novelraw Chapter 15 Lin Shishi goes to her appointment late at night without makeup
Chapter 15 Lin Shishi goes to her appointment late at night without makeup
Lin Shishi did not hesitate.
"Okay, send me the address."
He hung up the phone after saying that.
Song Ze stuffed his phone into the pocket of his shorts and patted the dust off his hands.
Li Guobin was the first to explode.
He slammed his hand on the table next to him.
The coffee cup jolted, spilling most of the brown liquid.
He pointed at Song Ze, his finger trembling.
"A duet? Get your facts straight!"
Li Guobin raised his voice, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down.
"Who do you think you are? What level is Lin Shishi? You're just a celebrity who recently got into trouble, and you think you can summon someone with a single phone call in the middle of the night?"
He turned and stared at Zhang Juan.
"Letting her sing 'Liang Liang' would ruin her. Are you Xingyao Entertainment just blindly following suit?"
Zhang Juan's face was pale, and she gripped her bag strap tightly, without saying a word.
Top-tier female singers have their schedules booked a month in advance.
This studio was added temporarily tonight. If the musicians don't show up, the studio rental fee and the musicians' overtime pay will all be wasted. She doesn't dare to even think about it anymore.
Song Ze ignored Li Guobin.
He pulled up a high stool from the side, sat down, his legs slightly apart, his posture very stable.
"Director Li."
Song Ze flicked a small piece of debris off the side of his ear.
"She's already on her way."
He gestured with his chin toward the heavy soundproof door of the recording studio.
"After she comes in, will you repeat what you just said to her face to face?"
Li Guobin opened his mouth, and his Adam's apple bobbed again.
He could flaunt his seniority in front of Song Ze, saying he was muddle-headed, had a rough foundation, and didn't follow the rules.
But he didn't have the guts to point fingers at Lin Shishi in front of her.
That's the platform's cash cow, a top female singer with a huge fan base.
He swallowed hard, swallowing back most of the words that were about to come out.
"Alright, I'll wait here. Let's see what kind of Lin Shishi you can summon."
Twenty minutes later.
The sound of high heels clicking on the floor echoed down the corridor.
One beat at a time, the rhythm was very steady.
The soundproof door was pushed open.
Lin Shishi, wearing a white suit and carrying a small chain bag on her shoulder, walked in alone.
No assistant, no agent, no one was with him.
Zhang Juan was stunned for a moment.
She really came. One phone call, one person, even her makeup and hair were just like any other day.
Li Guobin jumped up from beside the mixing console, his earlier red-faced and furious expression instantly vanishing.
He strode forward, a smile plastered on his face, and gave a slight bow.
"Shishi's here. You must be tired. Xiao Song didn't handle this matter well, making you go through all this trouble so late."
He tried to take over the conversation and regain control of the situation.
"I just told him that this song needs a major overhaul. Don't worry, I'll personally handle it and rearrange it completely. I guarantee it will be a hit as soon as it's released."
Lin Shishi nodded but did not reply.
Her gaze passed over Li Guobin and landed on Song Ze in front of the control panel.
At this moment, the pulley rubbed against the floor, making a short, sharp sound.
Song Ze got off the bar stool, pulled out the ergonomic chair for the main control room, and sat down.
He placed his feet naturally on the crossbar below the mixing console and tapped the blank engineering area on the screen.
"Stop talking."
He interrupted Li Guobin.
"Director Li, you said before that I have a rough constitution."
Song Ze rested his hands on the keyboard and mouse.
"I'll tell you tonight what something that isn't rough looks like."
He didn't look at Li Guobin. His left hand was typing on the shortcut keys, while his right hand was dragging the mouse, and the sound of keystrokes rang out rapidly.
"You can't cut the EQ of the bass drum like that."
The mouse cursor drags out several control lines on the frequency band curve.
"The frequency band around 40Hz should be preserved; that's the fleshy texture of the bass drum. If you cut it off completely, the bass drum will only have a thin layer of skin left."
He opened the compressor plugin.
"A compression ratio of 3:1 is already the maximum. If you go up to 8:1, the dynamics of the kick drum will be completely compressed. Without dynamics in the kick drum, the breathiness of the whole song collapses."
He glanced at Li Guobin.
"How can a singer sing a song without any sense of breath?"
Li Guobin took a step forward, his face turning pale.
"What nonsense are you talking about? I've been a music arranger for over a decade, who do you think you are—"
Song Ze did not give him a chance to continue.
He turned back to continue operating, retrieving several tracks of Chinese traditional musical instrument sounds from the sampling library.
Bamboo flutes, erhu, and guzheng are stacked one on top of another at a very fast pace.
"This song is an ancient-style OST, meant to have a melancholic undertone, not nightclub electronic music."
He pushed the fader on track 8 up a bit.
"The string soundstage should not be crowded together. The high frequencies of the guzheng should be placed on the left, the bamboo flute on the right, and the entire middle should be reserved for the lead singer's vocals."
He tapped the sound field diagram on the screen.
"Soundstage avoidance. Instrument frequencies don't clash, so vocals can stand out. This is a fundamental skill in mixing."
He spoke calmly, but his hands never stopped moving.
Zhang Juan leaned against the wall, her legs feeling a little weak.
She stared at Song Ze's fingers moving on the mixing console with its fifty-plus tracks.
The skill with which those hands worked was even more adept than that of the post-production director the company had hired at a high salary.
This is not the kind of skill a celebrity who has just had their career ruined should have.
Li Guobin's lips moved.
He stared at the few waveforms that had been meticulously broken down.
He spent several years figuring out the techniques for processing master tapes before he even got the hang of it.
The equalizer's Q value setting, the inflection point of dynamic compression, and the limiter's release time were all perfectly adjusted by Song Ze with a simple flick of his wrist.
A thought flashed through his mind, but he immediately suppressed it.
Impossible. He's been doing this for over a decade; it's impossible for him to be inferior to a nobody in his early twenties who hasn't even properly studied musical notation.
Lin Shishi stood behind the control panel, motionless.
The Song Ze who fawned over producer Wen Ziliang in the restaurant to get a free meal was like a completely different person from the man sitting in front of multi-million dollar equipment giving orders.
The former was obsequious, with a fawning smile on his lips.
The latter stood upright, and every word he spoke carried certainty.
These two images collided in her mind, and she couldn't make sense of them for a while.
Song Ze pressed the space bar.
The prelude, now fully mixed, unfolds from the monitor speakers.
The bamboo flute's tone comes first, cold and clean.
Immediately afterwards, the guzheng's strumming spread outwards like ripples on water, layer by layer.
The bass drum steadily supports the entire soundstage in the low register, providing a rich yet not dull sound, with each stomp carrying a downward force.
The images of joy and sorrow, separation and reunion in the world of fantasy, the cycle of three lifetimes, the death under the peach grove, and the reunion in the peach blossoms, all transformed into concrete musical notes at this moment, filling the entire recording studio.
The arrangement has a very clean texture and distinct layers.
It doesn't have a trace of the artificial, overly-applied electronic feel found in Li Guobin's revised version.
After the intro finished playing.
Song Ze took off the headphones hanging around his neck and placed them on the mixing console.
With a snap.
He turned his chair around, looked at Lin Shishi, and pointed to the glass door of the soundproof cabin.
"Go into the shed."
Lin Shishi did not hesitate.
She pushed open the glass door, walked into the fully enclosed recording booth, picked up the dynamic microphone hanging on the stand, and put on one earphone.
The sound-absorbing cotton in the soundproof cabin swallowed up all the noise from the outside world, leaving only her own breathing.
The two sat facing each other, separated by the bulletproof glass.
Song Ze pressed the button on the intercom microphone.
"Put away that aloofness you usually show on variety shows."
His voice, delivered clearly through the earphones, entered Lin Shishi's ears without any room for negotiation.
"This song is about utter despair."
He released the button and his finger landed on the play button.
Lin Shishi closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
The intro started playing again in my headphones.
She opened her mouth, ready to sing.
At that moment, Song Ze's phone rang on the mixing console.
The caller ID displayed was: Wen Ziliang.