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.
Save them in one single Dropbox map.
MY BABY
One of the hardest things for me to do is let go of my album and go public. I want to learn and apply all the neat tricks I'm learning and make everything sound great. Once it's out there, there is no way to un-publish it. I am in the process of going through each song to find those final things that need fixing, adjusting only the biggest and the obvious ones before going to mastering. I tell you. I could go on forever letting these twelve songs be my guinea pigs, but I need to let them go soon and bless the world with them because the songs are so encouraging. So, it's a trade off. More time and fix makes a better album but the fans are losing interest because this project is taking way too long. (After this I will release one single at a time instead!)
Anyway, I am now looking to see that I don't miss any vital stuff before take off. This video above is a good checklist of sorts to see if I am forgetting any thing before I send things to mastering. You can use it too if you are an indie music maker.
Summing it up
In this chapter I have saved some of the best of the "summing it up" videos I've seen. They help sum up what making great music is all about. Now that I have been doing this for a while I love when I find videos that say it all in a compact way to review and repeat knowledge I have been learning. The more I mix the more these steps become natural to me. I like today's featured video, (above), because Warren is so great at explaining audio engineering. He has become one of my favourite go to YouTubers. Here is the link: https://producelikeapro.com/blog/top-10-things-to-do-every-mix/ And here is a condensed version of what he recommends in that video.
Warren Huart's top ten mixing tips
before you mix- a great recording makes mixing so much easier!
- record everything the way you want to hear them
- record the parts so that when you come to mix they make sense
Mixing:
1. Gain Stage to avoid clipping/distortion (keeping the volume level even and low enough)
2. Create Buses for each group of instruments for added control. Bus your drums, keys, guitars etc.
3. Use your high pass filter properly on all tracks, particularly in vocals and percussions (not kick) and in guitars. Cut a bit of the low and boost the fundamental low end instead, getting rid of the low end rubble and clearing up the mix.
4. Focus and control your low end - your kick typically is boosted around 60 Hz, the bass is typically boosted around 80. There is going to be a crossover area at about 100 - 110 Hz. Around 60 and downward at the bass I want to remove the low end below that to remove the low end rumble. Make a deep cut in the kick EQ right where the bass is its best. Otherwise you'll get a muddy sound.
5. Use compression in stages. I have used this one on the bass to get more punch and clarity. He uses two different compressors from Waves after each other to increase character in the vocal. Each compressor creates a slightly different flavour. Then he slaps a third compressor on the vocal bus. Every time he compresses just a little bit, about -3dB.
He says that one advantage to using different compressors is that then you can set different attack and release times. Finally, using compression in stages increases the energy in your mix.
6. Use plugins not only what they are intended for but to increase sonic flavour. Each EQ, for example add a touch of sonic spice and adding 1 dB of it can make a mix sound better. (I don't think this one is so important at my stage of development. I don't own that many different plugins yet, but I have seen that Waves compressors and EQs flavour things better than standard plugins in Logic Pro, although the Logic stock compressors are awesome.) It's nothing I really worry about now.
7. Parallel Compression is your friend: This is something I need to try and haven't as of yet. You simply copy the mixed bus for the drums, for example and compress it mercilessly. Then add it to the stereo out increasing the volume slightly until it sounds punchy. What you have is a copy of the drums flowing out parallel to the drum bus but this one is adding energy. This will make the drums stand out and the beat clearer.
You can even duplicate your master fader before it goes into the stereo out and compress everything before the final output in the same way as you did with the drums. In this case you can use heavy compression (which, if turned up would sound terrible) but turned up slightly will add extra energy, glue and excitement to your mix.
He suggests using it on acoustic guitar arpeggios. Experiment with it...
8. Pan your instruments wide in the chorus and more narrow in the verses. Ex.: 50% panning of the guitars on the verses but full 100% on the choruses.
9. Use reverbs and delays to create depth in your mix. Often, reverbs will be barely audible until they are muted. The idea, no matter how much you use is to help the instrument or vocal to fell as it it has its own space.
10. Automation: Push up your kick and snare in the chorus is a straightforward thing to do (when everything else gets louder and more dense and they might otherwise get lost). Be on your guard. What "disappears when something appears"? Let's say you have a guitar solo that come in and every time it hits a note the snare is lost. Ride on the snare to make it pop out. I have been spending a lot of time addressing this kind of stuff in the song the Vine, Come to me and in Change My mind.
Automation can help you make vocals tighter, too. But it is better to adjust the notes in other ways.
Use automation to create interest. Feature a solo by lifting the volume up and letting something else back down. Create interest by thinking how it would be on stage. Automate panning to create cool effects too. Not too much but enough to keep people interested throughout the mix.
Automation can also me muting. Too many/conflicting parts? Cut them down where it doesn't work. If your ears feel confused, mute.
Even though there are many other great videos out there about how to think, I just want to throw a recently published one in for your enjoyment. It too is a good overall, "so this is how you should do music in the box" video. (Even though the thumbnail is crazy.) It's worth a watch.
Btw: I'm trying to spend more time mixing and making music than writing and that's why I've dropped less frequently the past few weeks. That's all for now...
Be blessed!