The final week of the project has been spent putting the finishing touches to the soundscape with things such as last minute sound effects, mixing and mastering. It has been a hectic week but I feel reasonably happy about the finished product, it could have been a lot better if certain ideas had worked out and I had used recorded drums on certain parts but the sound and samples I have aren’t too bad. The mixing stage this week went well despite a few problems with certain audio samples of the old speeches, to solve these little problems I applied a high-cut to many of the parts to make the quality slightly better, yet to still hold the authenticity. The way I mix is to go through the whole piece and change things slightly as I go, I then keep repeating this process over and over again until I am happy, this is opposed to the other method of listening to certain sections at a time. I listened through the whole  piece as I think it ensures that the transitions between each section are as smooth as possible and this is how the listener will listen to the track anyway. My learning of this method came from mixing an EP in my second year of the course and I thought that it was the easiest way for me to work so I applied the technique to the mixing on this project. I kept some headroom on the master track when mixing to make sure I could push it up if needed in the mastering stage, this technique was taught to me by Ian Shepherd in a lecture at university and I have done it this way ever since when mastering.

At the mastering stage I brought up the mids of the overall track slightly and applied some gentle limiting before I bounced the track to listen to on certain devices such as my iPod, laptop and in my car. Doing this ensures that the mix sounds good on a range of different speakers and if there are any problems I can go back and fix them before submitting my final piece. On the first bounce I realised that there was a phasing issue which had to be sorted out, I went back into pro tools and brought up the phase scope plug-in to help me fix the issue and I then bounced the piece again. Once I was happy with the overall soundscape I got it ready to upload to blackboard in time for the deadline. After 11 weeks I was very happy with my project but there were some minor issues that could have been done better, these will be listed in my next blog post.