2026-09-17
Dear You's Score: Mixing Stems and Reusing Melodies
Music mixer Wang Yu described Dear You's guitar cleanup, virtual-string adjustments, and avoidance of frequency clashes with dialogue. Music director Li Yihan recalled melody reuse on a limited budget and the choice of song versions. This production retrospective follows different responsibilities as music moves from stems toward the picture.
The music mix was not the final mix
Wang Yu received stems from the composer and checked them against picture and production sound. She adjusted tone, level, dynamics, and space track by track. Her responsibility was the music mix; using speech as a reference did not make her responsible for recording dialogue or balancing every sound in the film.
The completed music then went to the final mixer for integration with dialogue and effects. Wang distinguished balancing musical parts in time, frequency, and space from the broader work of balancing the film's different sounds against its images. Preparing the music and integrating the complete soundtrack involved separate responsibilities.
Recorded guitar and virtual strings needed different work
Most of the score Wang handled used software and sound libraries. Guitar was the only live-recorded instrument in the score production she described. That does not mean the film contained no other live recordings, vocals, or production sound. She described removing noise from guitar recordings made in an imperfect recording environment.
With virtual strings, she repeatedly adjusted effects to improve layering and realism. These were different tasks: removing unwanted noise from an existing recording and refining the presentation of a software instrument. Wang's account describes the particular materials she handled at the music-mixing stage.
How Wang grouped and balanced instruments
Describing a passage in the film's second half, Wang said acoustic guitar opens the cue, with strings, flute, and other winds joining as it develops. She grouped the wind and string stems, adjusted their relative levels, and raised both groups at the climax. The example distinguishes the instruments entering the passage from her work organizing and balancing their recorded stems.
For this multi-instrument example, Wang also described frequency adjustments to reduce masking. Raising the level and keeping parts distinguishable involved different tasks. In her separate explanation of the general workflow, she described preparing music to avoid frequency clashes with dialogue. That broader practice uses speech as a reference; it is distinct from balancing musical parts against each other in the cue example.
Choosing melodies and song versions
Li explained that a limited budget encouraged reuse of a main melody with changes in tempo and instrumentation. His three examples were Shurou carrying a banner on the old stone bridge, the reading of a qiaopi letter (平安批), and the final meeting where the two grandmothers reach out to touch the kapok flower.
Separately discussing the choice of a song version in the interview carried by Southcn, Li recalled humming and recording a melody with his guitar during a break while scoring an earlier film. Only later were lyrics added and the song named 《海风的旅程》 (Hai Feng De Lv Cheng, in pinyin). After repeated listening, the director's team preferred the spontaneous humming in the first demo, finding it a better fit for the picture. The film used that recorded demo, which preceded the completed lyrics and song title.
Cues, tracks, and the post-production calendar
Wang described more than thirty score segments, roughly one to five minutes each, and nearly a week of music mixing. Li's interview mentioned twenty-seven original score tracks and four theme songs. We retain those different units rather than combining them: a cue's appearance in the picture and an individual musical work are different things, as the examples of melody reuse illustrate.
Discussing completed songs, Li recalled replacing them in batches after story changes and reshoots, with their fit to picture as the reason. Separately describing the score's post-production timeline, he recalled adjustments continuing until April ninth and seeing the final cut for the first time the following day. The first point concerns song replacements; the second concerns the end date of the broader score work.