• jon@schemawound.com

Subsonic issues

Last week I was preparing one of my contributions for SIGNALVOID.  Looking at the waveform of the track it did not look right.  There were parts where the whole waveform seemed to bump upward, almost like an intermittent DC offset.  

Obviously this was causing problems with normalizing to a nice loud volume.  Considering the compilation is meant to be 60 second tracks played on random, it seemed important to ensure I got the track as loud as I could.

It may have been due to the fact I was trying to complete the mix in the middle of the night but for some reason the true issue eluded me.  No amount of compression or other tricks would smooth it out.  

Eventually I was struck by how simple the issue was.  Subsonic frequencies were to blame for the strange looking waveform.  

I set a brick wall high pass filter for 20 Hz and like magic I had a clean waveform to start working on.