The Last Flight

[Amberwolf]

If anyone has ever read Windhaven (by George RR Martin and Lisa Tuttle), this is The Last Flight:

https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/the-last-flight

Since Windhaven is an ocean world, with what amounts to an archipelago of islands for it's land, I went with what I hope is a mediterraneanish sort of sound, in my own wierd way. 

07-19-25: 071825 000001 000042a-- first public version
07-20-25: 071825 000001 000055f -- Various edits, mix, fx, etc. Added "lute solo" to final reprise section.
07-21-25: 071825 000001 000067k -- further fine tuning, added bass grace notes and fills, some mix changes in spots. Reworked the intro percussion, turned it way down along with the intro vocal notes. Moved some percussion bits around, added a few more shakers here and there.Altered the "trap style" pre-measure bits in most places to fill with shakers or tambs or caxixi, or leave empty for expectation of a note that isn't there this time so the next one has more impact, etc. Also automated more of the amp / eq controls on the lute solo in the final section for more dynamics.
07-22-25: 071825 000001 000075m -- added environmental fx, widened part of the lute solo to fill space.

07-23-25: 071825 000001 000077n -- had forgotten to widen the space for the rain
07-23-25: 071825 000001 000093q -- Added wind, walking and hten running footsteps in the clifftop gravel, the sound of flapping clothes, etc.
07-24-25: 071825 000001 000109u -- Fixed program failure (all buses mysteriously set to hardware out instead of chains they had been in) and fixed awkward placement of cliffjump / start of flight.

Original version  here:

https://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=15058975

07-20-25: 071825 000001 000042a - first public version

Edited 16 hours ago by Amberwolf

[Max Arwood]

One of my favorite! A lot of things going on to keep the listeners interest. Great recording and mix.

[Amberwolf]

Thanks!

I updated it with various edits, mix, fx, etc.  Added "lute solo" to final reprise section...might surprise you, might not.   Worth a listen if you heard the original.

https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/the-last-flight

07-20-25: 071825 000001 000055f - new version

Original version  here:

https://soundclick.com/share.cfm?id=15058975

 

Edited Monday at 05:54 AM by Amberwolf

[Kevin Walsh]

Really nice, the mix is a treat, very smooth. Loved the percussion and the interplay between bass and drums. Excellent!

[Amberwolf]

@Max Arwood@Kevin Walsh

Thanks!   

I forgot to note here that last night I'd updated it to version 07-21-25: 071825 000001 000067k -- further fine tuning, added bass grace notes and fills, some mix changes in spots. 

Reworked the intro percussion, turned it way down along with the intro vocal notes. 

Moved some percussion bits around, added a few more shakers here and there.

Altered the "trap style" pre-measure bits in most places to fill with shakers or tambs or caxixi, or leave empty for expectation of a note that isn't there this time so the next one has more impact, etc. 

Also automated more of the amp / eq controls on the lute solo in the final section for more dynamics. 

 

 

Still working on the cover art.  Have to composite several different things, since my usual help sources don't seem to want to create anything remotely resembling what I need this time.  

 

(how hard can it be to create an image of a storm-wracked ocean covered in clouds to the horizon, thunderstorms visible here and there...viewed from a clifftop high above that sea, looking out and down on the waves battering spines of rock like dark teeth rising from the foam, and between you and all that, just visible in form but not detail, is an old woman with silver hair falling fast from that clifftop she has leaped from, very long metal glider wings extended out to her sides for several meters...?)

 

 

 

 

Edited Wednesday at 12:43 AM by Amberwolf

[Amberwolf]

Finally got the artwork composited:

Also updated the track itself

07-22-25: 071825 000001 000075m -- added environmental fx, widened part of the lute solo to fill space.

Edited Wednesday at 05:03 AM by Amberwolf

[Max Arwood]

Wow, that was better than the other version that I heard even more air candy!!!

Oh yes I love the bass tone Mercer and full even listening on an iPhone!

[Amberwolf]

11 hours ago, Max Arwood said:

Wow, that was better than the other version that I heard even more air candy!!!

Thanks--I'm still looking for the right wind sound for that one lonely part just before the last section, and some others for accents earlier.  The wind represents her flying; there's a fall first, as she jumps from the cliff, then swoops out and glides over the ocean in the rain.

Lots of wind sounds out there...but hard to find one that sounds like these. 

 

11 hours ago, Max Arwood said:

Oh yes I love the bass tone Mercer and full even listening on an iPhone!

What is "Mercer'?    

The core bass tone is from the sample itself; the rest is from this:

The way I currently use basses in my tracks routes them thru three parallel buses and fx chains, besides whatever is on the track itself (in this case a subtle delay). FX chain included parenthetically below with each bus:

--Bass (Sonitus Multiband Compressor, with the two highest bands (of five) muted entirely, so you don't get any of the highs just mids and lows, but very little actual compression unless it gets really loud, to just keep it from distorting).

--Basshighs (SMBC again, with just the two highest bands *not* muted, and a reverb with a 1.5s decay, and most of the highs dampened, and "200% width" which takes the reverb part and spreads it out all the way to the left and right. )

--Subbass (EQ to cut off anything above 200hz, then Multiband Compressor wiht the top three (of five) bands muted, and the low-mid band gain cut by -10db and a knee starting at -34db, the low band below 60hz left alone, and a final output gain of 2.6db).

Both the last two buses go directly to the master bus, while the Bass bus goes to a subbus that merges all percussion and bass together with a single Multiband Compressor set to just do limiting, so that it keeps all the "beat" together and damps really big peaks to prevent distortion.

 

Oh, and I also have a separate track that I sometimes copy bits of the bassline to for accents on some beats, that uses LittleGreenAmp and a delay and Sonitus MBC.   On htis piece, I only use this on the one part  around two and a half minutes in for a few seconds, for the bass.  (I also use it for the "lute solo" in the last section).   

I  also use this on some of the beats and notes in Behind You Lie Many Unseen's last two sections to emphasize them, where I have the bass note play in both tracks for those notes, so you hear the bass tone and the harmonics from the distortion. 

 

 

[Max Arwood]

Mercer = SIRI again. This new iPhone has a new hotter processor so they had to put a bunch of AI junk in it to slow it down lol. It also broke SIRI. Maybe if I changed her accent, she could understand me better. SIRI was better in my 9 year old phone. 😟  

That progress right?

 

Edited yesterday at 02:09 AM by Max Arwood
Added info

[Max Arwood]

I have never split the bass like that. I’m going to go play with it. I do use a Brauer type technique. I use it for a few tape apps and several saturation/distortion busses. I split a bus called main to these then send those to a master bus. 
 

How many LUFS was your loudest section on your master?

[Amberwolf]

2 hours ago, Max Arwood said:

I have never split the bass like that. I’m going to go play with it.

I started experimenting with splitting the bass when I had a synthbass line in...I think it was Neotenous Chordata?  that I didn't want to lose all the sound of at the highs, but I also wanted to seriously magnify the subbass parts without blasting out the mid/bass etc.  I don't have a surgical EQ, just the Sonitus and other similar ones, and those didn't do what I wanted, so I thought...why not just nuke whole bands using the SMBC just as a "filter" (no compression/etc) and feed different busses that I could then do whatever with.  I also had a separate subbass tone sound that was just used on the beats, and that also went into the subbass buss. 

That worked, and since I almost always do the next song using the previous one minus all the content / automation, to use it as a template (because how I set things up improves each time, and it's the easiest way....) then the busing has stayed that way. 

When I did Ookami no Kari no Yume (Wolf's Dream of the Hunt), I added a second main Bass bus (Bass2) and several additional percussion buses (hand perc, etc) to the "percussion" chain, most of them  parallel to the main perc buss that feeds the Perc&Bass bus that feeds the master.   There's a lot of different percussion and bass in that project, driving the "motion"? of hunter and prey, separately but together, (not sure it works, but it was the idea), and I couldn't get them to play nice wihtout doing it that way.  

 

I still know almost nothing about busing, mastering, and all that stuff...every project is a new learning experience, especially when it has a different feel and sound than the others before it.... So i experiement till it sounds like I want, and if I can't make that happen, I google articles about it and sometimes I actually understand something they're talking about.... :lol: 

 

2 hours ago, Max Arwood said:

I do use a Brauer type technique. I use it for a few tape apps and several saturation/distortion busses. I split a bus called main to these then send those to a master bus. 

I'll have to look up "Brauer"... 

 

2 hours ago, Max Arwood said:

How many LUFS was your loudest section on your master?

I don't think I have anything that shows "LUFS".  I use Elemental Audio Systems free version of "Inspector" set to "Moderate" to warn me of clips and stuff,

 

but since I use Sonitus MBcompressor on the output in a modified version of one of the "master" presets, I don't normally get any.   I tend to just push the final out stage on that (that shows 5.0db in the screenshot below) until it "sounds" as loud as the other stuff I did that I liked at that level, and that doesn't completely destroy the dynamics and turn it into a hedge.    So +5 did it for The Last Flight.  +2 did it for the one before that.  Some don't get any. 

 

 

I almost always already start out with all the tracks and buses at the volumes I want for the kind of thing being put thru them, with minor tweaks at track output level for various things, so I almost never want to change relative volumes by adjsuting bus outputs.  The simplest way, so far, that gets a sound I like, and final volume i want, is usually to just push that Out up on the SMBC.  Someitmes I use the master bus input gain, but that often leads to clipping or problems because the other buses are already feeding it high enough.  And using hte output gain on the MB can do the same thing, but the Out adjusts level *before* limiting (and maybe other stuff, not sure) so it then does limiting to ensure everything stays in bounds, if I don't push it too hard.  

 

For this project, I finally  found a close-enough wind sound, and some footsteps to use for walking up to the cliff then running to the edge and jumping off, to start her dive and then soaring over the water.  Had to modify the music itself for that specific bit, not sure I got the lute bit done "right" yet; I think the perc and the bass are ok (most of the perc taken out there to let the footsteps running up do their thing). 

07-23-25: 071825 000001 000093q -- Added wind, walking and hten running footsteps in the clifftop gravel, the sound of flapping clothes, etc.

https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/the-last-flight

[Amberwolf]

I looked up "brauer" and found this

https://www.sonarworks.com/blog/learn/reaper-tip-michael-brauers-brauerize-mixing-technique

(I quoted some of the article at the end of this post for later reference)

which turns out that I apparently reinvented something that seems to be similar to this process for myself, cuz it's what I've been doing since at least Ookami no Kari no Yume (Wolf's Dream of the Hunt) since it was the only way to make things work...but I started the path to something like it back before even Neotenous Chordata, maybe as far back as Convocation of Lies and Just give Me A Voice. 😊  

I don't usualy have "lead vocals" so the part in the diagram below the quote doesn't usually apply directly, and I don't parallel compress that when i do have one (I guess I should learn how since I'm beginning to do more vocal stuff now that I have libraries of samples to use). 

In the last several pieces I've started using many more sends to parallel process some tracks, but some things still just go to one bus (a lot of percussion stuff stil goes jsut to it's grouping bus, but some that have deep tones also send to the perc-subbass buss if I want to preserve them and have them help the beat of the whole submix).   

 

 

Quote

Subgrouping Your Tracks

In Michael Brauer’s technique, various tracks, except for the lead vocal, are sent to four subgroup buses to allow for the mix elements to move and breathe. His subgroups are named A, B, C, D, but you can name them however you like. Here is how he groups his tracks.

Bus A: Sounds that are in the upper midrange of a song, like keys, synths, and percussion.

Bus B: Tracks that form the foundation of the song, such as drums, bass, cello, low percussion, etc.

Bus 😄 Mix elements that provide midrange energy and whose volume will be automated a lot, such as guitars.

Bus 😧 Elements that aren’t played staccato, need the warmth of a tube compressor, and could benefit from being widened. Think ambience, keys, strings, pads, background vocals, vocal and instrument spatial and time effects

1176: This extra stereo bus can be used when a track might need extra bite, thickness, and vibe.

In Brauer’s setup, each bus is processed with specific compressors and/or EQs and these processors are calibrated exactly the same way for every mix, hence the idea of creating a template. In addition to these four mix groups, Brauer multi-compresses his lead vocal with 5 aux channels, each of which contains a unique compressor. These can be mixed and matched with the uncompressed vocal to create a special vocal tone for each section of a song. I’ll give you some calibration tips later in this article.

Each of the A, B, C, and D bus processing applies slight compression and tone-shaping to its tracks, which provides a sense of movement for the entire subgroup. The different groups provide a variety of tonal and dynamic options. The same goes for the vocal compression channels—you could have the vocal be looser, cleaner, and more dynamic in the verses, and tighter, more distorted in the choruses. This is easily achievable using the multiple vocal buses with automation.

[Amberwolf]

Wierd...somewhere in the last few edits leading up to the previous export/upload, *all* the busses were somehow set to feed the hardware out. I don't even know a way to do that on purpose except one by one, and I definitely didn't do that.   Fixed by referring to a previous save version easily enough, but...weird.

Also fixed the awkward placment of hte cliff jump / start of flight effects.  I thought I had it down, but when i listened to it today, it sounded terrible, where i had had to alter the music around it, especially the lute part.   So I reverted that section back to original, and moved the jump back a few measures and it fits MUCH better there.   

So the new version:

07-24-25:  071825 000001 000109u -- Fixed program failure (all buses mysteriously set to hardware out instead of chains they had been in) and fixed awkward placement of cliffjump / start of flight.

https://amberwolf.bandcamp.com/track/the-last-flight

 

[steve@baselines.com]

Nice work on this.  It flows very smoothly.