Crowd Audio Contest Entry

Here's my entry: http://soundcloud.com/divinegravity/amomement-gone-away-divine-gravity

I had lots of trouble at the end of the mixing stage because my PC was not powerful enough :-( Probably took me about 10 hours. I'm a n00b :-)

Mixing is hard work

I am entering another mix competition because, well, I ain't got anything else to mix :-) Writing the book is also lots of fun but it can get really tedious and I thought I'd try my newfound techniques at some poor unsuspecting song.

I regularly listen to the Home Recording Show podcast; on episode 223 (I think), one of the regular guests presented his venture called CrowdAudio. You guessed it: he's proposing a platform to crowd source mixing and mastering to musicians who have better things to do than learn all that stuff (that *will* be easier one my book comes out, promised :-P). The process is simple: a band posts their sound files, describes the project, puts a prize money tag on the project and off it goes.

The current competition is for a hip-hop rap song called "Gone Away". For those who know me, well, you know it's not my style at all :-) but I decided to try and mix it anyway - I mean, if I can do prog rock, I can do hip-hop, right?

Ahem.

First of all, this is a real project. By real I mean "Holy sh*t how many files does this have??". It's been well recorded, apart from the acoustic guitar player who sucks ass; yeah, he's worse than me; luckily, the song doesn't have much acoustic guitar in it. But man oh man, with all the aux busses and groups and everything, this project has 70+ tracks! For a hip-hop song!!

Second, hip-hop and rap have a lot to do with vocals. And by a lot I mean over 30 tracks of vocals. Thank God for groups!

Third, it's been a lot of fun. Really. The song is well written, well arranged, and there are a lot of different elements to take into consideration.

What I did learn during these past couple of days is this: keep your sessions tidy: label your tracks, cut out unnecessary tracks, make your groups, prepare your aux busses; this is a huge time saver when you're working with so many tracks.

I'll post my song and some comments when the competition is over. Not that I'm gonna win it :-)

You Did, Remixed

I decided to try and put some of what I have learned to good (?) use.

You Did is my oldest song, recorded in my living room with my crappy Tascam mic (MXL, really). Everything has changed in the song since then :-) except the lyrics themselves. The VSTs have changed, the FXs have changed... But is the song better?

Here's the original version:
https://soundcloud.com/divinegravity/you-did-feat-shallabal-kgb

And here's the new version:
https://soundcloud.com/divinegravity/you-did-feat-shallabal-2013-1

Which one do you like best? Why?

Official Entry For GearFest Mixing Contest

Here is my final mix, officially submitted for the GearFest Mixing contest:

https://soundcloud.com/vinnie2k/the-liza-colby-sound-oh-baby

It made me sweat. But thanks to some great advice and discussion I had with fellow audio geeks (shout out to Bruno and Stéphane) and some good music feedback (thanks Anna!), I learned a lot about mixing and reverbs and sounds.

And the power of coloring tracks and labelling song sections :-)

Gearfest Mixing Contest draft entry

I've decided to enter the Gearfest Mixing Contest: http://www.puremix.net/gearfestmixingcontest

I've sent a draft mix to some friends and I thought you might want to have a listen as well:



I really struggled with this mix. The vocals seemed completely out of place with the rest of the song until I used the oldest trick of them all - more when I submit the final mix :-) I'm still not convinced it sounds good but that's all I can manage.

If you're interested, all the submissions are public and available from this Soundcloud group: https://soundcloud.com/groups/gearfest-mixing-contest

Definitely some creative people out there :-)

Am I out of budget?

I just bought a bass. The missing link. What separates the boys from the men. A good bass line can save a bad song. OK maybe not any of mines, but bass is an important part of any band because it is the link between melody and rythm. The glue.

I had been looking online for a couple of weeks when I saw this metallic blue 4-string Peavey Grind BXP (passive) bass. For the price ($130) I thought it was a nice bargain compared to the rest of what I saw around those prices. I tried it clean and throught my Line6 POD and I love the sound of it. It will need tuning and messing around since the fret harmonics are not in line with the 12th fret notes, but I'll take care of it later. Right now I'm enjoying that fat rich sound :-)

Budget wise, I'm left with $20. I'll sit on those for now even though I'm still eyeing Valhalla Room. I did somehwat learn how to use the epicVerb plugin I have now (sidenote: whenever I'd bring this guy in, the sound would just immediately disappear in the depths of the abyss; only after several tries have I noticed that the wet pot was all the way up :-) Bringing it back to more standard levels breathed life back into the verbed track. Weird default setting if you ask me), but I'm not totally convinced: when I turn it up, it makes me cringe. Not good. Maybe Valhalla Room as some demo mode I need to check out. But Valhalla Room is $50 so I'd go over budget. We'll see :-)

On another note, I have decided to enter the GearFest PureMix contest. 620 entries right now :-( What I have listened to so far makes me think I have a chance: overuse of bad reverb, lots of FX on pretty much everything... Yuck. Not on a rock song recorded on a stage by Fab Dupont. We'll see. I'll post my mix on recordingreview.com for critique (this forum).

Proud

I had my wife listen to one of my mixes: first the raw tracks I received, then the final product.

Her comments:
- "You took the mud out"
- "Now I want to listen to it"
- "It sounds professional"

What an endorsement, especially from someone who is not interested in the technique or how I did it, but just in what her ears like.

I'm proud of my work :-)

Ears

It's funny how listening to more music in a better listening environment trains my ears.

By better environment, I mean on monitors instead of ear buds. The listening sensation is absolutely not the same. Something different happens when air is pushed by the monitor drivers and arrives milliseconds later to my ears. I can pick out people singing out of tune a lot better than before - and yes, that's painful, especially if you sing with other amateurs who don't train their ears and/or voice as much.

The other interesting thing happening is that as I am listening to music, I critique the mix and the balance of instruments. This never happened to me before; I guess reading all those books about recording and mixing, and doing it myself of course, helped me listening to music differently. Thge other thing I noticed is how lifeless most of our modern music is. Not a beat out of rythm, not a note out of tune. We can thank DAWs and plugins for that, but as an amateur, it's a lot tougher to actually try to make music without going in and changing all those little inconsistencies. Listen to music made in the 70s: incorrect notes are left in, technically inperfect guitar playing is left in, voice crackles are left in, and OMG the dynamic range of music is left in! What we listen to nowadays is so compressed! The problem is that people's ears are now trained to listen to music that way, and if you produce something that's not as "perfect", people will think your stuff sucks.

Off my soapbox, and on to my next endeavour: the perfect mix workflow :-)

Goals for 2013

New year, new resolutions.

Let's see what I can come up with :-)

1. Not spend more than USD 500 on anything studio-related; this includes gear, plugins, instruments; this will be particularly hard since I need to get a better reverb plugin (Valhalla Room?), a much better drum sequencer (looking at Steven Slate Drums), maybe a chnage in audio interface. Oh yeah, I'd need a bass. Or a bass player :-)

2. Re-track and remix my first 4 songs; this one is underway but I need to decide when done is done

3. Compose, perform, track, mix and master Missa Nova, my short mass; this will be a huge challenge for someone as busy as I am.

4. Write down my basic workflow; with the books I've read / I'm reading, this shouldn't be too hard - and will be very useful and a huge time saver (see 3.)

5. Finish Rocksmith to hone my guitar skills; I can play basic chords but I suck at the rest, from jazzier chords to riffs to solos

6. Only keep the free plugins I really need, maybe make a list of 10 and stick to those

That's way too many, of course, but hey, it's not like you'll break my kneecaps if I don't do it :-)

Drum editing?

Drum editing. It sucks.

You see, I can handle myself fairly well in a live environment because the groove there is physical, i.e. I either can see the other players and benefit from the band's natural rythm or they can follow me; also, if I practice with my MP3 player on, the whole song already has its groove so it's a lot easier to play in that situation (note to self: find some other way to practice drums).

So drummers, if you want to be recording stuff, you better be ready to play to a click track; yeah yeah, kills the groove, whatever. It's either that or you'll be drum-edited :-)

When drum editing, two things are important: 1) edit while all the tracks are playing so that by trying to fit the notes to the grid, you don't accidently kill the sync with the other instruments (yes, those can move too) 2) look at patterns in the drum playing; for example, I noticed that I start fills a tiny bit early which makes me be early for the next x measures. Note to self: be patient, the nice fill will sound better if you wait :-)

Finally, this: bass and kick have to be aligned. Really. You will notice such a huge difference by moving them in sync by even a 1/32th note. My ears seem to be more sensitive to rythm discrepancies in the lows, go figure.

Workflow?

I've been reading a lot about audio lately, most notably The Audio Expert (Ethan Winer), The Daily Adventures of Mixerman (Mixerman :-)).

Besides the fact that I still really don't understand how the hell a mic can capture sound frequencies from registering air pressure changes (but I'll do the research later, it's on my Research ToDo list), I think I start to have a pretty good (mostly theoretical) grasp on how a song comes into being, from the idea to the writing to the melody to the harmonies (or the other way around, depending on if you're a melodic or harmonic composer) to the arrangement to the pre-production to the performance(s) to the tracking to the pre-mixing to the mixing to the mastering to the "printing" to the distribution to the satisfied listener. Kinda.

What gets me is this: the musician(s) compose the song with certain instruments, which sound a certain way, with certain ideas in mind. They then go to the studio, where the recording engineer spends hours placing mics and making sure everything "sounds" good. That's where issues start, because the band might have an idea of what sounds good, the producer might have an idea of what sounds good, and the band manager (God forbid), and each individual musician, and the recording engineer (the only professional sound engineer in the lot, really)... But anyway. After hours of gear switching and amp tuning and mic placement, the musician(s) start to track. Let's imagine the performance is immediately spot on (wishful thinking, I know, but I don't have all day, Skyrim is waiting). Now a lot of people like to track with outboard gear, i.e. stuff that comes between the instrument and the recording device (usually a DAW), although some poeple still track with tape): so in come the EQ, the compressor, the gazillion pedals and whatnot; some people don't (I'm one of them, I like clean coming in). Result? What sounded good now completely sounds different. So mics are re-positioned, amps changed, etc. Once the tracking is finished, mxing can start. If you think tracking is a dark art, mixing is the grandfather of them all. Listen or read people talking about mixing and you think you're listening to people talking about chemistry in 1372. AD. So anyway. In comes the guru with the almighty software plugins. And the sound completely changes again. Compression, gating, EQ, reverb, you name it: it's all going in. After all of that abuse, the song finally sounds finished, right? Wrong. Because you forgot mastering. Where your abused song gets compressed so hard that your ears will bleed. Where the EQ that the mixing engineer spent hours crafting will be changed, again.

So how in the world can any of what was done upstream matter? Imagine singling out one sound wave from one instrument as it's tracked. You couldn't possibly find it in the final song! It's like a cook with ingredients for a beef stew ending up with a veal cutlet!

So my line of thinking is this: I am missing something. I need to go into a real studio and see what happens there. Maybe the Truth will jump at me like a spider in Arachnophobia.

EQ or compression?

I am a regular listener of some audio podcasts, amongst which Ask Joe (Gilder). Joe is a nice guy and tries to answer as many questions as possible, in the nicest possible way.

Which is cool.

However, sometimes, I think being a bit more direct is warranted. I know it's bad for business, but it's good for shaking people up. One of the questions was: should I be using compression or EQ on my mixes?

My answer would have been: if you're asking, you should be using neither.

Asking if you should be using EQ or compression is like asking if you should cook broccoli in water or in oil. If you're asking yourself the question, it means that you need to first read up on those effects, i.e. do your homework. It's not like we're in 1990. In 2012, you type in either of those words in whatever search engine you like, and Bing! you've got tons of answers. You see, I haven't been doing this for long. I have been reading a lot, spent hours online in forums, and my conclusion is this: if you don't know what a plugin does, don't use it. Recording / mixing / mastering is not some black art. It's an art form that you can get good at with a well trained pair of ears and some understanding of acoustics and audio. Don't know what EQ does? Read about it. Get one (yes, that's 1) plugin, most likely the one supplied with your DAW, and learn how to use it, inside out. Don't apply some recipe (boost by 1dB at 400Hz) because some dude said so. Try it, listen, and make your own conclusions. Then read up some more and try to understand how things work. Not learn how things work. Understand. Huge difference. Learning, monkeys do very well: presented with banana, smile to get it, peal it, eat it. Understanding is knowing the underlying principles and inner working of things so that you can apply those principles to different situations. If you learn to boost by 1dB at 400Hz, the day you get a recorded track which for one reason or another would already have a peak at around 400Hz, you'd end up killing your mix.

So what are those effects, you might ask? Well, you can Bing them but I'll try my own explanation. EQ (equalizer) is an effect which allows you to add or subtract energy from your sound wave at certain frequencies in the audible spectrum; you have very basic equalizers in most audio devices and software (iTunes, MediaMonkey, etc.) with usually 5 to 7 bands of frequencies arbitrarily bundled together. EQ is probably the first plugin you need to understand because with EQ you can carve out the bad stuff (there are also other effects which allow you to do that) so that what's important stands out. Note I said carve out and not add up. When you record tracks in your home studio, like I do, the quality isn't that great for lots of reasons we'll go into some other time. The first thing you can do, of course, is to understand how to properly record your instruments: the best EQ is good mic placement and a great performance. That's why there are recording engineers. Once you have your tracks, take stuff out until the track starts to sound "thin"; you'll know it when you hear it: the track loses its "character"; go back and add up a little of what you have just taken out. If you do that for all your tracks, you'll see that all of a sudden, stuff starts to pop out from the tracks: you're on your way to a nice song. So that's EQ.
Compression? Compression limits the energy at a certain level (measured in dB) with some parameters that tell the plugin how to do it. That's it. What I hate about compression is that a lot of people seem to use it without understanding how it really works because everyone else does it and because it's cool and because it "puts the tracks together". OK. So now that I've learned that, I'm going to slap a compressor plugin on all my tracks, all the time. NOT :-) So I'm not using compression at all because I haven't figured out how it works. It's on one of my ToDo lists (remind me to tell you why I have multiple :-)).

Now Joe, being the good pro that he is, kind of changed the question into: if I should only use one, which one would it be? Joe agrees with me (haha): EQ.

Understand EQ :-)