In this chapter, I want to share how I collaborate with others online and how I am thinking about finishing my mixes of the songs on the Change My Mind album.
Collaboration
Working with others to make music through the Internet is now a global phenomenon. It is completely normal for someone living in one place to work in real time with a professional living somewhere else. I have musician contacts in a various countries (Guatemala, U.S.A. etc.) and we help each other out with our mixes before making them public. Songwriters, producers, musicians, audio engineers etc., are beginning to understand that there are more ways to make their music great than in their local area. It's the world at your fingertips!
This week, I have been working with a producer/audio wiz/friend from Gothenburg via the Steinberg VST Connect Performer app. This way I could see and hear the music that I wrote, composed, sang and recorded on his computer as he and I worked on the final touches in Cubase. He was the one who produced the first few songs off of the Change My Mind album before we switched to Logic Pro and I took over. So, he has my files and we are now in the process of finalising those tracks before mastering them elsewhere. A little tweak here and there and we're done.
Save money & work faster in collaboration! His time is money out of my pocket, but I save myself the cost of a train fee plus lodging and it makes the album go forward faster than I can do it on my own. What we were doing was the icing on the cake before mixing. Among other things I had some opinions on the arrangement and wanted it to build up a little slower, leaving a banjo out here and waiting for the guitar comps to come in not until there. We discussed which words could be emphasised more by a short dip in the volume at two points and adding some new piano base notes. We worked on volume automation of the lead vocal and even boosted one word of a soprano harmony that emphasised the word "fear". They were small changes but those changes make all the difference in the world!
The goal is to get three stereo wav mixes for each song: the full song, a version with just music (no vocals) and one as a backtrack including everything but the lead vocal.
The song Just How Good is a hit. I simply love how his piano (he is also the pianist on that song), the banjo, my guitars, and the fiddle make this an epic song. Love it. Simply love it. It is that feeling of satisfaction of being able to translate a song from my mind into a balanced and beautiful wav file that is simply gratifying! It is like giving birth to a child.
Organisation
Assets maps
In order to organise my files and eventually be able to upload my music to CD Baby as well as be able to sell my music for synchronisation (movie music, etc.) I have to have them ordered and in the cloud so I can share them through SongTrader, Taxi or other services. Also, I need backups. Organising all these files is a high priority and is part of ending the project. Finally, as the mastered version of each song is done, I'll add them in each map as well. What should be in an assets map?
Stereo versions of the
- the final, mastering ready song
- song without vocals (instrumental)
- song without the lead singer's vocal (Backtrack)
- the final song, mastered and radio/streaming ready.
And each and every track that made up the song - sometimes, when you sell a song, the tv producers want to remix your song and then they will need these files. Often, they want it NOW, you don't have time to extrapolate them, and they want it through Dropbox, the industry standard.
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An Indie Musician's Diary VOL. 1
Non-FictionThis is how I go forward with my music - the real story from November 2017 and towards the album release but it took Volume 2 to get the whole way there. Creating, editing and mixing music is a complicated effort but loads of fun. For all you who wa...
