album live. When high-quality recordigs of these live shows surfaced, many fans in the community heralded "this is what the album should have been." It sounded clean, passionate, energetic, and professional.
Since the show first leaked, many people would put these recordings on their ipod, as I myself did. However, I doubt I’ve once listened to them there because the raw live audio is just assaulting. Most notorious is the bass overpowering everybody. . If I was going to do this right, I’d need to somehow remix the tracks. This was a bit of finagling considering all I had to work with were the already mixed left and right channels. My goal was simple in theory, re-imagine the album using these recordings.
In practice though, far more laborous. Espescially considering I had little audio engineering experience. My line of attack for remixing was three-fold: 1) Tame the bass, 2) Accentuate whatever instruments are driving the song, and 3) diminish the live feel (audience cheering and echoes.) My friend refered to this task as "re-inventing the wheel." Each song took at least 3 rounds of remixing (some as many as 5.)
When you're producing music in the real world, you put each instrument on a seperate track and then set the levels and mix appropriately. I did not have this luxury. All I had to work with were the left and right already m mixed channels (consisting of every instrument already.) So, to be able to properly mix I had to figure out a way to somehow seperate the instruments.
What I figured out I could do is seperate the different frequency ranges. Not ideal, but it was enough to seperate the bass (the lowest frequencies) from the strings and vocals (medium-highs) I did this using the multi-band compressor
I would put the song on 4 tracks, use the compressor and tell it to only low 1 of the 4 frequency ranges per track (the blue range the bass, bass drum; Orange drums and low ranges on the strings, green for the vocalls and strings, and purple for the drum's hi-hats and cymbals.) Once I had these 4 seperate tracks it gave me better control over the sound.
Because I couldn't effectively seperate the vocals from the guitar and keyboard, if I wanted to accentuate one of them I would try to equalize the track in a manner that would accomplish this as best I could. To diminish the live "echo" I used whats called the "stereo expander" but instead of expanding, I went below 100% and this reduced the echo, making it sound more akin to a studio recording. As for the audience, I knew I couldn't remove them totally, so I didn't go out of my way to do. If I took them out entirely, it would be at the expense of the songs audio. So I just strategically edit the in and outs of each song. Besides, I think the crowd gives it a neat "Sgt. Pepper" vibe.
Once I felt I had mixed each song to my liking, I began to recompile the album. However, I decided to use a different running order than the original, to give the album a more "epic" feel and included 1 B-side (Kao) and 1 live outtake (If You can Touch it.) Both songs feature vocals from the band's lead guitarist, Hirama Mikio, as opposed to front-woman Shiina Ringo. This accentuate the "band" nature of this outfit, that this wasn't just another outlet for Shiina Ringo (in later incarnations of the band, other members would too feature vocals on songs, so my decision was justified.)
I "released" my faux album to two outlets: Electric Mole Forums, the premiere Shiina Ringo and Tokyo Jihen fan community, and JPopSuki, a popular torrent tracker specializing in japanese music. It was recieved with surprisingly positive acclaim. One person said, "Interesting. It's a sad state of affairs when the mastering is so bad that a fan made album using a live performance dvd as source turns out better than the official release. One wishes this (bad mastering, not fan dedication) were an isolated incident nowadays. "
What I wanted to show to the ActLab world with this is that the gap between "the professionals" (directors, editors, what have you) and the educated amateur is soo narrow that it's concievable for oe to out-do those with all the production money in the world (and by proxy, the expectation to do the job right the first time.)
For comparisoin, here is an image of the soundwave of the omg "Sounan" compared to my Redux version. I can't objectively say my Redux sounds better, but the soundwave tells the story.
