Thursday, December 29, 2011

"Dear Friend" - Mix in progress

A month or so ago I posted a blog about mixing "Dear Friend."  Here is an updated video of the mix in progress describing some of the details of the changes to the opening of the track.  This song was started around 2003, and the first version appearing in the video was what I completed at that time.  Originally, it was created entirely on an ENSONIQ MR-61 synth, and a video demo of that keyboard including the opening to this song is in the video annotations.  However, the "finished" mix was polished up using SAWPro.  When I began to get songs ready for a new CD I wanted to include this one, but I also wanted to update the piano sound to a newer KORG sample that I was using for most compositions since then, as well as tweak the mix a bit with my current DAW of choice, Reaper. I found that while I still had all of the MR-61 MIDI files, I no longer had the SAWPro edit lists or associated WAV files, so the ending of the song that I had initially created was no longer available for importing into Reaper.

My first goal was to simply recreate the original ending in Reaper, but I was unable to do that to my satisfaction and ended up making an entirely new ending based on the opening of another mix of the song I had created in the years between.  After making a new ending (which I liked better than the original anyway), I found that I needed to adjust the opening of the song as well to make it more at home.  This video shows some of the changes I made.