This is a bit tangential from the ongoing Zaion developments so I thought it'd be more fitting here in the general thread, but this section in the document has been making me think about how putting so little care into the group music projects is a missed opportunity, and makes the whole thing feel cynical.
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The song in question is this:
Recording music remotely is not uncommon at all, a lot of mainstream artists do this especially if there's a guest vocalist, but there needs to be co-ordination between everyone involved to make all the parts fit together seamlessly. Handing out lines to six new hires who don't know what each other sound like to record individually at home is a gamble that hurts the final product.
Hold it Down's... okay (apart from some of the harmonies not quite landing and the not-Corpse Husband shit sounding out of place), because the heavy instrumentals bury the weaker vocal recordings, but Niji's previous group debut song, Let's Get it Started, has far more noticeable issues:
This one
should be a strong pop song, but the production issues are noticeable enough to be distracting. It sounds inconsistent from line to line - performance-wise, Ren sounds confident on mic likely due to being a musician in his PL while Aia sounds like she's holding herself back a bit, and on a technical level Aster's and some of Kyo's lines feel overly filtered making me think the producer was trying to disguise lower-quality recordings.
I always felt the production on this song was off, but seeing that section of the document and assuming the Iluna recording process worked similarly makes it easier to understand why the song feels so disjointed. The part about them rejecting the recordings until she had someone clean them up in post makes me think something similar happened with Aster and/or Kyo's lines, since background noise reduction is a process you need to handle carefully - if you don't go hard enough noise will still bleed through, but if your settings are too strong it'll eat into the vocals themselves and damage the quality of the audio. If they didn't really know what they were doing and handed over incorrectly-treated audio then the producer putting the track together wouldn't have stood a chance of making it sound good.
In the interest of fairness, Hololive English also had some issues in the early days - Myth's Take Me Home, Country Roads cover sounds similarly poorly-coordinated, with Calli and Kiara's lines at around 1:40 in particular really clashing with each other. This is something I think all of them have complained about at one point or another because they would have been able to deliver a much better product had they been better directed, rather than just asked to record takes of the song separately from one another.