Digital Music Front

Archive for the ‘production’ Category

Another few months, another complete lack of posting. I have at least, not been entirely unproductive. I’ve been working on a track for a couple of months now. Actually its finished, and has been for a while, stuck in that same old post production loop. After an initially promising mix turned out to be completely gutless on a system with a decent sub, I tried cranking the bass up with disastrous results… distortion, mud, ick. So I got in a friend who is a professional sound engineer and a much more experienced producer than me to have a listen and help with the levels. He showed me a few tricks for making room in the mix for each sound and shit, but mostly he just told me to turn everything down and to cut rather than boost when trying to emphasise certain sounds.

So after a few 2 hour long sessions going thru the whole track from start to finish I’ve managed to get the levels under control. Now it just needs to be mastered, which apparently I have been going about all wrong. So I’m looking forward to getting that done, and this track being as good as it can be. As soon as I have the time that is…

Yeah, I moved house last week after getting notice to vacate my last apartment 2 weeks before christmas. Am now moved into a much nicer and more importantly larger house a bit further out of town. Sharing now, but at least its with my old housemate who I was actually able to live with reasonably easily and her new BF. Not quite fully moved in yet tho, studio is not set up as it were so it may be a few weeks before I get any more work done… who knows, maybe by the next time I post here I might have a track ready…

So a couple of weeks ago I ordered some books off Amazon:

One of the areas I’ve struggled with as a producer is that although I have a fairly good grasp of signal routing and how certain effects processors work, I don’t really understand much of the synthesis process and I think that perhaps if I did, I’d be a lot better at generating the kinds of sounds I want to make… so here’s hoping I learn something. If nothing else I’ll have some guidance into parameter tweaking and tuning and get more of a feel for how each one affects the sound shape. I’ll post a review when I’ve read them… which may tale a while knowing me.

Again with the slackness, and again due mostly to a lack of progress. I have been working on a new track lately and I’m happy with the way its coming along. I’ve been trying to modify my work flow to just put in an hour here and and hour there instead of setting aside whole days as that rarely happens and often I find when I do that I’m just not in the mood anyway. I tried to set aside some days in my calendar to work specifically on my music, but on the first day I ended up having to reinstall Logic because it was crashing on start up, and the second time I just couldn’t really get into the groove. So now I’m trying to take advantage of the mood when it strikes me, even if its only for an hour. So far the results are promising. I still have 2 unfinished tracks which need work but I think I might leave them til my new years holiday to work on again.

My plans to buy a hardware synth have been shelved for the moment mostly due to financial reasons. I have been looking into getting a DIY synth kit just for the sake of learning about how synths work better and having a bit of fun but I don’t know if my solder hand is up to the task, its never been very steady and something requiring fine motor control like a PCB might not be within my capabilities.

Yes I have been massively slack about updating this site. There are any number of excuses I could make, but in essence it all boils down to one thing: I haven’t been working on music at all lately. You would think after buying new monitors I might have lept back into it, eager to finish off some of the stuff I’ve left unmastered, but no. Its the same old story, I’m scared of it, I’m not compelled to work at it. I went out to see Protoculture a couple of weeks ago, one of my musical heroes. Every time I’m at a gig listening to great music I get this wave of motivation to get back into my own work, but i think its 9/10ths wishful thinking that one day I might be able to produce stuff as awesome as that.

Of course, my solution to this latest bout of procrastination is thinking I now need to buy a hardware synth, which I conveniently cannot afford right now, thus affording me another excuse to not do anything new until I can. Yes, I realise its getting pathetic at this point, but there is some actual justification for this new desire. As much as I love Logic and Reason, I find one of the most frustrating things about them is controlling synth parameters. Doing things ‘manually’ with the mouse is pain and it also restricts you to controlling one thing at a time. Mapping controller dials is an improvement, but I’ve found that in Logic its a pain in the ass to do, especially on 3rd party plug-ins, and in Reason the default maps it creates always seem to map to the oddest parameters (at least for my controller). My controller also only has 8 rotaries so its not enough to control a whole soft synth.

When you’re writing music in a studio environment, the less efficient means of control is less of a problem because generally you’re not trying to tweak things in real time. If you just want to jam however, its less practical. I envy The Rockstar Philosopher for his ability to just pick up his guitar and start mucking around, for me its a much more involved process which just serves as another deterrent to me actually sitting down and doing some work…

Oh yeah, Hi to all my visitors from ifeelmyself.com. My appologies about the state of the site, haven’t put nearly as much work into it as I should have. Chances are you’ve probably heard the demos already but if you want to hear some of the stuff I produce for myself then here are a couple of links until I get my shit together:

Sack the DJ featuring the Rockstart Philospher – Try harder

Sack the DJ – ninism

Come back and visit some time, read my hilarious rants and occasionally I will post a new track.

Actually, when I say I’ve done pretty much nothing with regard to working on my music, that’s not strictly true. I have been working, just not on my own stuff. Rather, I’ve been whoring my musical ‘talents’ out again to some people whom I am eternally grateful to – the porn industry, this time for ifeelmyself. At the request of a friend who works for them I produced a quartet of pieces to be used as backing music for video clips. Harder than it sounds, contrary to what you might think, not all porn music is bom-chika-wow-wow. Atmoshperic stuff is generally pretty easy to produce, but trying to picture how some track is going to go along with a naked girl feeling herself up is…. well, distracting….  ’scuse me….

Anyway, so far they’ve only bought one of the four, so at 3 – 5 hours work per piece, I’m not getting a very good return on investment. That said, I’ve been told that rather than the tracks getting bought grouped together its more likely they will just pay for them as they want to use them, which makes sense. Be interesting to see how long before they want the next one, or if they start asking for more without buying any of the others from the last batch.

Lately my musical endeavors have been much like this blog, which is to say, I’ve done pretty much nothing. After my last rant regarding my craptastic monitors, I’ve felt less inclined to put much effort into producing, almost as if the effort is not really worth it until I can over come this hurdle (which is fundamentally a financial problem). Ideologically speaking  this shouldn’t really be stopping me, I was talking to the Rockstar Philosopher just the other day about the realisation that I could and should just focus on getting the music down and worrying about post when I’ve got better equipment. Practically speaking I’m not very good at this, I hate leaving something unfinished… I just sank 100 hours into playing Lost Odyssey to completion before I would even think about picking up another game.

I have however, mostly by accident, managed to start working on another track while ‘Thru the wringer’ languishes in its unmastered state. As seems to be my modus operandi I stumbled upon the beginnings of this next track while cobbling together unfinished bits and pieces from previous work. Every now and then while I’m working on something I will stumble across a bass line or a note progression that I like which isn’t really suitable for the piece I’m working on and just save it in a different file. Then one day when I’m bored I go thru all this crap aiming to clear most of it out and end up using half of it. Behold, Frankensong is born… Actually… I should use that.

I managed to overcome my recent bout of musician’s block long enough to finish the latest track I’ve been writing. Finish at least to the extent that the music is written and layout done. Now what remains to do is that most hated part of any musical recording – post production.

When the Rockstar Philosopher and I released our first track as Untitled Project, I was surprised at how different it sounded on speakers other than the ones we had just spent the last 8 weeks writing it on. I suspect that a large part of this is due largely to my mediocre mastering skills, but I do believe there is also a significant component that can be put down just to the different response curves of different speakers. I’ve never really paid much heed to how different one song sounds on different systems, until I was listening to my own music.

This experience really hammered home the need for a good pair of monitor speakers, but unfortunately all my rather limited budget could afford when I last went gadget shopping was a pair of Edirol MA-7A’s. They’re not bad little speakers, but they’re also about the cheapest monitors money can buy, and as with anything, you get what you pay for. The speaker cones are only 3 inches, and subsequently they have almost no bass response. That is unless you turn on the bass boost function, however that render’s them useless as monitor speakers – why something like this is even included on a monitor speaker I don’t know, except perhaps that they are really aiming at a more general purpose computer speaker rather than a true monitor.

The upshot of having to use such ill suited equipment is that the mix down and mastering process for me is a convoluted and protracted nightmare that often takes me longer to complete than the actual creation of the song. I will spend hours tweaking the levels, trying to make sure its a nice balanced sounding mix, with no clipping or horrid over compression sounds, and then bounce it all to disk, only to find that what I had sounding pretty decent at home sounds like gutless radio trash on anything else. So the process is repeated, and I go home and try to remix the song in a way to compensate for the deficiencies I heard when played on a real system, only I’m again limited in what I can hear, and so it usually takes me between 10 and 20 attempts til I get something I’m remotely happy with.

So it is that post production has become something that I dread, its the thing that makes me hate being a producer, its that last horrible barrier to being able to say “I’m done with this,” and moving onto to something new. Worse, it even starts to make me hate my own music. I always think its a sign of how good a song is, that you can listen to it through over and over throughout post production, with only minor variations to the levels and overall sound, and not end up hating it. But I am getting close, and thats a problem obviously, because I don’t want to hate my own music.

Unfortunately the only real solution to this I can see is to get better speakers, but my budget doesn’t really allow for that at this point in time. So until it can, I guess I will be dishing out loads of tinny sounding radio trash.