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Come one, come all. You've all been invited to a special behind the scenes exclusive to explore and understand the thought processes and decisions that led to the finished album that you've been enjoying. We'll take a look at how the art team approached the amazing vision for the design of their artwork and understand why it ended up working so well. Then we move on to Gulliver who explains how he tackled the wide range of dynamic content and made it sound cohesive as an album. Finally I will wrap it up with some of the obstacles we faced as well as my approach to the track order. You'll really feel like you were one of the members working on the team that was making it happen. So let's get started shall we, first up is the art team giving us a peek inside their collective brain with an amazing attention to detail. Grab your drink and meet us in the viewing room

Audio Sexed Album Artwork Project​

Next up is Gulliver filling us in on how he worked that musical mastering voodoo and made it all work together:

And finally I will delve into a peak inside some of the difficulties we faced and a few decisions on what inspired my track order to keep that flow going to it's ultimate climax and the ensuing aferglow:

So how would you handle 24 tracks in disparate genres and make it sound cohesive? It might seem like an easy task but let me tell you that it really wasn't. There were problems that complicated matters even more along the way, For example this project started off with a set deadline after which no more tracks were supposed to be entered but after the original team manager walked off the project for personal reasons a few weeks before the submission date arrived I was forced to delay because I would need time to regroup and find a new team manager and make plenty of other adjustments to keep us on course. Submissions ended up being delayed about 2-3 times due to other concurrent projects, moderation, bugs, giveaways, support, personal matters and that meant that I couldn't start the order until that day which also meant that Gulliver couldn't start on mastering until I was done. No pressure or anything.

Just the track order was a huge project and I can't even tell you how many different aspects I considered to make it a cohesive whole, I guess that's why it came out sounding so well. I was going to prepare a walkthrough of that but I didn't feel it was particularly interesting like the excellent job the art and mastering team did, just my vision for the project and how I created a framework and built on it marrying together genres through considerations of tone, energy, message, mood, how each track started and concluded, the theme of the album as a whole and many other factors. I imagined it as a journey with peaks and troughs, how would I travel? How could I give meaning to the journey? I hope you liked my "route". I knew right away the position in key areas of the compilation that certain tracks had to go, once I knew those there were less possibilities to consider in the same way if you're using a certain progression there are only so many options for notes that you're going to use for your melodic lines. Really I felt pulled in arranging the order this way as if I had traveled these roads before. I had grown accustomed to these songs and the ideas and people that spawned them and I wanted to do them justice.

Really everyone did such an amazing job the scope of which still wakes me up screaming at night because let me tell you that a lot of thought was put into all of this from the artwork, the judging and the music to the order, mastering all the way to the physical release which I just looked over and made some final changes on with Andrew and Gulliver. If anyone along the way didn't pull their weight this would have never come to pass so thanks to everyone involved. It was really my honor to work with all these amazing people in making this come to fruition and I hope we can work together in the future on something. In the meantime while most of us take some much needed rest there are many developments underway at AudioLabs. Stay sexed because things are about to get quite interesting as we catalyze that energy we have going and a few projects explode on the horizon.

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This is such a fascinating insight into how the project developed and how it came to fruition. The great team effort and individual skills that each person had really stands out in all of this, and I love reading about what decisions were made and how that affected the album.

Incredible work by all those involved, huge thanks to everyone.

 

wow what internet can do......

thank you

 

Fantastic !!! Thank you for the insight
Thanks to all evolved.
I hope to have enough time to participate to next album.

 

Well done again Cat!

That was very interesting to read.

Now I can't wait for the next thing :dancing:

 

Most excellent !!! Really enjoyed reading this.

 

Big thanks for the insight!
I can totally feel what you were up to.
Years ago, I used to collect, select, order and heavily post-process demo tracks from vastly different rock bands for CDs included in a rock magazine appearing quarterly.
These were times where you still had DAT machines and a CDR master recorder that alone cost half as much as a new car.
It can really be a hard task to make a whole CD sound consistent, with source quality of the songs really ranging from badass to almost studio quality (Certainly much worse than in this project :-P)

But it's so rewarding when you manage to get a good result and then you hold the final product in your hand.

Now let the musicians tell their stories

Thanks again to all involved, this is really a fantastic project.

 

Wow! Amazing everyone!

 

The long hours, hard work and cohesive teamwork is oh so evident in the final product, and you can all take a bow with a dozen curtain calls for this incredible performance. Well, well done.

 

Good read Cat, and one that a lot of people can learn from. It's like playing "wack a mole" sometimes with the situation you described. A LOT harder then people think.

 

Will Audio Sex start a record label next

 

Thanks everyone again I'm honored to have been apart of this especially so early in my musical endeavor. such good talent here on the album and the forum.

 

I really, REALLY dig the artwork, too! Fantastic!