I have been taking a break for a bit from the blog, there has been so much happening that there wasn't time for this.
I have finished the 120 Ways song.........that is what I thought anyway. It has become clear now that I am in another bit of gear binging. After a long and protracted discussion with Jay at Your Music Forums, I finally bought a preamp, and ART TPS II. I have been thinking about this for some time, off and on, mostly when I have to crank the mics so far up as I am recording something.
Finally I take the plunge and its pretty good: I now have more control over what I record, which is really a novelty for the synths, since up till this time I just hit the record button and let it rip. Now that part of the process has become much more interesting, especially when its combined with some of the techniques that Jay laid out here - so I won't repeat that, but I will say that technique is really kind of a revalation to me.
Also should mention that my friend Cass remixed this song, which you can get here
Its a stunningly better mix, and some of that - not by any means all of that - is due to the better equipment Cass has in his studio. But as always I must emphasize that gear does not equal talent - Cass has great ears and lots of experice, and it really shows. Makes my original mix sound like soggy cereal!
In reference to 120 Ways, I have rewritten the snare drum part and changed the sample I have been using. One thing from that link I will say, I have started recording all the drum tracks in stereo - much, much fuller. In fact I went and re-recorded most all the tracks on this song, so I am not quite done yet. I may ask Cass to work his magic on it again, since I just don't think I can get those kinds of results myself.
Other upgrades: I have been saving for a year to buy a new computer to run Sonar 3, since I was told that my box wouldn't cut it. Long story short - not quite true. I still needed to upgrade the RAM, but at least for the present time I think I will be OK on the computer I have now. And the longer I wait to upgrade the computer, the better one I will be able to afford. Can't wait to get my new sequencer!
I was also blessed with the gift of a copy of Reaktor from Native Instruments, you know? This thing is just killing my time, I find myself staying up way too late getting lost in the odd noises it gives off. Plus it has made me interested again in sampling, so much so that I am getting a copy of Kontakt, the NI sampler, and Battery, the NI drum sampler. I think I will be going crazy now.........
So is it all chasing my tail? Is the upgrade cycle endless? I think abou this technological aspect of my musical obsession in a slightly different way than the physical instruments. Although I have had for instance several saxophones in my life, now I just have my beloved Martin tenor; while I may lust after a soprano or an alto, I never need to shop for another tenor sax again - haven't needed to since what? 1985 or something? So that is a comfort, like having an old friend lives close by that you can visit as often as you'd like.
I suppose its all just aspects of the same thing - no matter how you can make music, the important thing is to keep progressing, keep advancing your thinking, keeping the creative flame alive in your brain. Cause I can tell you with a straight face, once I quit being creative, I will quit breathing.
Last night I had the wonderful sensation of actually finishing a project. It pains me to think how long this took, but life gets in the way, does it not? You can download this song by going to the songs page on this website and clicking on the link for 120 ways.
This was the third mixdown attempt on the song. The first, which I wrote about, ended up being not so hot - the drums were OK but the efx on the vocals and the horns.....not good the next day. And the bass was boomy too.
The second mix was better till I mastered it, and then I hated the drums, especially the hats, which sounded hideously tinny.
I do try and do things the traditional way, make the sounds sound right first before I do anything else - I really don't like to use EQ afterwards if I can help it. It really eats up my CPU too.
Since I had decided to drop the echo, I first rearranged the Aux sends. Compression was still in #1 but I moved the reverb up to send #2. I also changed from the Kjaerhaus Classic reverb to another freeware verb, the rgcAudio reverb. I have used this a ton of times, its simple and I just think it sounds good. Bad news is, its not available anymore on their site - really a shame.
I did try the mighty SIR reverb, but a sound just didn't come out and grab me so off it went.
With that done, the vocals were coming together pretty nicely, but the reverb I choose for the vocals was not good for the drums. I played around again with lots of reverbs, but ended up using the CakewalkFX reverb - not something I usually do but there was a nice preset in there - medium warm drum room - that did the trick.
Now I have pretty happening vocals and drums but the bass was still just to thumpy. I tried lots of things, but I finally inserted a Sonic Foundry Track EQ, and rolled off everything under 80k - boy that does work! May not be big news to all you skilled mixer folks out there, but it did wonders for me.
Now the snare, with all this other mixing, sounded OK to me but a bit flat. I decided to use the Analogic delay that I have mentioned before, and just a touch did all sorts of nice things to the snare. This was in the end of the FX chain.
One last bit of effect was to make the refrain trumpet have a bit more depth and length, and once again the Analogic Refrain, as an insert, did the job. You gotta like these freeware plugins!
I exported the whole thing as a stero wave file and it was pretty good, but there were still a few volume tweaks that I had to make, seems like its easier for me to do this when I am just listening to the stereo mix and not looking at the tracks in Sonar.
Finally I did the mastering in Ozone3. I have been using T-Racks for some time, but now I feel Ozone is really a superior product. Plus you can get other users presets off their websites, and I actually used one of them for this mix.
I know that mastering is an art and a science, and I should take more time with it - but hey, I'm just a 51 year old punk and all I know is what sounds good to me or not.
As always I would love some comments on this song, and I want to give a big shout out to all the good people that have been reading this blog and helping me as I finished this song.
In Sonar, it says this song took 36 hours, 51 minutes and 18 seconds with 464 revisions. For me, it really was like two months work.Maybe I obsess too much??????
The next step: finish the other songs for the CD. I'm sure I will find plenty to write about that too!
Where I actually get down to mixing
First off I played this for my #1 person who I am married to, she of the good and critical ear, who pronounced it 'fantastic'. No small feat this, because if you have read this stuff you will know that Barbara never ever will tell me that something is good if its not. Painful sometimes, but I wouldn't have it any other way. The only thing she said that could be improved was a general comment about how she didn't think I was really letting go with my trumpet playing, that I was a bit too restrained.
Actually, part of this is justified. With my current set up, if I use the good large condenser mic, I have to really back way away from it or play a little softer, otherwise I run the risk of overloading the audio. Until such time as I get a better front end to record with, including a compressor, I am stuck with this. And to be honest, this song does not call for some huge blasting solos, its not that kind of song.
As I was listening to the seperate tracks prior to mixing, I noticed that some of the digital stuff from the XL7 that I recorded prior to moving the audio card around did have some little aritifacts - or pops if you will. OK, so now at least I know that there were bad things on there, even from the digital outs from before I solved the IRQ problem. They were just so low that without really listening I couldn't hear them. Fortunatley this was easy to fix, so I spent some time re-recording the bass and a couple of other parts that had some problems.
Next I played around with the horn to see if I could get a better solo on the bridge, since the rest of it is fine. For the life of me, I can't seem to get something better down; to be precise, even tho I am playing the solo correctly on the first 8 of the bridge, I am not happy with it. Conversly the second half of the solo sounds just right to me. I am toying with the idea of only having the horn on the second half - a bit weird, but actually kinda cool, since it a) eases you into the bridge section more gently and b) the horn then has more impact.
I am not certain yet, but am tending to go with this.
Onto the mix itself. With the computer resouces at my disposal, I can run up to a maximum of four aux busses, or four insert effects, whichever comes first. Typically, as I am doing here, I will only use the busses, since this gets me effects on everything that I want. I end up using a compressor, followed by delay, followed by reverb, and lastly an eq. Not standard I guess but that is my thinking now.
Before I get into the details, I won't lay out the many combinations of plugins I tried, its just too long to mention. Unlike many people, I tend to use different plugins on each project - maybe I am just fickle.
The compressor I am using (as is the eq and the reverb) is a freeware thing from kjaerhusaudio, and these are excellent tools. I tend to not need anything too fancy here, used one of the presets and just adjusted it a mite for what I need. I end up using this in varying amounts on the kick, snare, and acoustic bass.
I am using the Bionic delay from the guys at Dub Scrolls and this whole site, as I have mentioned on this site in other places, is just a great resource. As is my custom, I run some delay on most channels pre-reverb. I am using this on the vocals, snare, trumpet.
After this comes the reverb which is pretty much on everything in varying degrees except the acoustic bass and the kick drum. One thing about not having much flexibiltiy is that at least the efx match up!
The last thing in the chain, and its only used on the trumpet, is an eq since I was not totally happy with the sound I was getting. The eq helps a bunch on this, and I think it works better post-efx in this case. Hey, maybe people do that all the time, I am not sure. Sometimes its good just to be a punk, even at my age.
I listened many times over and over, and did a lot of adjusting of volumes.
Something that I don't a lot of is having levels go up and down in the mix, either for volume or for efx send. I tend to think the dynmaics should be taken care of by how you play, except of course for the typical compression tricks that I take.
I do sometimes do more extreme stuff with efx, but mostly once I get things set I just let 'em rip. I really don't want to have things sound too compressed or flat.
Tonight I will do some more mixing, and decide on the trumpet issue. Then its onto burning a stereo mix out and then thru the mastering software. Again I don't want to get too fancy on the mastering, since I am well aware that you really can't master at home as you can at a real studio. If by some chance I start making money at this, I will think about the studio route. Of course, if I do start selling my CD well when it comes out, maybe I won't actually need to use a mastering house.
Hey, I can dream can't I?