Last night I actually had a few free hours to work on this last song and bring the drums up to standard. I blew off studying for my Microsoft test again – gad, the last thing in the world I want to do is study for this thing………again………………anyway…..
Yesterday morning, I woke up super early and had about 15 minutes that I could use to work on the drums in this song. As usual for me I fired up Battery and dumped a standard drum kit in there.
Also as per usual I started looking around in my midi drum files for something to base a beat on. Not that I am trying to sound like a commercial, but it seems more and more that I am using the GrooveMonkee midi files. I have lots of other drum midis, but for some reason the GM things just seem to be easy to find a groove that fits without searching forever, and when you don’t have a lot of time, every minute that you save is worth a lot.
I was really lucky that morning, as I found something within a few minutes that would serve just fine as the basis of groove that would work fine with what I already had from my drum machines. Many times the hard part comes with matching the existing groove exactly, so I spent a bit of time there.
This song does have a bridge section, and again I was able to find a couple of midis that worked well here also – hooray GrooveMonkee! And I should mention that even though I own a lot of the GM files, these particular ones (from the electronic set) I just downloaded for free from the site – doesn’t get much easier than that.
At that point I had to stop, since this getting to work thing was getting in the way.
I would like to digress here a bit and talk about loops as opposed to midi files. I used to use drum loops all the time, and I think I did some pretty creative things with them. Certainly with all the tools you have now, in the right hands drum loops are great.
For me however I find that using midi files just gives me a great deal more flexibility, since I am not stuck with the exact sounds from the loop, I can change individual drums in battery, or kits, with no work at all, and I can apply the effects after recording, and you know I am into effects. That way, once its recorded as audio, I can still do whatever I like on the audio side, just as if they were loops to begin with – but now I feel they sound like me.
So last night I was able to jump right back in and get to work. The method:
Start with making the midi files groove clips, extend them and make sure they line up with the existing material correctly. I think that this is maybe the most important first step. I am not a drummer, but I can really hear when the groove missteps, and it drives me crazy.
The next step is to start adding fills, flams, start swapping the drum hits around. I like to have at least a couple of different bass drums and snare sounds to play with. I use a combination of playing the parts in live on the keyboard and doing granular editing of the notes by hand in the sequencer. And I always try to think like a drummer (and I will pointedly not put any drummer jokes in here!). I want it to feel like a human is playing it, including the dynamics and all that.
Then I work on the exact drum sounds. In many cases, the Battery kits are so good, I won’t have to swap any sounds. In this case, the song is slow and after listening to lots of kits, found one that had a snare and kick that I liked. Funny, they are very dark and thud like, on this song, not a bright and amped up like I normally go for.
I did, after some messing around, replace a few of the cymbal sounds and change the notes they were playing on. After that, it was more of the same – close my eyes, listen to the beat (with just the bass and vocal) and keep adding and subtracting and moving things around. Its not like it’s a science, but I know when I have found what I am looking for.
After a few hours, I had the drums tamed! As it turned out, I opted to dump all the normal sounding drums from the DX200, although I kept the interesting percussion noises. In the same fashion, I dropped out a lot the ER1 drums, except again for the interesting electro noises. This gives the drum tracks a feel that is somewhere between acoustic and electronic, which is what I was after.
Now that I had the groove down, I was able to split the Battery drum tracks into their component drum sounds, keeping the like sounds (meaning both kicks for instance) on one track. Being a soft synth, dumping the sounds to tracks is easy.
And that’s when I ran out of time. All that needs to be done now is rerecord all the hardware synths to audio and mix.
A pretty good nights work, all in all.
Last night, I had a few minutes to listen again to some of the songs to make sure I am still going in the right direction with my mixes.
Some of the material is quite a bit older than others, in fact I listened to the oldest piece that is going on the CD. What I found was that with the way it was recorded, it sounded flat, dead lifeless compared with the new material.
Back then, I didn’t have the same work methods like I do now. The most pertinent example, I would just record all the drums on one stereo track and call it good. Of course, that is not conducive to making good drum mixes since you can’t mess with it after you record it, no discrete compressions on the kick, snare, all that.
I thought, OK, I have been down this road before, I can just split the tracks and rerecord them. That was the theory anyway.
I had the midi set up different when I did this song, so first I had to fix what interface was pointing where, and while that should have taken just a minute, I had some struggles and wasted some time there.
Once that was done, I spilt the Yamaha drum tracks, but they sounded funny to me, especially the hats. I discovered that for some reason I ended up with lots of hats copied, almost but not quite, on top of themselves.
Big suckathon that, since I had to painfully and slowly go to each duplicated note throughout the song and delete the doubled notes. Of course, they were so close to being right on top of the original notes I had to blow up the notes pretty large. Nasty and very time consuming.
More than an hour had gone by now, and so much for getting to bed early.
Next I tackled the ER1 drums, with the same splitting to tracks. This went much easier, but I of course am not out of the woods yet. Some of the sounds, in particular the handclaps, sounded dated and awful to me now (what was I thinking????) and will have to be dumped or replaced.
With all the splitting and moving of parts, not everything is quite where it should be, so I have to do some massaging of the tracks to get them where I need them to be (meaning whole sections needed to be moved). At least the groove didn’t die with all the shifting, that would have been awful.
At this point, it becomes obvious I have to add back in the vocal and horn parts, since I am only working with midi data, and the mix I was working from originally is just audio. Of course I have all the original parts, although with the vocals and trumpet I don’t have them all in one file each, but in takes of each part. This means more painstaking placement of parts.
I do naturally have the original mix to refer to so it shouldn’t be that bad to drop in the audio where I need to, and try and maybe even extend the song a bit.
Then I can start the real mixing, but I am going to make a bet that I will be using Battery once again to add some more drums, and make some of the drum parts more interesting. Most of the percussion on this piece is electronic, but somehow I feel the need for a real snare, and to make all the parts sound less canned. Even a drum machine can have soul, right?
This does set me back a bit, but this is a really good song and I don’t want it to be ruined by sounding poorly mixed and recorded next to all the others. I suppose this is the price I have to pay for getting better at what I do………..
Its all over but the shouting, I turned 52 yesterday, and I have a wee bit of a hangover……proves conclusively that you don’t get smarter as you get older. But I did do one smart thing, at least one, in my life and that was to finally marry the right woman. Barbara made this a great birthday weekend, even if I did indulge a bit too much....but I digress.........
So I might as well admit it, I didn’t reach my goal of having my CD done by my birthday. There are just not enough hours in the day or days in the week. In fact in the last week, I managed to have just two hours total that I could work on the mixes.
Not that the two hours weren’t productive – in fact, I found that I did get a lot done, working on the rough mixes and making them sound a bit better. Its interesting that I now can bounce off the general sounds of a newly mixed song against an old one that I am happy with. I think I have a much better idea of what I am going for now, and getting a better handle on the tools.
What is developing with my method is I am sure familiar to everyone: I find a few good plugins that I use constantly, and only if I can’t get the sound I want will I stray to some of the others in my collection. It really speeds thing up not to have to invent the wheel every time. For instance, I am finding it most excellent to record my vocals in mono and then copy the track in Sonar, sometimes with different effects on each channel. I find that I like the sound of “dual-mono” quite a bit.
Last year, I spent a bit of reflective time looking back at what I did musically for the year. I wasn’t going to do that again, but what the hell.
As seems usual for me, I took up yet another instrument, the flute, that I don’t have time to play as much as I should to get some sort of mastery. Still, when I look at the songs for the CD, I find that I am playing it more than any of the other winds I play. It must fit something inside my head. I am going to be very curious to see if other people actually will buy into me being a flutist.
The big thing this year was deciding at some point that I was going to finish my CD first before I got ready to play out live. Lots of reasons for this: for one, I need a calling card if I am supposed to try and get gigs, and the days of a three song demo tape are long gone for me. Its much better to have a real CD to give to someone that they can listen to once and toss, right?
A big part of this decision was to abandon my first plan on how to play out live. Initially I wanted to incorporate my ER1, EA1 and the DX200 along with the XL7, triggering midi patterns with the XL7 on the other synths. The XL is supposed to be able to do this, and after a HUGE amount of work, I got it to work maybe 80%, but never exactly what I wanted.
Finally I came to the conclusion that I was spending more time on tech stuff than writing music, so I just stopped working on that model. What I realized is that I could write the parts on any of the synths, record that using the best sound from any of the synths and then transfer these parts to the XL for playing live. After all, no one but me will know the difference, and with the XL having such a vast range of sounds, I can get something passable. In any event, many of the synths sounds come direct from the XL7, no problem there at all.
This liberated my writing to some extent, since I could simply write on the instrument I wanted and not worry about things like having enough voices on the XL, or if I was able to trigger the other boxes correctly, or have any mid problems, since all the synths are on their own midi connections.
Another big milestone was saying that these were the songs for the CD. Its really hard to stop, hard to say, this is enough. In my case, the job was made easier with my upcoming collaboration with Jeff, a good kick in the ass. I am still looking forward to playing live, but the idea of having someone else to write with again is most cool indeed.
So where is the CD now? I think I have finalized maybe four out of the ten songs, and maybe in a week or two I will have the other six. I am beginning to enjoy this mixing thing a bit, or at least I am now before I plunge into it again!
I have been investigating having the CD duplicated and getting all the prices together and all. I still don’t have the artwork, or what I am going to say for the liner notes, but at least I have a name for my record company now: Obcentric, which is a word I made up that is a combination of obscure and eccentric, which certainly fits me, don’t ya think?
I have to decide if its worth the money to join ASCAP, I mean, do I really dream that I will get some sort of mechanical royalties on this thing? I have to realistic at some point, and I tell you if I manage to sell 100 CDs my expectations will all have been surpassed.
Still…..you never know, do you? The only thing I can say with any certainty, here at the ancient age of 52, is that nothing will ever happen if I don’t make the effort to make it happen. Like the old song says, you cannot win if you do not play.
Have not had much time at all in the past week trying to get the mixing done, too much work at work and work at home. Twas ever thus....
Still, on Sunday night I was able to get back to it.
I got the free Audacity wav editor and ripped some songs from different CDs, to see how my mixes added up. This was before I did an mastering, just with the songs as they were.
What I found was that the commercial mixes were more compressed, at the least, then my mixes.
I ran one of the songs thru Ozone and just picked a likely preset and now compared. Actually, I thought my material sounded good, not exactly the same as the commercial stuff, but good anyway.
I shot off a couple of mp3s and got some very positive response from Jay at yourmusicforums.com. Really, is there anything better than having a set of trained ears that don't have anything riding of the result listen to your mix?
To say I was pleased with his response is so understating it. I felt like I was making progress! Ya!
One of the things I have been doing that has proven to be handy is the little spreadsheet I made to keep track of the songs. At least then I can tell what state a particular song is in, and what the solo instrument is. This will make it easier for me to plan the song sequence.
One of the things I thought I could count on was that I wouldn’t have to remix everything, especially the song 120 Days. If you have been reading this blog for some time you will remember the endless struggle I had mixing this song.
I thought I would pull it up just to take a listen and compare it with the newer songs and mixes I have been working. This may have been a big mistake, since it just sucked compared to the newer work.
One big difference is that I recorded all the XL7 parts before I bought my ART preamp. More than any other piece of gear, this is just a lifesaver for me when recording this synth. As I am sure to have mentioned, I usually don’t have to touch the synth tracks at all if they have been recorded thru this little box.
Just about everything sounded weak to me, except for the vocals and the trumpet. I didn’t start from scratch to try and correct the faults, but it was close.
For instance, the drums sounded weak. No matter how I tried to fix them, the sound was flat and lifeless. As you can guess, I finally ended up replacing the drums with Battery drums – but it took me an hour of messing around before I came to that conclusion. Of course I still had to process the drum sounds, but what a difference.
The acoustic bass from the XL seemed flat and lifeless to me too, could not get it to sound right even doubling it and compressing the hell out of it.
What came to the rescue was the Dimension synth included with the new version of Cakewalk’s Project 5. Normally I would use the string bass patch I have in Kontakt, and its great but just brining up Dimension and calling up the patch was much easier. Also, I was able to bring in a touch of tube warmth right in the Dimension patch, which really made the bass stand out. Most cool and easy indeed.
Finally I was making some headway, but what a dam long struggle! I didn’t want to mess too much with the vocals, but still I ended up having to double the main vocals and put a touch of compression on them.
With my trumpet, I found that using the Limi (which is a limiter, natch) from Cycling 74s freeware pack, Pluggo Jr, gave the horn just that bit of presence that it needed to stand out in the mix.
I am still not 100% happy with all the sounds, but short of rerecording all the synths I just don’t think it will get all that much better. Actually, its not like the mix sounds bad; it really feels much more like the rest of the songs on the album, and its important to me that there is some continuity in what I do, even if the songs themselves are very different from one another.
This morning, I was wide awake at 5:00 am and decided to give the song another quick listen – its pretty good now actually, but its hard to believe that the song that I struggled with for months had to be redone – either I am getting better with what I am doing, or getting more picky. Or both I suppose.
Some of the older songs are not all reproducible with the gear I have now, so I have to do with what I have. In one case, all the drums are on one track, along with the synths. I have the trumpet on one track, and the vocals on two tracks. Hey, just like a four track from the dawn of time!
What I did in this case was use three different compressors just to add some body to the sound. Interesting: the trumpet already has effects on it, and the compression makes the effects much more pronounced, really good actually. This makes the whole song work, and while not quite as clear and precise as some of the newer material, I think it will be OK.
Here is the score as of today: out of 10 songs, 2 are mixed and ready for a quick bit of mastering and they will be done. I don’t know if I will get this done by my birthday at this rate…….
Its Sunday morning, and I have just about recovered from my crazy long week. Most of this recovery has to do with me actually going out to see live music for a change, which is good for you.
A few weeks ago I saw that Meat Beat Manifesto was coming to town, with the Dub Trio as the openers. Years ago I missed my only chance to see Meat Beat as I left the club they were to play at before they took the stage. That’s a whole other story I won’t go into here, but suffice it to say that I really didn’t want to miss them this time.
I may not like everything that Jack Dangers puts out, but I have a few of his Meat Beat albums and no doubt the guy is hugely talented. A bigger draw for me was that my old friend and bandmate Mark Pistel was going to play with Meat Beat – at least I was pretty sure he was still with them, had not spoken with him in a year or so. Time goes by quick when you move away from San Francisco.
Mark and I played together in the early 80s in Social Fabric, a band destined for obscurity, but we did play a lot of shows and had some very crazy times. From the first day I met him Mark was not only an excellent bassist, but new lots about sound reinforcement, which is helping him still as he runs his studio in SF. Needless to say, he’s a great guy.
But lets go back in time a bit. The Meat Beat show was Friday, but earlier in the week Jeff called me and invited me to go to a show with Paulette and him and some Gypsy Caravan dancers (right, you know Paulette teachers belly dance, since you have avidly read every single line I have ever posted on this blog.) The other week when Jeff had been playing me stuff he liked, he played me some cuts by Ganga Giri, which is the first didgeridoo music I have ever heard that I liked.
This was supposed to be an early show, start time at 8:00 pm, which on a Wednesday night seemed OK by me.
I rush home and Barbara, who takes care of my soul as well as my body, had some quick meal for me, and I ran out the house down to the club.
Now I know that shows never ever start on time, so it was 8:30-ish before I got there into a totally empty club. Well, not totally. The warm up band, Luminous Fog from here in Portland, were doing their sound check. I didn’t see anyone else I knew, and after downing a quick beer for medicinal purposes only, bagged it for awhile but not before I thought, oh crap, an off nite and no crowd, how many times I have been in this situation, only much worse cause I was in the band!
When I came back Jeff, Paulette and some belly dancers were back. At least there were a few people in the crowd now.
Abut 9:45 Luminous Fog begins to play. There are a bunch of people in this band, and the suckers can really play well, its like a mixture of reggae, funk and some 70s rock/funk stuff that, as Jeff said, none of those in the band were even alive when this stuff came out. My fave song: “Your tax dollars go to build a police state”.
At one point, Paulette coaxed me out on the dance floor. Lets get this straight: I am not much of a dance, especially when I am just wearing sandals, but I hope I don’t look too retarded. I always figured hey, I am in the band, I can dance with my instrument around my neck, ain’t that good enough?
We danced thru a bunch of tunes and took a rest. Paulette and I were checking out the dancers, some real good ones as it turned out, and then one skinny guy with a little pointed beard. He looked like he was kinda having spasms and being pulled by some guy with strings like a puppet, at the same time. Sad. That’s what I am afraid of, I will look like that when I dance!!!!!
And the band played on. And on. And on. Forever it seemed like. I mean, I do like what they do, but I have to get my ass out of bed for work in the morning, ya know?
Finally the set it over, and Ganga Giri gets set up. Here’s the deal: he plays amplified and effected didgeridoo, along with a DJ that spins not tunes but sounds, a bassist that also has stuff happening on a laptop, and a drummer with big ethnic tom-toms and flute.
It’s a happening thing, a great bunch of grooves and Ganga is fun to look at, shaved head, a million tattoos and several didgeridoo of different sizes. He dances around these things, some of which are probably 10 feet long.
Good stuff, but man its late by now. I dance a few more numbers and bag it. A good show but way too late for a work nite.
The Meat Beat show on Friday was way, way later than that. Surprisingly, it did start on time, about 9:30 or so. The Dub Trio was playing when I got there at 9:45. They are an interesting band, with a great drummer, but not as dubby as I would like. The drummer had a Bad Brains t-shirt on, and I can see why with some of what they played. Good, but in my opinion, not worth the buzz, since lots of what they play isn’t dub but more punkish, and god I am so over that……..
Meat Beat came on about 11:00 and gave a long and intense show. There was so much stuff on the stage that they couldn’t set up correctly – it’s a tiny stage after all. Its pretty much this: three racks of synths and computers, a couple of rear projection screens and a drummer with an electronic kit.
Mark was one stage near the back, and as I found out later, was running the whole show using Live on his Mac (I have to point out, in strict fairness to PC users everywhere, his Mac crashed at one point. Lucky they have a backup, but the point is: all computers crash, got me?)
The most fascinating thing about the show to me was that two of the musicians on stage were actually running some custom made software that allowed them to mix clips from movies, complete with audio and effects, in with all the rest of the music. Wild stuff, to see all these horror film clips and hear the highly effected sound merging with the – lets get it clear – massive wall o’ beats that were being produced. All these clips were triggered live using Korg Microkontrol boxes. This is real, honest to god improvisational electronic music, what I have been trying to get to for ages and ages now! How could I not be impressed? Well, if the mix bit big time, that’s how. Its really distressing to me how bad the in house sound crews can be in clubs. With this show, I just don’t think they knew how to handle electronic music, since the more traditional Dub Trio sounded fine. In any event, it was a distraction, since all I could hear, thru my you-bet-your-ass-mandatory ear plus was bass – actually I could feel that vibrating the whole floor, and this huge mush of mids and some ear piercing highs. At one point I loosened the ear plugs a bit to get a better sound, and it helped a bit but the sound was loud to the point of distortion and so I put them back in. Very disappointing! I was carefully watching the drummer, and many times could not actually distinguish what he was playing in that awful mix.
Be that as it may, it was an impressive show and the crowd loved it. Its nice to see that not everyone likes bland pop music in the world. I had a great time afterwards hanging out with Mark and the band, and was most pleased to meet Jack Dangers. He seems like a really nice guy, and we had some time to talk some shop about flutes and other wind instruments. He even plays bass flute and bass clarinet. I am jealous of that, and of his amazing synth collection, which includes a Roland System 100 modular system. Jack told me it used to be owned by the Human League. Don't you want me baby? You mean, your synth collection? No shit! Thinking about when he bought it, well, Jack has been at this for some time. Way, way ahead of the curve!
Best of course was time to catch up with Mark, and getting some info about mutual friends of ours. I am so pleased that at least one person I know is making it at some level in the music business, doing challenging and original music.
I drank too much, stayed up too late and had a bit of a hangover – not bad for an old geezer like me!
Wait, you say, what has this to do with the mixing of the CD? Here is the skinny: on Friday, before I went out, I had about an hour and decided to tackle one of the two remaining songs. This is an instrumental called Water Wheel, which I totally re-recorded from my first shot at it, to get rid of some awful recording artifacts and replace the drum sounds. Now that I have a bit of a method, and a bunch of presets that I am using for various signal processing, things are really speeding up. You might note that I am using Battery for the real drums sounds, so that its easy for me to pick a kit that I like and its easy to process this kit for mixing. So now I will put, say, a compressor on the kick, and listen to what presets I have already made for other songs. Then I modify a preset that is close, and save it as songname – kick. Makes it really easy! And I do this on the snare, cymbals, all that.
Its not like a cookie cutter approach, since each song is different and on some drum kits, I don’t need to do much at all, especially if the cymbals are recorded with some ambience. Bottom line is that I got an OK mix in about an hour.
Yesterday I mixed the last song in about an hour and a half. One thing I am doing now, is copying the vocal line as many times as needed, putting effects on the secondary/tertiary tracks, and using the mute tool in Sonar to only allow thru the parts that I want to effect. This is so damn handy!
The other thing is that I falling in love with the effects in Reaktor. These are so amazingly flexible, I mean to say you can get the strangest sounds from them, but also very nice traditional reverbs and delays. I most certainly will have to upgrade to version 5, since I understand that amongst all the other changes, the effects sound better too.
So the big news: I have rough mixes of all my songs! I have 12 more days to finish up to hit my target deadline of my birthday. My next step is to go back, listen to all the tracks and do some fine tuning of volumes on each track. Then I am going to dump some tracks from commercial releases and compare the sounds I have with someone who presumable knows what they are doing. This should take my crappy speakers out of play. Last as always is play the finished songs in the car, the ultimate test! Stay tuned……………….