Technical notes from Statik:
These 2 Special Edition releases started from a fairly simple idea…to see what mixing our songs in 5.1 Surround would be like. Little did we know what a journey that simple idea would take us on.
A lot of our songs are very dense, and I always wanted to try something that would really spread out the sound, and let listeners experience the songs in a completely new way. In order to make true surround mixes, I had to bring up the songs in the studio, which at this point was easier said than done. Most of these songs were started before the idea of mixing “in the box” or just on a computer was possible. Technically, some were started on a Mac Clone running Studio Vision Software, and later transferred to Pro Tools, and sometimes ADAT tapes. At the time they were then mixed out to a 32 channel console. These were mixes that I couldn’t just press a button and bring up. I had all of the main audio tracks transferred into my computer, in a Pro Tools Session, but there was still a lot missing! Most of the effects weren’t there, and all of the various mix routing, levels, and a lot of what I had going on in the mixes was no longer available to me. I wanted to keep everything that really made these songs special, so after buying a couple of new Digidesign Cards, and an old interface on Ebay, I was able to get my 20 year old computer running with a 20 year old version of Pro Tools. This enabled me to bounce down the missing tracks and effects, and see exactly what was going on in the original sessions. At the time when we made these albums, just buying huge hard drives really wasn’t an option, and having lots of tracks play at once from your computer was a major ordeal. It was a lot of work to get all of the tracks into a new format that I could work in, and I believe that the whole process made everything sound better in the end. I now had the sessions in their complete format, and I was able to run the audio through much better converters. Besides just being able to mix the songs in surround, I really started to think that most of these new (stereo) mixes were sounding better than the originals. So we are including the new stereo mixes, as well as the new surround, and instrumental mixes on the Blu Ray disc. For those that want it, of course we included all of the mixes included in the original CD release as well.
While we were on this path, of retrieving all of the files and songs, we went through all of our ADAT tapes, old reference CDs, and old Pro Tools Sessions that we had. Luckily we were pretty good about keeping everything. As we are in the song writing process, songs (of course) go through a lot of changes. In going through all of these tapes, and sessions, it was really interesting after so much time has passed, to hear early versions of the songs, where kaRIN has totally different lyrics, or lyrics that are still being worked out…or where the music was mostly there, but far from its final polished form. I know that (for me) versions like these are always interesting to hear, especially for songs that I really know and like.
The other great part of going through all of these sessions, was running across songs or song ideas that were never finished. It was great to be able to work with these ideas from so long ago. I was able to bring these into my current set up and give them all new mixes! We kept all of the vocals as they were though. It was like finding bits of audio treasure.
Finally, as all of these mixes were getting finished, we really had to think about the best way to release everything. CDs are fine, but it would have taken 5 or 6 cds to fit everything for each release!! and even then, of course, we couldn’t have put the surround mixes there, and the audio specs of cds, are lower than we were mixing and recording in, and we wanted everyone to really experience these albums in the best way possible. Although DVDs were another option, the Surround Mixes would have been compressed, and we still couldn’t fit everything we wanted to on a single DVD. So the best option for ultimate sound quality was Blu Ray discs. Although Blu Rays never took off, they are still around, and playable in dedicated players, as well as Playstations, and X-Box machines. The amount of audio that is able to put on a disc, and being able to have it in high resolution, uncompressed audio, in both stereo, and DTS Master Audio for surround sold us as ultimately the best sound experience that we could offer!