Ok, here’s some numbers, some statistical, some interesting, some just…numbers

Track Lengths

If you remember, one of the original goals of the #secretalbum project was to work with short tracks – and “short” was defined as “equal to or less than 90 seconds”. As a reminder, here’s the link to some numbers from previous albums.

• Here, the average effective running time is 53.4 seconds. To put that in perspective: the average for Torture Garden by John Zorn is 37.5 seconds. The average of all my preceding albums is 401 seconds.
• The maximum is 89,
• the minimum is 16.

To accompany this info, here’s a little histogram:

Track Length Histogram

Musicians and Instruments

Another project goal was to work with many musicians, and to exclude myself from playing as much as possible. Let’s see how this worked:

• There’s a total of 17 musicians performing on 16 tracks (or 1.06 per track on average).
• The maximum number of musicians per track is 4 (Bottom Freezer), the minimum is 1.
• There’s 3 tracks where I don’t play myself.
• The maximum of different instruments per track is 5 (of course, this depends how you count…).
• The most-used instrument is synthesizer (appearances on 9 tracks).
• The bass-player group is the biggest (5) – this is shared among double bass (2), bass guitar (2) and synth bass (1).

Misc.

As promised, some odd numbers:

• the whole range of macrodynamics of the album is found within a single track: Mein Lieblingsmetzger has a macrodynamic range of >22dB – i.e. the loud passage is more than twelve times as loud as the quiet one.
• By the authority of WaveLab, the mixdowns have an apparent bit depth between 30 and 40 bit. Yes, it makes sense for you to get the 24bit FLAC files.
• The frequency range extends slightly below 30Hz.
• The way a DAW counts this, the most complex track is Wehtgetan with 82 tracks.
• In that realm, the most simple track is Halbwegs Leer (one double-tracked guitar).