This section is all about the ideas that become songs. Check out the following posts, or scroll down for more info:
We start every blog the same – we’re still learning and don’t position these ‘Song Cycle’ blogs as the lessons from masters. These are lessons from amatuers, eager to share and eager to learn… In this blog, we talk about our experience around song writing ideas….
We are not sure we can better Stewie’s take on this, so let’s start here:
Now our turn. It should surprise no one that we’ve all found it hard to say where a song came from, but we generally have found that they come from either ‘the words’, ‘the music’ or ‘the mood.’ And, we find some arrive ‘whole’ but most arrive in fragments, requiring the band to knit them together. And some songs ‘finish fast’, some torture us for months and many ‘stink up the place’ hanging out in the studio far longer than they should. Hard to kill a song, but when it comes to song writers, we’ve become massive proponents of Capital Punishment. And our final point, is most of what we’re about to say is ridiculous because most songs are delivered by the song fairy and if ’she ain’t flying you’re s–t out of luck.’ So with that load of waffling rubbish, let’s try to be specific.
1. Word-born Songs… Because Jimmy is so rubbish musically, most of his songs arrive first with words. Looking back, the ideas for these songs come from six sources:
2. Music-born Songs. Because Ed is so steeped in music theory and chords, most of Ed’s songs are stories about chord combinations hitting him in the head, mostly on buses around London. He then marches into the studio and tags some chords on to existing lyrics. We’ve identified a couple sources of inspiration for music driven songs:
3. Mood-born Songs: Some times you just want a mood and that’s all you have. The best example of this for us was No Bells. We were listening to Ella Fitzgerald and Joe Pass do Stormy Weather and we wanted to do something similar for Louise. Jimmy knew he wanted to write a song about a ‘war widow’ in terror of the door bell ringing with news of her fallen spouse. And he suddenly recognised that he could write it in this ‘mood.’ Lew had chords that he’d wanted to put in a Joe Pass song and gave them to Ed. Louise could instantly feel the mood of the song and create a harmony over Ed’s chords. But it started with a mood – we wanted to write this song:
4. Whole or in Fragments?: We’ll talk more about this later in other blogs, but we just want to make the point that an ‘idea’ could be a fragment or a fully realised song. Don’t be afraid of fragments – with the right set of collaboraters they can take your fragment to a great place. One of the best songs of all time was the collision of fragments – Lennon had written a song about the uncertainty of life and what it all means (I read the news today…). McCartney had another fragment about the routine of mornings (woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head). George Martin had an idea about a chord. A big chord. Three fragments – a Day in the Life. Don’t be afraid of fragments.
5. Fast or Horribly Slow: Again, we’ll talk more about this later, but don’t be afraid to let a song live awhile in the studio. Everyone has a magical moment when a great song emerges whole. We love these moments. But we’ve had pretty good songs live a long time in the studio before they were ready. Our best examples is Sat out the 15th, which went through 5 or 6 different versions before Andy decided it needed a cello and a beat boxer. Really! The only issue is don’t let the songs hang around too long. Sometimes they need to be thrown out. If anything we have erred too much on keeping bad songs. You grow to like them even though they’re rubbish just because they’ve become friends – not very good friends, but you’ve shared some times. This is dangerous and leads to some bad songs appearing on albums. You know which they are. Sadly, we do too.
6. Good or Horribly Bad: And that brings us to an additional point on ‘idea generation.’ Not all ideas are good. Be ready to trash them. Be ready to tell your band-mates nicely that the idea is a really bad one. We refer to these as ‘ED Water Moments’ and those who are our long serving fans will remember why. If you don’t - here’s the blog. The point is – don’t fall in love with yourself. 9 out of 10 ideas are rubbish. Be prepared to say so. To know so. To trash 90% of what you are thinking. The brain’s big, the world’s big, there will be more ideas…
7. Getting in the mood vs. ‘get on it’: There’s a lot written about getting into the mood to write songs and how to address writers block. Jimmy thinks most of this is ridiculous but that is because he is on the extreme end of the persperation vs. inspiration argument. Some artists believe absolutely that you have to wait until the fairy hits you on the head – and there fore they spend a lot of time trying to get into the mood for the fairy to strike or to go to situations that might inspire. So lots of long discussions about ‘walks in the woods’, exercise, the right teas, etc… Others believe that you just have to be disciplined and write and there is a benefit from systematically going through phrases, stories you’ve heard, family experiences, friends experiences, etc. until you get an idea. This is the perspiration side – If you’re on the inspiration side, you better make sure you have a patient set of band mates — willing to hang out until you come up with a song. If you’re on the perspiration side, you better make sure that you throw away a lot of your stuff – because much of it will be rubbish.
8. Resources: There is a lot of good stuff out there to tell you about idea generation. Here’s a list of some interesting things we have found:
Jimmy
No, we’re not very good at any of this song-writing stuff. And yes, everyone else is better. But the spirit of Abubilla Music is a community that learns and shares. So here are our views to date on the old inspiration vs. persperation debate about song-writing.
As always, we start with the experts and then give you our views… So a bit of the history of this whole debate and then a few lessons from our time in the studio.
Part One: The Inspiration vs. Perspiration Debate
Part Two: Routines
Part Three: 4 Lessons from the Studio: We are believers in the 10,000 hour rule and are about 10% of the way there (greatness only comes after 10,000 hours of practice), so we’re definitely on the ‘sweaty’ side of the song writing debate. We’ve learned a bit though:
Jimmy
Okay, it is true I get distracted easily. But, if you find yourself bored at work, and can’t find any dead flies, there here’s a nice little project for you: DIY Beat-boxing.
Check out this website for making your own music! You’ll have a composition in 3 minutes:
So Jimmy was asking around for a music tutor (he’s still looking if anyone can suggest someone) and Ed decided to take the task on himself - a kind of distance-learning affair. This is his first tutorial (I warn you it’s long).
Those are all the main chords you will ever need in writing a song. There is one more key point to make however:
The bass note:
Key thing when writing good chord sequences it to be aware of:
Hope that helps – more than happy to show you stuff on a keyboard if you want (it’s pretty hard to do this without a practical element to it!)
Ed
PS this might also help
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_(music)#Types_of_chords
Bless him. That’s a lot of thinking.
This section is about all taking the ideas you’ve had in the first section, and working them into a song.
Check out the following posts for more info, or scroll down for more info:
We start each of these blogs with the same point: we write these not because we’re good at any of these, but rather because were students of all things music. As we learn, we share. We hope you’ll continue to do the same, as well. This is a little blog about collaboration in song development…
Collaborations – examples, types and our lessons learned. Short and Cheerful.
A. Examples: Let’s start with some great example of songwriting collaborations:
B. Types: In terms of collaborating during early song-writing, there are five major types:
At Abubilla Music we do a lot of Sausage Making (e.g. No Bells) and Dividing and Conquering (e.g., Breathe). And we’ve learned a few lessons that might be helpful:
And that’s enough about collaboration. It has been so hard to write this alone.
Jimmy
More rubbish on song-writing…and we start with the same warning to you. We don’t think we’re good at this stuff. We’re learning. But, we’re also committed to sharing lessons as we go… So these are our lessons about intro’ss. Remember this is about song writing, not pick up lines…
Like our previous blogs, we’ll start with a section on great ‘intro’s’ in music and then we’ll provide some personal lessons. Off we go.
Part One: Great Intro’s: At Abubilla Music we love to sound all authoritative and scientific, with a strong desire to take the art of music and break it down into so many sub-species that you lose the will to live. At least be aware we understand fully the futility of all this, but it gives us great opportunities to embed lots of songs. But believe it or note, we’ve now broken the whole world of music, into 8 ‘classic types’ of introductions. Really. We know the emails, tweets and letter bombs will flood in after this, but heck, at least we try…
Part Two: Humble little lessons from Abubilla Music. If Section One of these blogs is a wonderful run through the history of music and a chance to survey all that is wonderful, these Sections are always a bit more humble as we ask, ‘what have we learned in our little home studio, surrounded by pets, and fighting the post pizza carb-commas that settle down on the band?’ Here are our five lessons about ‘introductions:’
That’s it.
Jimmy
Yep, you know the routine – we write these as students not masters and hope you enjoy the sharing. This is a rough overview of song-structure to give you some basic vocabulary, a few examples and then five basic lessons.
Part One: Song Structure, The Basics: A key lesson for us over time has been to be much more thoughtful around song structure, musically and lyrically and invest in all parts of the song and to not let cement harder early on structure. There are wonderful on line debates about the right song structure, where to put guitar solo’s etc. You should join in – here’s a good example: click here. Now for the building blocks, briefly:
Part Two: Song Structures in Action a Quick Review: it is interesting to break down songs to see how many different musical ideas are happening and what the artists are doing about basic structure. Here’s a few:
Part Three: Our Five Humble Lessons: As we’ve gone through the four albums and help our discovery artists, we’ve started pulling together some basic ‘studio lessons.’ They might be helpful to you:
That’s it.
Jimmy
This section is about all rehearsing and routine-ing your material, and how that can help you in the studio in the long run.
Check out the following posts for more info, or scroll down for more info:
You guys have been giving a lot of feedback on these, but we still want to slap the warning label across – we’re rubbish and we know it, we’re learning and we show it. These are our lessons. So now a bit about outros, following the tour de force on intros.
There’s a good metaphor here for songs. Having written an extensive blog on intro’s, defining all sorts of sub-species, I’ve sort of lost the will on writing about outros? Is that symbolic of song-writing or more an indication that too many vodkas filled the night before the morning of blog writing? Probably a bit of both. Here we go – some basics about pop music with examples and then our lessons.
Part One: Outro’s follow the same sub-species of intro’s in reverse. You’ll surely remember our scientific dissections of the ‘intro’, where we identified seven forms of intros (in italics); here’s the outro equivalent:
Part Two: Lessons: We’ll be quick here, as the same lessons apply to outros as intro’s with one exemption:
Well, there you go. Time to go. Start the fade button……..
Jimmy
This section is about all recording a demo version of your song, and how this can help you to make decisions about structure, form and sound.
Check out the following posts for more info, or scroll down for more info:
Lyrics and Chord Charts
An important stage of the song writing process is to present your song in a way that other musicians can read and play it.
There’s no point having the best tune and chord structure that has ever been written, if you can’t give it to other musicians in a way which they can read it easily, quickly and play along to it.
So, here are 10 tips that we’ve found helpful with lyrics and chord sheets:
1. Where possible, type the sheets rather than handwriting them. As nice and as arty as your handwriting may be, vocalists are more likely to sing the right words if they can read them.
2. Make similar sections look similar. So, if you have a chorus, that’s repeated, label it as such. And if the lyrics are not too different, then try to format the text and present it in the same way. That way the musicians will soon learn to associate the shape of the text stanzas with the music that goes with it.
3. Give each musician a pencil, and let them make notes as you go through. They might find ways to write things that are easier for them to understand.
4. If there’s more than one page, then number the pages or stick them together. If sticking them together, use tape and tape along the longer edge of the paper and stick the right hand side of page 1 to the left hand side of page 2 and so on.
5. Don’t use the smallest font you can find. The Same goes for using other fancy fonts. Times New Roman will do. Serif fonts tend to be easier to read because of the serif.
6. Put composer and lyricist details on the sheet. That way, if the sheet makes it out of your sight in any way (disappears into a guitar case etc..), then you are still linked to the content on the sheet.
7. Make a note of any changes you make to your lyrics. Then after the session, update your lyrics document, and print out a new copy and file it somewhere. Save a copy of the lyrics file in the session folder of your song to keep the file somewhere you will easily find it. This will come in very handy if you want to publish the lyrics in the CD liner notes.
8. Put the chords above the lyrics. Even where you have a vocalist who doesn’t play guitar, this will prove useful to pointing out different sections of the song to the vocalist (such as ‘lets try to phrase it differently between the C chord in the first line and the F in the second’
9. For extra understanding from the musicians, write it out bar by bar.
So, for the first 2 lines of our song Footprints, you could display it like this:
VERSE 1
|G |C |
Walk, walk walkin’ slow
|G |C |
Up and down the Beach
10. Finally – it is important to remember that you have created the music and the lyrics, so you should be proud of them and remember that they are yours! At the same time, remember to credit any co-writers or collaborators, just as you would want to if someone used a chorus of yours.
Okay, so this is a blog about creating a home studio for audio recording and it will involve 7 steps. It will be told from a Home Studio for dummies perspective but be warned — you need to be really dumb to find this useful. Andy will chime in on technicals because he knows what he’s talking about. Be warned. It is also written to those with human relationships, where you have to consider … others.
So some additional caveats. I’m going to give you tips to build a home studio for 6 performers all playing at the same time. So a lot of the kit that I’ll talk about assumes you need to be prepared for all this. If you’re on your own for awhile, then you don’t need most of the things I’m talking about and others will give a lot more appropriate advice.
Here’s how I think about a home studio. This was all new to me, so I didn’t know squat but here’s my mental image: the brain is the core HW/SW and the skull is your mixing environment. The backbone is the basic hardware and cabling that sets up the musicians. The arms and legs are the workstations of your musicians (mics, headphones). The veins are all the cables, which deserve their own tip. And the heart is the core musical instruments or add ons that you bring for your musicians. The lungs are the room. Oh, and the soul is those that drop by. So with that, here are my 7 steps to building a home studio (and my links are just showing where we bought stuff at the time, but do shop around):
1. The Lungs: Find a room and talk to all those involved with that room – and warn them that ‘life as they know it is over!’: Now, this is good advice if you want to save an important relationship but it is bad advice if you want to build a home studio, because if your partner, friend, room mate ever knew what was going to happen to them they would never, ever in a million years say yes. I chose our cinema room, which was also my wife’s office and said I was going to put some software on the computer and learn about music production. She said yes. One year later, she is in the loft, having retreated there and the cinema room is filled with studio equipment - more wires then a 1950′s super computer. It is impassable to the whole family. Now, because of the damage you will cause to all human and pet relationships, I’m not sure how picky you can be. But if you could be picky, find some healthy lungs. Big is better. Less noise is better – less wheezy breathing. Well ventilated is better – big healthy air flow. But, if it were all these things why would YOU be given it. So you’ll settle for what you get.
2. The Brain: Now Choose your Studio Equipment: Computer, Mixing Software and Mixer. I did a lot of research on this at the outset and went with Pro Tools. I’ve not used others so have no idea but I have been very happy with it. I run it in two home studios, MAC and PC and so I am the world’s expert on daily comparisons — go MAC all the time, every time. No question. So get the best MAC you can afford (because you’ll use it for tons of other things related to your music) — the click goes to their 27″, which is ‘the dream.’ If you can afford it get two monitors, with BFD and mixing window on right and core window in front (if you go with MAC you need some fiddly kit to make dual monitors work, but ask them). Then get Pro Tools and go for mixing board — LE series, 003. There are tons of short cuts in terms of mixing when you’ll be happy for the physical board. The other boys will chime in on the stuff they use for solo recording.
3. The Skull: If you have the luxury to decide, go for mixing desk and nice chair: If you are in a good relationship, take a hard look at your partner. Do you like the way they look, their touch, the feel of their body against yours? Did it take you a long time to find said partner and do you invest a lot of time with them? Okay. Now look again. However much you love them, you are still going to spend 28 times more with your mixing chair than them. You will sit all day with the band, you will sit after the band leaves to do fast mixing, and you will sit on that chair for hours during the week to improve mixes. The ratio is 28:1. So think about that when you fork out the dosh for the best chair possible. Really good chair. I confess, I have an amazing wife, so I had to think of something 28 times better – I went Aeron. In terms of the desk, I’m less fanatical. I have a big flat table in London and a more professional desk in Spain, a Studio RTA Producer Station. The main benefit of a more professional desk is you can organise all your added kit, starting with headphone amps (see below) into the rack stations. Finally, you need good monitoring speakers. We went Genelec and are happy, but we also burn CDs and run them around our house and those of our friends and play them on 10 other speaker systems to make sure we like the sound. You can’t trust one pair, but we decided to burn a CD and test rather than set up 2-3 other speakers. But you’ve got to do the CD thing.
4. Sort out the backbone stuff. this is where I was clueless and Andy really jumped in. You’ve got to set up an infrastructure for your musicians. This involved buying two headphone amps, for a total of 8 discrete headphone plugs, but 16 if you share volume (and trick, you can buy some of the head phones with volume knobs to give some more freedom). We also bought an Octopre kit (don’t forget optical card and optical cables!) which expanded the number of inputs, mic and line in, which allowed us to set up templates in pro tools where we could permanently assign instruments and mics. We then bought a snake that allowed us to set up a major mic/line in portal in centre of room (there is advance alternative to this that we’ll write about later). This was back bone and I wouldn’t have thought of any of it without Andy.
5. So with backbone sorted, we can now get our arms and legs sorted. In my simple head, I think about this as giving the artists ‘workstations’. They need to have: mic and stand, line in for instrument, headphone, and music stand, and all the cables connecting them to backbone. I didn’t think this way at first but it helps, especially with a great band that can sing, play and add value to everything. So with that, you need as many workstations as you have musicians, plus the guy in the brain, plus your ‘soul’, your audience. So, start counting. We have six full time musicans, so they need the whole works – 6 mics + cables, 6 headphones + cables, 6 line in’s, 6+ mic stands, 6 music stands (for lyrics/chords) – one place you can save money is get them cheap or skip them). Now that’s full on because they don’t all sing, but we have a lot of live instruments, so the guitarist all like to play into mic or thru amp. So we need it. We bought two great mics – both AKG, one with and one without the directional stuff. We bought 2 condensor mics for stereo guitar recording (and don’t forget a stereo bar). And we’ve got four workhorses for the rest and did a good deal on a mic-stand-cable combo. We’ve got pretty good headphones, but they do keep having problems with one side going out, so not a huge advocate. Then we got tons of cabling for all this (see veins). Got basic music stands and mic stands, but would recommend two of your mic stands be really heavy duty so you don’t suffer droop. You’ll have enough problems in your personal life with drooping and general bodily deterioation – why have to deal with droopy mics? The notion of a workstation is a good one, because it helps you think about cables and messy studios, which i will devote some time to at end. Now, remember, the brain gets a little station – headphones, mic stand, mic, music stand. Depending on your contribution to band you can give up everything but headphones. I talked about the soul of the studio being those who drop by to listen. I would recommend you have a couple headphones for them and a little sitting place. This also helps when the back up singers arrive. Now, I’ll put it here, but we must return to it when we discuss acoustics of room, the single smartest, little brilliant, high-bang-for-the-buck thing we did was buy a reflection shield for the mics from SE Electronics. On important vocals, our leads will step within their little booth, with confidence, and belt away. We can also use it to surround a guitar mic where we’re recording from an amp. We use ours non-stop and so far don’t think we need to to a vocal booth (remember, we like the sounds of pet noises in our music). Also, you will really begin to hate your vocalists after a while (because you will spend so much time mixing them in after they go) and it’s nice to use the shield to avoid general eye contact. I’ve been told they feel the same way.
6. The veins. Okay, then there are cables. Your life will be all about cables. You will learn all sorts of vocab around what cables are and I know I’m wrong in even saying cables. But that is the generic term. Here are the problems you will encounter with cables: they will never be the right length, they will all look alike, they will never work when you need them, they will always be tangled and your whole life will be spent untangling them and coiling them – you will feel like a sailor on a C19th warship keeping this junk straight. So they will be your downfall. And no matter how good you are with buttons, your band will hate you for the cables. And they will never remember where they are plugged in, always put them in wrong place, etc… So not sure if you will hate your band more than your cables, but you will definitely hate your cables. So here are some basic tips: a) for all the instrument cables (str jk to str jk leads for those who talk jargon), buy multi coloured — no two cables same colour. Just do it. And get 5 m for 4, 10 m for 2. And then get 2 more 10 m. And hide them. And bring them out when arrogant guitarist says none of the lines work and he’s frustrated. That’s 8 leads. Get 8 different colours. Trust me. You’ll want to have the following dialogue: ‘Martyn, where are you plugged into? I dunno. Well what is the colour of the stringy thing going to your guitar? Red. Andy, where is Martyn’s red string thing plugged into? B.’ That will go on 100 times a day. And this is most important because for mics and headphones (and you’re talking extensions with headphones because they have a little stringy thing already) you just get black. So enjoy the rainbow while you can. On headphones extensions and mics leads, get 30% 5 m, 30% 10 M and 30% a mix of 2-4 meter. And now the labelling bit. I bought a bunch of coloured tape. All mics are green or red tape. And I tape 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 strips around the ends of each. 1 thru 5 red. 1 thru 5 green. Then for mics same thing with yellow and blue. So our dialogue is: ‘Jimmy, I can’t hear anything from the cams. Martyn, where are you plugged into? I dunno. Martyn, what colour and how many strips on your cable. Oh, 3 red little stripes. Andy, where is 3 red plugged into? Number 4. Thanks. Martyn, any better? ’ And then Rob points out he left to get a beer. But you get the idea.
7. So now I’m at the heart. The fact is each of the band are going to have to jump in here. I’ll tell you what we bought for Spanish studio, which we agreed would be a set of basic workhorse instruments that they were all ‘okay’ with… Let’s go in order of the Pro Tools Session. Our drums are digital — we went for mid-level Yamaha. We then supplemented with BFD 2 and the Percussion and Jazz & Funk add-ons. These are fantastic. We went for all the normal percussion add – ons – tamborine, shakers, etc… Guitar wise, we went for a classic Fender strat, Mexican and in Candy Apple red. The bass is a a Warwick corvette, and came with a nice little amp, which although was thought to be a bit poncy to begin with, has now come into its own as a pre-amp. The acoustic is a Yamaha CP700, which is nice and performs reasonably well on its pickup as well as acoustically. Buy 70 10 volt batteries and hide them, though. You leave the acoustic plugged in and it drains the little battery overnight. Amp sounds come from the Line6 Pod XT, which has vocal harmonisers and everything, but we haven’t quite got that far with it yet… Keyboards include the Yamaha CPX 700 NT and a Novation box for Jimmy to use at his station. We love the Yahama and have had non-stop problems with Jimmy’s MIDI-Pro tools-PC in London studio. We have full harps and the boys bring an assortment of tin whistles, trumpets, ukulele’s… Martyn brings really expensive guitars that go to 11. Rob brings a five string bass.
Okay, so that’s it for 1.0. These are the home studios that produced Six Months of Saturdays. We know we’ve got a lot of issues and so 2010 is about building out Studios 2.0. So watch this space. The major upgrades will be: a) to figure out a cost effective set of acoustic solutions and b) to sort out this notion of musician workstations. On the first, Andy works on some of the best studios on earth and has argued all along we should invest in steps 1-7 long before we sort out all the right acoustic shielding, etc… And we have a pretty professional sound. So watch this space. On the workstation thing, right now we have the hub and spoke system. Everything feeds into the snake. This means the middle of the room looks like octopus mud wrestling with with tangled mess o’ cables. Rob suggests we work out how to switch all the plug ins to the walls so musicians just plug into their little station along the studio walls and keep centre free. We’ll try that, so again watch this space. That will get us to 9 tips to build a studio, so we promise to come up with number 10 before we rev thru Version 2. Hope you find this useful and tips on above would be helpful. If you do comment on this don’t get to geeky or strident — we really can’t be bothered. Let’s not forget, afterall, its all about the music (and the lyrics!).
So, you’ve decided to get your tracks mastered, you’ve chosen an engineer, how exactly do you go about getting your files to him?
He/she will probably have their own method of FTP, or file transfer, which may even be you posting a CD, but check their requirements carefully, as you don’t want to taste time, effort and money having to re-send discs because they asked for data not audio etc etc
So, what format should the files be in?
Your files should be at the highest quality possible. Definitely no MP3 or other compressed files will do really. Engineers will ask for uncompressed audio files.
So if you recorded at 48kHz, then the mix files should be 48 kHz. You should really be recording at 24 bit, so your mixes should be 24bit masters (and hence an audio CD may be returned as it will be at 16 bit as per the CD standard)
Why?
Well, you want the mastering engineer to do the best job that they can, so you need to give them the best quality files that you can. 24 bit recording gives you a greater dynamic range than 16 bit (as there are more bits with which to record the data).
Some engineers will convert anything that isn’t already at 44.1kHz to this sample rate, but that should be their decision, and they can use their own tools to do it.
As for why not MP3 files, well, an MP3 (or Mpeg 2 Audio layer 3) is what is known as a ‘Lossy’ format. It reduces the filesize (good for streaming online, or fitting on your ipod) but in doing so degrades the audio – it throws things away, it thinks it does not need, and as such reduces the data size of the stream.
So, giving a mastering engineer an MP3 to work with is akin to asking him to start off with something that is already seriously degraded. The expression ‘polishing a turd’ comes to mind. Now, you may think you can’t hear a difference between your MP3 and your wav files (and at higher bit rates, you may be right to a point), but once the mastering engineer begins to work on the material, by compressing and limiting the material, and generally ‘making it sing’, this will bring the sound of the artefacts that the processing generates, to the forefront of the balance, and you’ll hear them..
Dynamics Processing
As with quality of files, you really want to give the mastering engineer mixes that do not already have any dynamics processing on the main stereo output at all. Whereas some engineers like to give clients mixes which they have put through an L3 limiter (by Waves), it is best to give mastering engineers dynamically un-limited files.
Why? Well again, you want your mastering engineer to have the best chance at processing the track, and this will include some dynamics processing, so give him he best chance he can have a this. By all means, send them a copy of the ‘Limited’ mix that the engineer gave you and ask him/her to refer to that.
Zipping Up Files
If you are uploading your files to a dropbox, or FTP server, it is a good idea to zip them up before you upload them. There are a few reasons for this, filesize not really being one of them. The system offers a system of error correction, so the file that your engineer gets is more likely to be the one you send..
Ask Your Engineer
Don’t be afraid at any stage to ask your engineer if you don’t understand something. Remember – you are the client here! You should be confident in the money you are spending. Even get your mastering engineer to speak to the engineer who mixed your tracks if it will help..
Choosing a Mastering Engineer
So, you’ve got your finished album, and you’ve decided to get it mastered. There are a few ways you can go about it, and there are a multitude of engineers out there… so how do you go about choosing one?
1 – Who does you favourite artist use?
If you like the music your favourite artist produces, then it follows that you might like the work that their mastering engineer does. Saying that, if your favourite artist is a Thrash metal star, and you are producing an English Folk album, that may not follow, but as a general rule, it can work. So, if you love Ed Sheeran and want to use the same engineer and facilities that his ‘+’ album, then you could try Christian Wright at Abbey Road Studios in London. Note this can work out to be expensive – read the budget option below for more info..
2 – Location Location Location
If you want to ‘attend’ the mastering session (an ‘attended session’) then it’s a good idea to be in the same area, or at least part of the country that your mastering engineer is, so you don’t then end up spending an extra few hundred pounds getting to the studio.
By the way, some engineers don’t allow attended sessions due to their setup and location, and some may charge more… it’s a good idea to enquire when you first book the time…
3 – Budget
Money matters, so whereas you may love Ed Sheeran’s album, and you may live in St John’s Wood (see point 2 above) you may still not be able to afford Abbey Road mastering. However, some studios, Abbey Road included, now offer an Online Mastering service. Abbey Road charge £90 (plus VAT) per track, with extras on top for whichever format you decide upon (CD, Vinyl or DDP). This is for an unattended session and you don’t get to name your engineer.. but may be a way of getting your album mastered in a top class venue for less.. http://www.abbeyroadonlinemastering.com for more info. Metropolis studios also do this: http://www.imastering.co.uk where £90 plus VAT also gets you an un-named engineer or £125 plus VAT will get you a named engineer.
4 – Ask people…
Word of mouth is a wonderful thing.. So ask your friends who have used mastering engineers, who they used and their experiences of them, even if your friends are a thrash metal band and you are doing English folk..
We have used Dan Dan Fitzgerald of SoundSound.ie for the pat 3 SMCC albums, and we found him through the fact Andy had worked with him previously on a few other projects. He has now also mastered Ketebul Music artist Winyo’s debut album.
We’d obviously also recommend him… http://www.soundsound.ie
Mastering is the final process that your audio goes through before it goes to the plant to be burnt onto a CD, or to be uploaded to your Aggregator to be pushed online to iTunes and Spotify etc..
The question a lot of people ask is: What do Mastering Engineers actually do? In the past they would prepare the recordings for release – so they would work on the recording and eventually ‘cut’ it to a vinyl acetate – hence they were and still known as ‘cutting engineers’. They were then needed to create the files required for CD plants, but these days that is less necessary as we can burn our own CDs using most desktop PCs and Laptops, so what else do they do?
Well, that’s a bit like asking a magician to reveal his secrets, but here are a few reasons why it’s a good idea to get your album mastered.
The first of these is that it’s a second pair of ears. Your engineer has probably spent weeks working on your mixes, and to him, they sound great. However, the room that the engineer has mixed in may not be your typical listening environment. The mastering engineer will have treated his or her room so that it is an accurate listening environment. They can make precise decisions on the low end, the top end and everything that is in between. They will apply EQ to even things out and compression to make things punchy and even.
The second is that they’ll make your album sound as one. So, where you may have recorded bits of your album in your bedroom, some in your mate’s garage and 3 tracks in your rehearsal room, your mastering engineer can process everything so that they sound a bit more cohesive and ‘of one’ piece of work.
The third is that they can provide you with a Red-Book CD of your master to give directly to the plant. This includes ISRC meta data (more on this in a future blog – you’ll have to provide these yourself), CD text and other data.
Another good reason is that they can make your track sound good alongside other records.. 99% of all music you hear on the radio has been through the mastering process, so your track may not stand out as much to the casual listener, but if it sounds great to the man in his transit van, or the man listening on his £5000 hi-fi, then the track is a success.
There’s a few reasons there, but its all a matter of time, budget and quality. Some of the best recordings ever were made with one microphone, and recorded to a wax cylinder, but that aside, this is the last chance you really get to add finishing touches to the project, so find an engineer and work with them, and build up a relationship of trust. If you’re planning on making a lot of records, this can reap major rewards.
Once you’ve done some mixes, you’re going to want the rest of the band to listen to them.. but how do you get the mixes to them?
So, back in the old days, the only way of passing a mix around the band, or indeed listening to it away from the studio, was to create another copy of it – so through copying to another reel of quarter inch tape, or in the 80s, running it off to a DAT, (or for a very short time DCC). This of course required you to have a quarter inch machine, or DAT deck at home. Cassettes were OK but not really the high fidelity that you had spent time in the studio trying to record. Mini-disc came along and left again. CD-Rs were the answer for a while – and studios charged through the roof for a copy.
So lets fast forward (pun absolutely intended) to today’s project studios and in particular, home located, DAW based studios. predominately we will be recording in ProTools, or Logic, and the output will be a data file – a stereo ‘mix’ or balance of the multi-track audio. So, how can we share this around the band?
Well, there are a few ways – each differing in desirability.
Email is all well and good for sending messages, a few photos and the odd mp3 file, but if you’re sending across 44.1kHz 16bit wav files, then inboxes start to become full very quickly, especially when there can be multiple revisions of the files.
Dropbox and other ‘cloud’ based services
http://www.dropbox.com is basically online server storage space. This space is reachable through both an application that you can download to your computer to sync up individual files, and via a web browser interface, so in theory, you have access to your files anywhere. So far so good.
As part of the application, it creates a local folder on your computer (on Mac its in the User folder), and any files you put in this folder go straight to the dropbox, which is great! Except that when you mix your song, you want your mix file to live in the project folder, ideally in a folder called ‘Mixes’, so to get it in the Dropbox folder you would have to copy the file – which is duplicating it. Now, if you’re happy to have two versions of your file on your local computer then great! But if you have a lot of mixes, then this starts to fill up your system drive, and that’s not great either…
You can create things called SYM links, which are a little like aliases. Creating an alias to the mixes folder in your Dropbox would mean that the alias was copied, but not the files themselves, whereas the SYM link forms a Symbolic link between the two. I’ve found these to be a little unpractical in practice.
Also, once you have the mix uploaded to the Dropbox, you then run the risk of it not being playable on the computer that your lead singer is using. Say that he is off on a trek across Europe to find himself, and he is in an internet café in Serbia – you don’t want him to download the file to that computer, and you don’t want him to have to install any extensions to make playing the track possible.. Which is where we come to Soundcloud…
(by the way – other cloud based storage space is available – StrongSpace being one of them)
SoundCloud
http://www.soundcloud.com has been around for 3 or 4 years. It is basically a website where you can upload your sound files and they will be available to play direct from the browser.
You can upload different types of soundfile – wav, mp3, aiff etc and the upload mechanism takes care of everything. So, once you upload the audio, you have a few choices –
a) do we want it to be downloadable or not
b) do we want it to be publicly listenable, or not
By setting the track to be downloadable, you can make sure that the members of the band can download it to burn to a CD to listen in the car or whatever.
Note: whatever file format you upload, the streaming, embeddable players all stream a 128kbps MP3 conversion of the file, however the download is always the original file that you uploaded, so perfect in the case of burning to a CD at home.
By setting the track to private, it does not show up on your soundcloud page, and can not be listened to by anyone who does not have the secret link. Giving members of your band the secret link means they can access the file and play it back (without giving them the username and password).
Avid clearly think this is the best idea, as they have built a new feature into ProTools 10, which uploads your mixes directly to a linked SoundCloud account.
They have a variety of accounts- the cheapest one being absolutely free. They come with different amount of ‘Tape’ which is digital tape, as in minutes of storage space on their system (rather than file size, so you can . Check it out at http://www.soundcloud.com for more info. Their range of embeddable players also make it incredibly easy to put music on your website.
We have used it since the beginnings of Abubilla Music, and also use Dropbox to store images and other files.
For folks that have erred way too much on ‘go’ vs. ‘no go’ we have no right to write this blog! But, we have to share lessons, even if the biggest lesson for all of you in this context is: for goodness sake don’t do what we’ve done!
As usual, we’ve give the theory then our lessons.
Part One: When do you shoot the baby? (vs. throw away smelly fish)
Yep, that’s a terrible image but the right one. We are talking about killing a fully developed song that has been with the band for maybe a year. This is shooting the baby! We’re not talking about the endless trashing of songs, at idea stage, or rehearsal stage, or recording stage. We kill tons of these, but that’s just throwing away fish that begins to smell. We do that very well. There are lots of little ideas that we’ve invest 2 hours with, 10 hours with and then decide fairly quickly that they stink. No problem.
Nope, we’re talking about shooting a baby. This is a song that is done, having been written, rehearsed, recorded, over-dubbed, mixed and you’re now deciding song order for a new album. Where should it go? And then someone raises the question: ‘is this really good enough?’ Oh, my. And you start to get into that second debate ‘good enough against what criteria.’ Elvis Costello asks: what is a good song? Is it a song that makes 1 million people’s summer, where it is a hit, part of a cultural moment, played on beaches? Or is it a song that means everything to two people? It defines how they fell, a critical moment in their lives – it MATTERS. So, what does it mean when someone asks whether the song is good enough?
The debate falls into a couple components:
Part Two: Our 3 Lessons… So, we are the worst in the world at this… we’re good at throwing out smelly fish, but not so good at shooting babies (I suddenly hope no sicko googles that phrase for some reason and finds us!). But, we do have some lessons so far:
Part Three: And this is what can happen if you don’t say no.
Glad to know the great ones have managed to get some stinkers into the public domain.
Check back soon for more info on this part of the song path
We’ve discussed a lot the danger of over-producing new artists and destroying their unique voice. Three quick case studies of this happening:
1. Cher Lloyd: So we remember her from X factor – Turn My Swag On: So here now is a classic example of over-production, where she sounds like anybody and nobody: Swagger Jagger:
The youtube video has twice the dis-likes as likes. Because it is awful. She’s not awful. It is awful! In contrast, here’s a wonderful example of under-production – Superheroes -and she’s fantastic:
2. Diane Vickers: We know her from Carry You Home:
And then they destroyed her with Once:
And now we have Janet Devlin. Please don’t ruin Janet. And we promise not to totally ruin Tati:
Jimmy
This section is about recording new performances over your basic track.
Check out the following posts for more info, or scroll down for more info:
Remember the rule: we don’t write these because we’re good. We’re learning and hope to share our lessons, most of which are derived from small and large failures. Today, we take on over-dubbing and we’ll change things up a bit…
Typically, we start with exploring the ‘best of topic X’ in popular song. The problem with over-dubbing is you don’t often know what all the choices made by artists on what to include and what not. Although we strongly recommend the ‘classic album’ series (now on DVD) or the Song Book series on Sky Arts 1. instead, we’ll just jump right into the our top 5 over-dubbing problems and then our top 5 lessons. But first let’s define what we’re talking about from our typical ‘layman’ perspective.
Part One: Over-dubbing: A Layman’s Perspective: As someone untrained, uneducated in all things music, Jimmy has made a virtue out of this by championing the ‘layman’s perspective’ and his ignorance. So here’s what I understand about over-dubbing. Well, first you must dub. Now, you’d assume that ‘dubbing’ was recordin and ‘over dubbing’ was adding additional tracks. But nope. Not that easy. Dubbing is actually about transferring recorded music from one medium to another. So ignore the whole ‘dubbing’ angle. Over-dubbing is just adding tracks over initial performance. It often also distinguishes the basic recording, which is what the core musicians could do live and the overdubs which the core musicians or invittees do after. But, that’s actually also a bit rubbish because very few basic recordings are done live anymore, because you want each track to be amble to be played with separately. For our purposes, though, we think about it as ‘the core song’ done by the core band live and all the rest. So this covers all the rest, including added instruments, dual track on vocals, vocal harmonies and of course slide whistles.
Part Two: Over-dubbing, The problems: The problem with over-dubbing is really simple: a) tape is cheap so you can do it endlessly, and b) everyone’s lazy so the ‘spill sucks/click rocks’ matra because critical. Spill alone will eventually drive you to your knees in fits of rage (assuming you could every actually get upset at something call ‘spill’ which seems so cute and gentle. How are these problems?
Part Three- Over-dubbing, Some Lessons Learned: As a group of lazy bastards that thrive on ‘cheap tape’ we’re the very last folks to advise on this. But as a virtual fountain of youth for endless lessons from failure, we also feel uniquely able to spew. Thus:
That’s it. Andy will go into more detail on the actual recording and mixing of instruments… And since this was so short, here’s something to entertain you, Barry Schwartz on why less is more, speaking at TED:
Jimmy
Our partner for Artwork and Design (and SMCC bass maestro) Rob Skipper, has put together these bits of info which may help you as you prepare your files for production. Of course if you want a professional to do it, then we can recommed Rob at Camden Electric Art.
First up – get the relevant artwork templates from your chosen CD production company. They are all slightly different between companies, so make sure you get the right ones. These can usually be downloaded from their website.
If you are going to use Quark XPress, InDesign or Illustrator to prepare your artwork then you probably know what to do and this article is not for you.
If you are using Photoshop or another image editor then here are a few tips that will hopefully help things go more smoothly:
DPI
For printing, the accepted standard for images is 300 DPI (dots per inch). Your Photoshop template should already be set up this way so don’t change it. Make sure the images that you place in the template have enough resolution.
CMYK
It’s OK to work in RGB whilst you’re building your designs but the final artwork must be in CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key(Black) as those are the four ink colours used on the printing press. When you turn your design to CMYK some of the colours might look a little less vibrant. It’s a long story about transmitted light (colour subtraction) versus reflected light (colour addition).
BLEED and CROP MARKS
On the paper parts, if any of your artwork touches the edge of the paper you will need to extend it over the edge by 3mm (3mm of bleed) to allow for the accepted tolerance of guillotining the booklet or inlay after printing. This is not needed on the CD face as the printing always stops a few mm from the edge.
FONTS
If you are working in Photoshop with fonts on layers then Saving the final artwork as a Photoshop PDF and choosing ‘Press Quality’ setting should ensure that the fonts are embedded in the PDF. This will make the fonts much sharper and more legible – particularly at smaller point sizes.
It would probably be good practice to keep your working files as .PSD and then when you’re ready to go to press, save them as Photoshop PDFs.
Finally, if you have any questions, get in touch with your CD production company who should be happy to help, and importantly get the right files to the right places at the right time – ensuring that you get your order on time, and looking like you expected it to look!
We use Copysounds for CD production. You’re artwork needs to fit a standad CD template, but more importantly, the template of the company you will use for CD production. Here is a link to Copysound’s templates page. Using these templates gives the corect about of bleed. You choose the booklet side you want. For our Discovery CD with Tati we used the TP03 – the 4 page booklet. You simply download that booklet and off you go. We use print resolution of 300dpi.
Check back soon for more info on this part of the song path
Check back soon for more info on this part of the song path
So, one nice gift you can use to help with promotion is to give out backstage passes. Obviously they aren’t really giving backstage access to your fans, but it all goes to help making them feel a part of the show – and can also help towards the holy grail – getting fans to visit your website after the gig, and hopefully stay in touch.
So, how to persuade them with a Laminate. You can get them professionally produced, but they can cost between £2 and £3 each. Great if you’re selling them, but not so great if you’re giving them away to the audience. Especially when they may only have spent £5 on the ticket. Once your venue and ticketing service have taken their cut, you’re not left with much, so you can make them yourself….
Well, first thing is the artwork. Your typical laminated backstage pass is around about 6.5cm x 9.5 cm. Some sites offer templates that you can use to create your artwork. Add your usual band branding and logos. You could link to a private page on your website, or using sites like Bandcamp, you could create free download codes.
Once your design is finished, you’ll need to print them out. One thing you might want to do, is print more than one out on a page (to save paper/card), and this isn’t always as easy as it sounds.
One way, on a Mac to print out multiple images on a page is as follows: Save your image as a jpeg and open it up in Preview. Preview is generally an application that is overlooked when it comes to working on the Mac, but it can actually be quite powerful and useful for some tasks. When in Preview, click file and then print, and in the print dialogue box, change the scale to 100%, which will mean the image isn’t scaled to the size of the paper (A4 usually). Then make sure auto rotate is switched ON, and then change the copies per page box. I recommend to 6. Any more and they’re too close together.
So, once you have your artwork, you need a laminator and some lamination pockets, and you’re ready. We got ours at Rymans, and they have £2 off their cheapest model at the minute. So, cut out your passes from the card and insert them into the lamination sleeve (use 250 microns to get the thick authentic feel). Place 6 or 8 into the sleeve and slide the fold end first into the laminator. Let it feed through at its own speed and when its finished, give it a second to cool. Then cut each pass out. Either use scissors or a craft knife and a cutting mat (with a safety ruler). Use scissors to round the corners, as otherwise they’ll be sharp.
The last stage is to put a hole in the top for your lanyard to go through. Use a standard hole punch and make sure you punch it in the middle.
All you then need are the lanyards. We got a bunch from ebay, for a good price. If you’re in a band, set up a production line, and you can have them made in no time at all. Its different, its quirky and can make a difference for big gigs.
We’ll post some photos of the ones we make for our gig at the Half Moon in Putney. Here’s our prototype:
If you make some, then send us pictures and we’ll post them here!
Now we know. While we work hard at Abubilla Music to create fun videos, we just don’t yet know what it takes. You just need a cup, some liquid and…
Our closest to this is of course Aiden’s Dream, which took slightly more effort!
Jimmy
So, this morning, an email popped into my inbox at Abubilla Towers, and I thought I’d share its contents with you:
http://www.brandedmedia.net/blog.php?id=1207583053916721439
For those shy of clicking on links away from AM, Branded Media are offering free plastic boxes to accompany branded USB sticks ordered from them. The offer is not extraordinary in itself, and is only for the month of September, but the interesting thing here is the idea of packaging a USB stick like a CD or album. Immediately I am hit with a multitude of possibilities of how this can help with the release of an audio product. A few of these are:
1. Your release need not be confined to being just audio. You could include all manner of things on the USB stick. Including videos, lyrics, artwork..the list goes on. If you can save it to disk, and it has a small enough file size then it can be included in the package.
2. Its a physical product. A lot of music consumers are still worried about downloading. The industry’s all out battle with the ‘torrenters’ and a few years back the ‘Napster’ generation (before it went legit), has in some way created pariahs, in the same way that drink-drivers (a once socially accepted and excepted norm) and smokers have been treated. While I’m not comparing drink-driving with downloading tunes without paying for them, the effect is the same. Mass media coverage of ‘industry experts’ suggesting that the downloaders are killing the industry is misleading and wrong. What they actually mean, is that the record companies don’t see the profits they used to, but anyway, am getting off topic here… Legal download sites have begun to turn the tide, but still people are still wary of giving credit card details over the internet for what amounts to a file. A physical product may go someway to rectifying this.
3. Its a new unique idea. One of the things people say is that ‘The internet killed the music business’. In my opinion, this couldn’t be more wrong. I can write a track, upload it and someone in Australian can be listening to it the same day. While this does nothing necessarily for content quality control, the playing field has leveled amazingly. As a result, everyone and their sister are making music. The key now is to make it stand out. This could help with this.
But…albums (not Abubilla) have been offered on USB sticks before and the idea has never really taken off, for a few reasons I think:
1. Longevity Once you have loaded the album onto your computer, you’re not likely to need the stick again (although I do except that the stick is a good backup – like a CD, and that you basically create a branding opportunity without trying.. people will carry a USB stick around in their bags, but not a CD generally..)
2.Usability You can’t just plug the stick into a player and hit play (again, some devices may do this, but there isn’t one in every home and office in the land).
3.Quality there are still audiophiles out there, who will not touch any kind of audio file. They want a CD. partly through
4. Price I’ve no idea on this one. Will ask Branded Media for a quote, but when we investigated Playbuttons we found them to be too expensive. The Playbutton is though, a great idea, and one which we may look at again in the future.
So, a few interesting theories there.. and a bit of wildly veering off topic. I’ll update the blog with the price when I find out. I can’t see the next Abubilla album appearing on USB stick, but then, who knows.. maybe it will be a packaged USB drive that lands on your doormat.
By the way King Henry’s Tears is available now on iTunes.. We’re in the process of updating the Abubilla Music site, so it hasn’t appeared as of yet on there, but will soon..
