Chapter 436: Four and a Half Hours at the Limit

Chapter 436: Four and a Half Hours at the Limit

“Twenty-five hours?” After a beat, Yu Xiaohu genuinely assumed he’d misheard.

“No. Five hours.” Wu Chen smiled.

“Five…” Yu Xiaohu’s face froze. His expression went blank, the look a person wore when shocked beyond measure, or when hearing something they couldn’t bring themselves to believe.

He didn’t even get the words “five hours” all the way out before turning to An Menglan.

Their eyes met.

She looked the same: lips slightly parted, face blank.

“Five hours” sounded so offhand, as if Wu Chen had simply tossed out a number.

Both of them knew every step that went into making an album, and Yu Xiaohu had already squeezed the schedule as tight as it would go.

Earlier, in the studio, the two of them had talked about how fast Wu Chen had turned out the digital single “Genius Superstar” the day before. Yu Xiaohu figured Wu Chen must have some way of going faster.

That was one of the reasons he wanted to hand Wu Chen the producer’s chair.

To rush the schedule.

To go faster.

But in Yu Xiaohu’s mind, however fast Wu Chen was, he would still need at least a full day, twenty-four hours, and even that would take everyone working alongside him without sleep or rest.

Faster than that?

Five hours sounded as absurd as someone claiming they could get fat from a single bite.

No matter how fast you went, there was still a process. Even if every stage went flawlessly, five hours wasn’t remotely enough.

“Uh… Mr. Morning Mist, what I meant was…” Yu Xiaohu recovered, speaking slowly, gesturing as he picked his words. “I’m not saying we should lower the album’s quality, or cut corners somewhere, or rush it through… just to get it out as fast as possible. I mean…”

“I understand.” Wu Chen smiled. “The quality won’t drop. Five hours… is plenty.”

“Mm… then…” Yu Xiaohu hesitated, dragging the word out, and glanced at An Menglan again.

For the first time, he felt a twinge of regret. Maybe making Wu Chen producer wasn’t the right call after all.

Not because he begrudged the producer’s chair. Once he’d decided, he wouldn’t regret it on that account.

Nor was speed the only reason he wanted Wu Chen in the role.

There was a second reason, and it was actually the more important one.

The sensation.

Right now, online opinion was attacking Wu Chen from every side, on an unprecedented scale. The uproar had reached fever pitch and stayed at a rolling boil.

People questioned his character. His arrogance. His talent. And every song on An Menglan’s new album, lyrics, music, and arrangement, was his.

The moment the album came out, it would cause a sensation and reverse public opinion.

On top of that, if Wu Chen were also the album’s producer… it wouldn’t just reverse opinion. It would settle the question once and for all and set Wu Chen firmly among the top figures of the Chinese-language music world.

The sensation would be greater still. It would stun the entire Chinese-language music scene.

Yu Xiaohu wanted the biggest impact possible.

The bigger the sensation, the more heat An Menglan’s album would carry on its official release. It really could become a case of Wu Chen’s buzz carrying hers.

A fine plan.

But now Yu Xiaohu genuinely regretted it a little, purely because Wu Chen’s “five hours” sounded so wildly unreliable.

An Menglan saw him looking at her. She hesitated too, but not for long.

“Let’s do it. Teacher Morning Mist, I’m counting on you.”

In that moment, one could say An Menglan had made a blind choice.

She didn’t think it could be done in five hours either. She entrusted it to Wu Chen all the same.

“Then let’s get started.” Wu Chen smiled and checked his watch again.

1:47 p.m.

He raised a hand in a small gesture and headed into the studio, and the others naturally went in with him. Once inside, he clapped twice.

Clap! Clap!

“Thanks for your hard work, everyone. You can all take off for now,” he said.

The dozen-odd people in the studio turned around, looking lost. They looked at Wu Chen, then at An Menglan and Yu Xiaohu.

“We don’t need you for the moment,” An Menglan said.

“Everybody out for now,” Yu Xiaohu said.

No one knew what Wu Chen meant to do, but if he was the producer, he called the shots.

“Leave the computers and equipment,” Wu Chen added.

Soon everyone had gone except An Menglan’s assistant, Liu Jing.

Time to get to work.

In the first hour, Wu Chen had An Menglan pull up the “Wu Chen–recommended” demos they had recorded earlier. He separated the tracks on the computer, extracted the clean vocals, handed them to Yu Xiaohu, and sent him to the rehearsal room next door.

As Wu Chen arranged it, Yu Xiaohu would have the band play along to An Menglan’s singing. The same accompaniment as before, but her vocals carried emotion, and that would help the band find it too.

He gave Yu Xiaohu two hours. In two hours, he wanted accompaniments for six songs; six, because the first song’s had already been finished.

He didn’t insist on flawless. He just wanted final versions in two hours.

At the same time, he had An Menglan re-record vocals for six songs over the demo accompaniments.

At the same time, he sat at the computer in the control room, listening to her through monitoring headphones, and started on part of the post-production…

Starting post right away was something only Wu Chen could do. They were his songs to begin with. His mental stat, over ten thousand, let him remember every detail of a song’s production.

He could only do part of it at this stage, of course, such as adding non-instrumental effects: dripping water, wind, camel bells, and so on. He did it against the demos; later he would separate the tracks and remix, and that would be that.

In the second hour, he kept An Menglan singing while he kept typing. Monitoring headphones on, his attention split two ways, he even had her redo several songs, “Queen” among them, more than once.

She couldn’t tell what was wrong with her takes. Wu Chen could.

In fact, she was in poor shape today. She hadn’t rested properly in days.

In the third hour, Yu Xiaohu brought the accompaniments: six songs’ worth. He wasn’t entirely satisfied with them himself. They were all played on real instruments, better than any synthesized backing, but to him they were still missing something.

By the time Wu Chen had them, An Menglan had finished re-recording the six vocals too. Those were also missing something…

Wu Chen went straight to mixing and moved formally into post-production.

Up to this point, Yu Xiaohu could more or less follow. Not chasing perfection at every early stage wasn’t necessarily a problem; if the post was good enough, the result could still be perfect.

But the most tedious part of any album was the post-production.

Across the industry, post-production times varied. Some albums spent years in post; others wrapped in a week.

Years didn’t mean the work truly needed years. It was a matter of habit: no urgency, endless demands, work constantly paused and shelved, dragging on for years.

Normally, though, even a top professional team needed about seven days to finish post on an album.

But!

It took seven days because the post team had the power to make changes, not the power to make decisions. Working on the masters, they had to add whatever effects were needed while also handling vocal correction and other fixes.

After vocal correction, the producer would usually listen and decide whether more changes were needed, sometimes taking the singer’s opinion into account.

It was an endlessly repetitive cycle.

And any time the team fixed a flaw, they had to spend ages fine-tuning it again and again in pursuit of the best result.

Broadly, post meant optimizing the source audio, removing flaws, balancing levels, adjusting EQ, correcting vocals, and so on… every step demanding a great deal of the ear and of musical sense.

Now Wu Chen was doing all of it alone.

He held final say himself.

They were his songs to begin with, and his musical perception and memory exceeded human limits.

So every step of post, every vocal correction, every adjustment, every added effect, he only had to do once. Every fine tweak, every tiny change to a value, took him a single try.

The accompaniments were missing something. An Menglan had been only middling.

He fine-tuned all of it, listening and adjusting as he went. The tweaks were so slight that once he had made them, even he couldn’t hear that they’d been done in post. No one else could have either.

The fourth hour.

The fifth hour.

Wu Chen spent both on post-production.

He sat at the computer, keys rattling, mouse clicking, flying through shortcuts. Some adjustments went so fast that to everyone else the software merely flickered on the screen; before they could tell which tiny value he’d changed, he had already jumped to another window…

6:15 p.m.

In the recording studio.

Wu Chen clicked the mouse one last time. When the progress bar finished, he glanced at his watch, pushed the keyboard away, and stood.

“Done. Give it a listen. If you don’t hear any problems, release it tonight.”

Finished.

He had said five hours. In fact he had needed only about four and a half.

The remaining half hour was set aside for An Menglan and Yu Xiaohu to listen.

They looked at each other and saw in each other’s eyes an emotion neither could have put into words.

Could this… really work?

How could it possibly work?!

How could post-production done by “tweaking whatever he felt like” possibly match an album made the normal way?