This is what happened right now:
The Master
Once the mixes were complete by late-CW-47, Tonmeister Christoph Stickel started pretty much right away. A version 01 was ready by Sunday evening for me to listen to, and after a day of listening, I was able to provide feedback, such as:
- track spacing did not account for the organization in sections,
- the sound (EQ-wise) appeared too much „Vanhalen-II-y“,
- that mighty Sapientia Salomonis wasn’t loud enough.
Version 02 had fixed almost all of that beautifully with the exception of the Sapientia Salomonis thing. Then I thought to myself: so far, I had discussed everything with Christoph from a UX/musical experience – with the exception of that SapSal thing, where I used „macrodynamics“ and „LU“ to describe my goal.
So I phrased it differently: I wanted those ff and fff passages to sound unpleasant („unangenehm“). That was the goal from the extramusical narrative, after all. And with that, Christoph provided version 03, and everything was nice.
He then proceeded to do the proper due diligence and went on to create the production (per)masters by today.
And that’s perhaps the most important milestone on the path to a minimum viable product (that is still great) complete:
With what I have now, I will be able to release a perfect-sounding album on Christmas Eve.
Next Steps
Waiting for the visual arts preprints to complete (aiming for „early this week“, i.e. hopefully tomorrow). Then commission the vinyl production, add visual arts to the digital downlad – and wait for Christmas!