Not all days are difficult in mixing land, and some actually produce results.
Yesterday for example things actually went rather well. I started a mix on a new song, and again I am finding the PSP vintage warmer and Block Fish to be ultra valuable on the drums. I should be more accurate and say, on the drums when I finally get some decent drum sounds.
On this song, I have some non-standard drum sounds, some electronic percussion from the EA-1, and some regular drum sounds. I spent maybe an hour and a half trying, in vain, to make the XL7 snare, kick and hats sound decent to me. In the end, I just couldn’t do it – the snare sounded flat and the cymbals just were awful, like little hissing bits of white noise, no matter what I tried.
Finally I bit the bullet and decided once again to break out Battery. Of course, I had to clone all the midi tracks, and break them up more, so that all the instruments are on separate tracks. I thought I had already done this, but so much for me being consistent in my work habits….
Anyway, once this was done, it was fairly quick to pick a decent drum kit and rerecord all the drum parts.
Next I decided to get more organized and moved all the tracks like this: bass drum, snare, hats, hats2, rides, crashes and then bass line, all the synth lines and finally the vocals. This is what I like to do on the songs, in order to see what the heck I am doing more easily. Of course, in lots of my songs not all the drums come in at once, but I still find it easier to work this way.
By now, its pretty familiar to me: squash all the drums - although I try and use the aux sends to conserve on CPU power, I always seem to end up using different compressors on every channel. Then I add reverb and/or delay and whatever effect on them. Its amazing to me that some compression will actually seem to make the sounds more, not less distinct, especially in the case of hand drums but also snares, depending on how much I push it. Of course, if I crush it too much, the snare can start to sound like a trash can, but sometimes that can be useful too. Basically, I want to hear everything loud and clear before I move on.
I always try and give myself room to experiment too. In this song, I am running a plug-in called SupaPhaser on one of the drums – it gives a deep, somewhat boomy sound, which nicely serves to accent the fact that I am running three snares at once on this section.
Once again I find that the synth sounds from the XL7, which were recorded thru the ART TPS II are so full sounding I don’t have to touch them. Nice!
Now onto the voice. One thing I have done on the last couple of tunes: I always record the voice in mono, and then I duplicate the track and apply different treatments on each track. In this case, I had run the same compressor on each vocal track, but on one I added reverb, and the other delay. This is not what I normally used to do, where I would run delay feeding the reverb on a single track. I still like and use this technique, but in this case I found that running them on separate tracks made it sound a bit more transparent, but still “bigger”, moving my voice back but not indistinct.
This song has a flute, but that turned out to be pretty easy: another compressor, lightly, and then the Bionic delay – I just seem to use this on everything, since it just flat works. I ran some verb on top, using the Glaceverb plug-in. I don’t seem to be able to get the S.I.R. plug to work on my new machine, and don’t have a ton of time to be able to figure out why. You make it work with what ya got.
The other day I drove myself crazy trying to get a particular vocal effect. I was going to copy just the refrain from a song and make part of it sound a bit spacey I guess you would say. I totally failed at that, but I had better luck today.
I did the same process, copy the vocal onto another track and wipe out everything but the refrains. Then I keep trying one after the other effect. Finally, I thought about using Reaktor as an effect – after all, it has a ton of them in there.
After much experimentation, I found the sound I was looking for: a sort of twisted delay with lots of movement. At that point, I was able to just use the Sonar mute tool to mute out the portions of the refrain that I didn’t want effected.
In short, I got a pretty good mix in about four-five hours. I really can’t complain about that!
A somewhat eventful week.......
I spent several hours with my old friend and band mate Jeff Rees listening to lots of middle eastern/electro music and seeing what we liked and didn’t like. You may recall Jeff has been playing for many years with Gypsy Caravan, the belly dance troupe started by his wife Paulette. Jeff was a bassist when we met and played together back in the 80’s but he now plays a host of ethnic wind instruments, mostly from the middle east, and hand drums. We were getting together because Jeff wants to expand what he does, he knows about my electronic music interests, and wants to incorporate that into something new with me. Cool!
So we drank some wine and checked out a ton of music and I got a better idea of what he is trying to achieve. I think its right up my alley, different than what I am doing on the CD but still well within my boundaries. It was good, I heard some great new stuff and am enthused about this whole project. Jeff seems to think we can sell come CDs and make some good music along the way, I’m all into that. Tuesday we do some listening back at my shack, so it’s a new beginning, which is great because while being in your own head and having control over everything in your music is wonderful, its not the same thing as working with someone else. And Jeff likes practically next door to me, knows a ton of other musicians and – well, its new and exciting.
Which is exactly not what mixing is. I seem to go thru endless levels of mix anxiety – am I applying the right efx, are the levels really correct, do I actually still like the songs after 1 million listens, am I still satisfied with my vocals…………..its a hot mess.
Let me be more specific: now that I have fallen in love with compression on the drums, I seem to be able to get better drum mixes easier, especially if I am running samples thru Battery. But I start to second guess myself: am I just squashing the life out of everything in the quest to make it “loud”?
I took over some songs I had just mixed to Jeff’s house so I could listen to him on his monitors (those Alesis Monitor Ones, not that good from what I have read but better than my Radio Shack powered ones) and I was pleased it actually sounded OK, and not crappy. So I think, I am heading in the right direction at least. That is, until last night.
I am working on the vocals in a song, and I realize that at one point I should do some trickery with efx to highlight a certain passage. I actually find something that works, using one of those off the wall Ohmboyz plugs, but for the life of me I can’t seem to get it to work just when I want it to work, on this one chorus.
I go thru chopping out the phrase and try and run all the same processing on it but its not the same at all. Then I try a lot of other tricks, none of which work at all. Very, very frustrating and I wasted 45 minutes on it. Finally today when I came up the elevator at work I may have figured out a way to do it, by recording the passage onto another track – I will try that when I get home. But my god it took the heart right out of my mixing for the night. And people do this for a living?
Over all, I am least confident when treating my vocals, I don’t know why but they seem to be the most troublesome. At least with the instruments, I don’t run much in the way of efx on them, except to compress and maybe the reverb. With the vocals……………well, I am tempted to do nothing or everything, I have a hard time just doing a little bit of sweetening. Why is that? Am I secretly afraid of how my voice sounds? Am I afraid it won’t sound “professional” if I don’t have some clever little bits of things done with my vocals? Vexing, vexing.
I have at least gotten the XL7 to work as a controller for mixing. Its pretty easy to assign the 16 rotary knobs for pan or volume, its just a little harder to actually “play” them while the song is running to do a mix. Hopefully I will get used to it at some point, seems a much more natural way to do things, than with the mouse.
The score on the door is: 4 songs mixed or at least sort of mixed, 4 new ones to mix and a couple that were mixed before. And I am less than a month away from when I need to be done, so wish me luck!
To beat or not to beat
Now I am actually to the part of the operation where I am doing the initial mixes for the project. I started with a song that features some unusual percussion, by which I mean not a standard drum kit, and lots of modulations on the drums.
I went thru my usual procedure, by just doing a mix on the bass drums first, then the other percussive elements. Part of the problem is that I have what four? different bass drum sounds, and they are somewhat all over the map, what with the modulation and the panning.
What I realized at one point is that, unlike any of my other songs, there is no snare drum at all. This became apparent as I did a quick mix of another song that had a “real” drum kit in Battery. In that song, all I did was use the PSP compressor, and almost instantly it sounded just great. Of course, I am going for the real drum sound there, so that makes a big difference.
This raised a concern with me about the original song I had been working on, since if you listened to them one after the other, the song with the Battery drums just sounded so much more powerful. Thus I spent some very unproductive time last night trying to sex up the drums on the song with the unusual percussion. Long story short, it just didn’t work well at all. After listening to it again, later in the evening, I think I have decided not to add any more percussion on this song. Its not like it is at a loss for drums by any means, not just the standard sound drum kit. After all that was what I built this piece around, the different sounds of the drums, so why should I change it?
I know that I should be looking to have some consistency on my CD, but one of the things that I seem to do on every song is start with a clean slate. I seldom use the same synth sounds twice, although I have a fondness for things like a piano with a string section blended in with it.
There is not much consistency in how I record stuff either. Most of the synth parts from the XL7 go direct to digital, thru the preamp, and that works great, but the EA1, ER1 and DX200 don’t seem to benefit from this. And I don’t always record things like guitar in mono, sometimes its to stereo even though I don’t have a stereo mic. Call me crazy, but I can hear the difference recording a mono signal and copying to another track as opposed to recording in stereo from a mono mic.
In the song I have been speaking of I tracked all the guitar and sax parts in mono and then copied the tracks. I then mixed the tracks slightly differently, such as putting delay and reverb on only one track, and just reverb on the other track. Gives a spatial quality I think, not quite like stereo. Someday I hope to get out of the trial and error stage!
I also am always concerned with the amount of stuff I have going on at any one time. Right now I am listening to a piece by Andrew Bird, and he has many fewer elements at any one time in his music than I ever do, and yet it works. Thing is, I don’t try and write complex music, it just comes out that way, where I have lots and lots of textures and elements coming at people every which way. If I am trying to be true to what I think is good music, I suppose I will just have to live with second guessing myself every step along the way. Not the fastest way to compose, for sure. Maybe my boredom threshold is just too high, or I have listening to operas or symphonies for too many years. None of those classical guys every worried about having too many instruments or sections, did they? Of course, they weren’t writing 4 minute songs either.
All during the process, I know I will keep saying to myself, as I can’t find the right software plugin, if I just had that other piece of gear (like a UAD-1 or a decent set of monitors for instance) that I would be able to get the sound I want. But it just isn’t going to work that way. Any money I am saving up has to go towards the manufacture of the CDs, not towards more gear. I hope working hard makes you smarter, cause that is what I am having to do. And I have to remember that 20 years ago, I couldn’t do this at home at all, and even pretend to get record (remember those, before CDs, they were black and shiny……) quality in any sense of the matter. So, back into the breach my friends, until I have more mixing stories to impart.
I was trying to write this a few days ago, but life is so hectic now! Between having to work all day, spend time studying, tend to the garden (and eat lots of fresh artichokes in the process) and have time with my sweetheart, it seems like the day is 20 hours too short. In spite of that I have made progress.
This last Monday I finally finished all the recording for the CD. I did the vocals over the weekend, and with great perseverance and some luck polished off the last flute solos on Monday night.
I must have spent an hour and a half before I had a decent idea for the first four bars of the solo. From there I built it up piece by piece, like a long slow thought. Such is the case when your ideas outstrip your technique. One thing that was interesting to me was that at one point, I broke into a famous riff from a cha-cha hit song from when I was a kid. I don’t even know the name of this song, but if someone listens closely to the song “One Life to Live” when the CD is out, they will hear it.
This reminds me of my friend Scott that I haven’t seen in maybe 15 years. Back in the day, I played with him in a couple of bands. Scott was a really talented guy – solid pianist, excellent rock bassist and best of all, could play the crap out of a cornet. And he never needed to practice any of his instruments, he was that good. They call it gifted.
We were in a band called Piglatin, an avant-jazz band that featured a talented poet sort of speaking/intoning what I thought was good poetry, a bassist, a couple of percussionist that played found percussion, things like shopping carts and railroad ties, and Scott on cornet and myself on alto sax.
It was a great off the wall band. Whenever we played at clubs, we were so different than any of the other bands on whatever bill we were on. Its was really fun, people got off on it, and I only had to bring my horn.
Since much of the music was on the jazz tip, Scott and I had plenty of room to do solos, trading licks in the best punk-jazz tradition. I know, you didn’t think there was a punk-jazz tradition. Maybe we made it up.
Anyway, Scott and I got into this thing during the improv sections where we would both spontaneously start play theme songs from cartoons, sometimes TV shows but mostly cartoons. It was amazing. I have never before or since played with anyone in any band where I would start riffing and Scott would answer and it would just build and build and build, almost like we had one mind.
The only problem was the Scott was a junkie, although he denied that he was an addict since he didn’t hit, he just smoked it. Yeah, right. What this did was make him very unreliable.
After some time, it just got to be too much and it fell apart. Damn, whenever I think about it, I miss it and I miss him and maybe sometime I will have that feeling of being really really in sync with another musician, but somehow I don’t think it will ever be the same. At least, at least I know what its like. And I’m thankful for that.
Well, so you are saying, what is this about the CD? OK, just a tidbit: I spent some time last night working on the first mix, and I had one of those, oh shit moments where I wasn’t sure that I liked what I had done with the song. There is so much to think of with mixing, since the tone can change so radically with efx and compression and I found myself thinking, oh my god this sucks what the hell am I gonna do????
Somehow, I believe that I will probably endure many of these moments in the next month or however long it takes to complete. But I am not rerecording anything, not messing with the arrangements that it took me so long to complete. I guess in some sense I will never be totally satisfied with any piece of work I do, or only satisfied for a brief period of time. Push push push – that is what its all about, and even in the mixing I have to try and move myself and my concepts of sound forward. Evolve or die. I guess if it was easy, I just wouldn’t do it. I hope the end is worth all the means, I hope I move into a new plane of music making, live music, and yeah, selling my music to people that like it. Doesn’t seem too much to ask, does it?