Mixing “Useza”

Nothing in the world sounds like matepe.

Anyone who has ever heard this sound live will never forget it. Experiencing how Sekuru Chawasaria suspends the flow of time in his living room, or sitting between the Zonke Family maestros on their veranda have been transformative moments for me.

That “bleating” sound of the middle range keys. The wild, sometimes almost atonal, bass lines – as that what gets tuned to the scale are not the bass key fundamentals but their overtones, which in turn create illusory patterns that never cease to trick your brain, even after you learned playing them yourself.

It was always my dream to have a matepe recording that comes close to what you hear when you are on the spot.

I believe that one reason for the relative obscurity of matepe music is in fact a lack of good recordings. Hugh and Andrew Tracey’s field recordings captured fantastic music, but the vast amount of rapidly played notes often gets lost in the noise of the buzzers, and you end up hearing little more than “chord strumming”. Joel Laviolette’s Chawasarira recording from the early 2000s is a pretty much the only exception, and has once opened a door for me.

First mixes

When I received our recordings from Samora, I asked my friend Amaury Groc, a former-life sound engineer, if he would like to work on them together. Not only does he have experience, good taste, a genuine interest in the music, and judgment I trust – he also had a lot of expensive audio plugins and just been investing in a new set of very nice studio monitors. 🙂

Our goal was to turn the matepe in the recording into the best version of itself, to bring out every note, without adding anything artificial, hoping to convey some of the effect the music has when you are in the room with it.

We don’t use any reverb on the album, except to keep the voice from sounding completely dry. The mbira sound consists solely of boosting and cutting frequencies, albeit sometimes quite sophisticated.

We frankenstein-ed a balanced sound from the room & close mic and pickup channels of the two mbiras, and discovered that compressing the close mic brings out a lot of natural reverb from the deze. We quickly got addicted to that spacey, almost electronic “head in the deze” sound that defined our first mixes.

The Nyege Nyege guys apparently liked it, too, and the fact that they wanted to release the album motivated us to keep trying to get the best out of the recordings. Plenty of time, too, as they had so much in the pipeline that they needed the premasters not before Nov. 2024.

Iterating

We were generally unhappy with the undefined, somewhat wobbly, deep bass – and especially with Kuvachenjedza, Sekuru’s signature piece on which he plays a lot of cool variations. Unfortunately he played those on the second matepe that was sounding much less smooth, and the mic placement on that particular take had been far from optimal either.

We kept meeting once or twice a month to work on another bunch of songs, and most of the time, it was like three steps forward in some aspects, one backward in another. Sometimes we even realised that went in cycles, or lost track of what we had done, so eventually we started taking notes of all changes.

A real breakthrough came when Amaury got a new room treatment for his studio, a custom-made set of diffusers and absorbers. What a difference in clarity and precision! It revealed that we had actually overcompressed things, and we discovered that the undefined-bass problem was actually caused by a phase cancellation issue.

Over the course of a whole year and ten to fifteen versions for each song we had learned a lot and arrived at mixes that we were really happy with – except for Kuvachenjedza and Dimbotimbo.

Rescuing Kuvachenjedza

It was maddening. Of all things, Sekuru’s ‘flagship song’ just didn’t sound good! The wonderful Nhetete patterns were practically inaudible, lost in the buzzing. No way to EQ this.

Exactly at that time, Leo Batuki went on a recording trip to Mozambique that we had organised, and then back to Harare for our project presentation concert. He agreed to join Sekuru to his home right after the show, in order to record Kuvachenjedza again. It was already past midnight, and they worked almost until morning. I had to wait until his return to Germany to get the takes, and then it turned out that the recordings were less exciting than ours – obviously, Sekuru had been too tired.

I was desperate. The notes in our recording were there, just too low and no way to bring them out. I started researching new tools. Melodyne didn’t work (apparently the simple yet irregular harmonics of mbira keys give it a hard time), then I downloaded a demo version of SpectraLayers to see if there’s some way I could directly fiddle with the audio spectrum.

And indeed, after a bit of experimentation, I figured out that simply doubling/multiplying the fundamentals of the nhetete notes improved things a lot, although it is just sinusoids. As the plucking noises were there, just the tonal component too low.

Only the “smart” selection tools for selecting notes by similarity didn’t work at all, so I ended up spending hours selecting and copying every single note into a new layer that I then could export into a separate file for mixing on top of the song.

Tools

Here’s a list of tools we used that proved really helpful for mixing mbira:

• Ableton Live – The transient and warp markers in audio clips make it easy to replace (short) problematic sections of recording with patches from another cycle of the song.
• Eventide SplitEQ – An EQ plugin that allows you to equalise transient and tonal parts of a signal separately. Great for taming harsh metallic plucking noises without affecting the rest of the sound. Unfortunately rather pricey.
• Oeksound Soothe 2 – A tool to dynamically suppress resonances in an audio signal. Think of hundreds of very narrow-band compressors. Great to counteract the sometimes very uneven amplification of certain frequencies by the deze, without statically removing the whole frequency band from the mix. Also can help to tame buzzing to some extent.
  Pretty expensive, too, but for Ableton Live there’s a free/name-your-price alternative called Boba, that works not quite as smoothly, but fine.
• Steinberg SpectraLayers – Great for emphasising notes or remove problematic frequencies and noises directly in the spectrum.
• Empirical Labs Lil FrEQ – A very musically sounding equaliser plugin modelled after a hardware unit. Amaury’s favourite EQ. The user interface is ridiculously hardware-like.

Some lessons learned [again]

• When using mics and pickups, check the phase alignment of the tracks even if everything sounds fine at first.
• When producing many versions, keep a diary of changes
• When A:B comparing, double check each time that you’re really exactly at the same RMS volume. Things may sound SO much better, and SO much more detailed while they’re in fact just 1.5 dB louder.