Quarantine Music Collabs - Production in 2020 and Remix/Remaster in 2024

Read on to listen to the tracks - they're at the end of the text.

Back in 2020, when the first lockdown happened in Istanbul, me and a group of friends decided to record music together. However, because it wouldn't actually be together, I recorded the piano parts, sent them to my friend Etkin Celep who recorded the main guitar parts, we added drums, and then sent this file to people we wanted to feature on the project.

We managed to produce two of these songs - a cover of Heart Shaped Box by Nirvana, and a cover of My Heart Will Go On by Céline Dion.

I mixed and mastered both of these tracks, and we released them as videos on the school media society's YouTube channel.

Below is the 2024 mix and master of Heart Shaped Box, and below that are the original videos released in 2020.

Here's what I did differently, four years and two degrees later:

A better mix. Obvious but necessary, my previous mix was made in a very "guerilla" way, which isn't necessarily a bad way to do things - unless you have no idea how to do them properly. I threw a random mix of compressors, EQ and free effects I found online to every single track, and kept playing with the levels until the master fader wasn't clipping anymore. I then threw the whole thing into a free, online "mastering engine", which made it sound louder - or so I thought. Once you listen to both versions, you'll realise how quiet it actually is, and how ineffective my initial mix was.

When I opened up the project in 2024, the first thing I did was getting rid of every single effect, every instance of automation, any EQ settings, practically everything except for the tracks and their positionings.

One of main regrets from 2020 was not giving enough emphasis on the bass, which was beautifully played by Nuri Çelik of SPARK, an Istanbul-based rock band. I changed this drastically for my re-mix, and made sure the bass had enough room to do its thing in the final mix.

Next, I fixed my insane overprocessing of the three guitar solos at the end. My thinking was to have all three of them sound completely different, and, for some reason, like they were on a stage. I remember the starting point for this was that one of the guitars was recorded suboptimally, with distortion and a weird sound character, which led me to think outside the box to fix this. I have since regretted this decision, and to redeem myself I took a brand new, unheard-of approach: leaving them alone.

I cleaned them up a little bit of course, but I turned my focus on equalising their levels and smoothing out the transitions, as well as their placement in the mix. They had to make some way for the bass too, which wasn't a major problem once I dialled down the "LOOK THERE'S A GUITAR SOLO" approach.

Before the finale, between 1:09 and 2:01, the whole piece goes into a softer, "orchestral" section without actually having a full orchestral element except for solo flute and solo violin parts (the latter of which I had to recreate with MIDI due to the way the violin was recorded - I sincerely apologise to our violinist).

There is also a MIDI brass section which wasn't present in the original project. I wanted to include it in 2020 but decided against it as the mix was getting too complicated and we wanted to get the song out as soon as possible. I had more time now to reflect and figure out a way to do it in a classy way, also filling in any "empty" space.

One thing I am still not happy with and didn't have an option to fix is my own piano section. I didn't have access to any proper recording equipment in 2020 so the piano sound you hear is taken directly from a Canon 250D camera pointed at my piano at the angle you see in the videos. As you will also be able to see, the piano lids were open - which made it sound louder but didn't help with the audio quality. I added some compression and spent a tremendous amount of time with the EQ to make it sound as full as possible, which helped a bit but it still sounds flimsier than I would've liked.