Completed Track - Akari
We have choonage!
Fresh from the mastering house, sounds brilliant. Our final mix was keen but the skills of someone who understands the genre and can polish our little gem tipped it over the edge.
I see lasers, strobes and hands in the air.
props…releasing this anywhere?
Sent out the promos/demos last night. Literally arrived in my inbox just before I headed off to work yesterday morning, so after dealing with all that we spent a few hours last night hitting everybody up.
I enjoyed it. Gl with reaching listeners. I’d definitely be proud to put this in a set with my name on it.
interesting that you sent demos with it mastered
Top notch track!! Not really my style for playing out, but I would definitely have it in rotation on my iPhone.
Total cost was 55 Euro to have it mastered by the Dutch mastering house that does the work for a lot of the labels we are pitching it to. See Recommend a good mastering service? for all the guff about mastering.
Compared to our own efforts with multiband compressors, EQs, limiters and the general mastering kit (and between us we have 25 years of experience in music and audio production in various genres) we are so chuffed with the result.
Things we noticed about getting a proper mastering job done : mastered version retains the energy and parts balance of the original mix, but has the reduced dynamic range one looks for in a polished product, desirable bass is more pronounced without the “woolly”, muffled sound one gets from a dodgy mastering job, peak levels in the song don’t result in a “wall of sound” effect where it’s just pure noise - we can still hear individual parts in the tune.
I really like it man. Not the kind of genre I usually listen to but I enjoyed it. I’d definitely have some of that in a DJ set.
My only criticisms are that the kick in the first 32 bars sounds kind of flat? Idk if it’s just me, I usually do have a preference away from techno kind of kicks, but if it’s supposed to be like that then all good.
The other isn’t so much of a criticism as much of just a note because of course there’s no truly written laws on the subject. Talking about the length. I think it would have been far more effective to shorten the intro a lot and also the second chorus anyway. But still that could be just me.
All up, it’s awesome!
make a nice warmup track. a version with a harder edge would be very cool for later in a set.
agreed on the kicks at the start and not keen on the kicks/snares throughout tbh, but overall very nice.
i’d mix that into a set if u did a harder remix of it.
320?
great track! i really enjoyed it man
Thanks so much for the great feedback.
The comments about the drums and the intro length are interesting. We went back and extended the intro after a few days of using a mix with some other stuff. We figured that people can either use the full length or skip forward a bit if they don’t want it.
Another thing is that when I spent 18 months away from production, focusing on DJing I found that all my previous productions were horrible to mix, so the structure of this tune, including the length of the intro is based on some general conventions we’ve observed over lots of mixing and analyses of various tracks.
And a harder mix? Well… we’re working on another track that is dirtier and harder - we used to be really into hardcore and hardhouse back in the day but this track felt like it had to be nice and cruisy.