Hey, y'all!
For those interested in listening to my mastered version of the Sirius XM Broadcast of Dave’s solo performance that aired on April 16th, 2021, I've uploaded what I worked on (similar to what I did for the previous Dave solo “Live At Home” broadcasts in 2020 and the recent SPAC ’04 show, although this particular broadcast sounded really good already, so what I’ve done here is subtle and focused on small enhancements because it didn't need anything drastic to get there).
In this paragraph, I’ll highlight what I did during the light and tasteful mastering process in case you’re interested in that stuff. (If you’d rather go straight to the link below to hear the files at this point, though, all good!) The volume in the original files I worked on was good and loud, so my process didn’t include making it much louder, and the sound quality of what was broadcast was already very nice - my purpose for this mastering was just to nudge it even more in that direction and focus on cleaning up a few key areas. I applied a bit of dynamic EQ to clean up some of the frequencies and even things out (particularly to tame some of the boominess in Dave’s guitar at certain points), brought some clarity and detail to Dave’s vocals/guitars and a pleasant sheen to the high frequencies, created a bit more stereo spread to open up the sound, applied a splash of reverb to compliment what was there and help fill out the room sound a bit, and added the tiniest bit of limiting. Dynamics are still very much in tact, and I did zero "slamming”, so you can turn it up nice and loud and it will still be pleasant on the ears. Again, what was broadcast already sounded excellent - kudos to the engineer who mixed this before Sirius aired it!
Real quick note: As with the other “Live At Home” broadcasts, Sirius didn’t really let the end of each song finish playing out naturally before playing the audio from the next request video. Taking that into account, there’s very little (in some cases almost zero) time between the song ending and where the next fan's request audio began playing, so here’s what I’ve done about that: I laid everything out and did quick crossfades between songs so that it has a back-to-back-to-back live performance feel as much as possible. On the songs where they did leave a few seconds of natural song ending space before playing the next fan request (like "The Maker", thankfully, which was an absolutely stunning performance), I left those decaying notes in there until the last possible nanosecond. In cases where they ended the audio almost immediately at the end (like "Break For It"), I simply moved into the next song at the latest possible instant before they cut it, so there’s no weird silence or audio drop. ("Break For It" was such a rad performance with Dave doing looping, by the way - so cool!) If they had left more time at the end of the songs for the music to fade out naturally, I assure you I would have let the songs breathe a bit more before starting the next one so they would not be right on top of each other, but I’m working with what they’re giving us, lol. Just a heads up about why some songs are so close together.
LINK (Dropbox):
https://bit.ly/3n0jkgU
There are two folders - one in WAV format (I’ll keep those up for a little while until I need to claim the space back for any other DMB related mastering projects I might tackle down the road), and one in High Quality MP3 format for those wanting to listen on mobile (which I’ll keep up even longer than the WAVs since they are smaller files). I also saved the band's Instagram post about the show and used that as the artwork for the MP3 files, but feel free to use your own, of course.
Note: I appreciate this community so much. It’s really cool to have a place to talk with like-minded people who appreciate this band’s music like I do, so I enjoy working on these little mastering projects to share with y'all whenever I get the time to do so. I hope whoever wants to hear this enjoys it!