Recreation gives inspiration
After a nice walk along the snowy beach in Ystad Sweden with my husband, I am back at work. He has vacation for a few days, so I won't be doing much mixing....
Above: Yes you see crazy Swedes in robes on and bare legs, waving to you when it is in the middle of a snowy day in March! Ystad Salsjöbad is Swedens most prestigious spa/hotell, and I guess they feel they have to linger there to get their money's worth. We just walked by for free and took their picture.
The Octopus I think the best way to describe being an indie musician is like being an octopus. You have to have eight arms to get everything done. You need to use skills simultaneously: musical ability, graphics agility, market know-how, teachability; networking... so many traits. It is easy to give up and it is a full-time job. I hope I can delegate some of the things I've been doing as things start to roll...but for now I have to do it all and first of all, I need to clean up.
Snow by the beach today
Spring Clean Up
Clean up in the mix for The Vine: I will spending some time re-sending my tracks, adjusting plugins and grouping them differently in order to get the sound I want. I'm cleaning up now...using the video up on top from the jazz musician and mixer Bob Mc Caroll. Thanks Bob! The idea is to copy the effects auxiliaries that I am sending the background vocals to so that all of the ones that are on the left have reverb echoes that go towards the right and all of those on the right have echoes on the left. This will widen the vocals more, even on ear buds.
If I get this figured out, I am going to go back to the other songs and clean them up too with this method before sending them to mastering. Nice! In the future I will probably create a template that I can start with at the beginning of each new project. One with a gain knob at the beginning of each plugin area and divided to receive signals in a logical way. Right now I am cleaning up two years of doing things on the fly. It gets better, the more you understand. Don't give up folks!
These are his easy steps to fix a messy aux rack
Bob Mc Caroll's method
1. Use colour to mark your tracks and use the same corresponding colour to code the aux track where you are sending that track. Ex: make all your drums yellow
2. Make sure you name each track clearly For ex.: "DRUMAUX" is where you send your drums and it is also yellow.
3. Highlight all the aux tracks you want to reorganise and press the read button on each and every one of them. As you click on the read button they will create a track for each one on the main rack.
4. Turn the read button off in the editor/aux rack and go to the main track rack on your upper left. Now you can reorganise them as you would any instrument tracks. Make sure they are in the right order with all of your instrument tracks above and all the auxes below and in order.
5. Highlight all the aux tracks in the tracks area (left upper area)
6. Right click on them and create a track stack. Create a folder stack (not a summing).
7. Within the track stack you just created you can rearrange/shuffle the aux tracks however you want
8. If you should create a new aux later, use the same method and drag the aux into the aux track stack until it sits where it is supposed to be.
This seemed a bit too clumsy for me so I started reading the comments under the video. It's a good way to learn more or better ways to do things that the video itself. Here's some examples of the comments:
I have already done automation so I am going to try the latter - right click and create track stacks.
Music Tech Help Guy is even better at explaining how to organise sends, auxes and groups. In the future my stuff is going to be more organised from the start - just like his. Check out this great video "#66" in his Logic Pro X tutorial series. He is my favourite at explaining Logic.
He suggests you route all your instruments of the same kind to a single buss before going out through the stereo output. All drums through Bus 1 for example. There you can add some compression onto them. I have a side chain with subbas on the kick. It should also be routed to that one common buss. The EQ fixes the group and compression there help to glue the drums together. before output. As a group you can close them down or solo them easily too.
Various other things to clean up
The drums Drums are special. This article was very helpful. https://talkinmusic.com/musicproduction/percussion-mixing-tips/
Leaving the kick out of the drum aux has its advantages. It depends on what you want to do with it. I have a sub chain so I chose to leave it out of the drum aux but in the same folder.
Spotify I'm cleaning up my Spotify accounts, making them one (instead of two) and getting rid of the old stuff that was cluttering it there (2 old demos! How could I ever put them there in the first place?) As an artist you have to kill that old personal account, or use an alias.
Planning ahead: Need to book a photo and a mastering session...sent an email and talking with a friend who is a photographer next week.
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