68 - Mixing

I'm currently recording vocals and mixing my new CD. I know that some people like to put down all of the vocals and then mix, but I like to record vocals for two or three songs, do some rough mixes, and then move on. To each his own.

I like to make mixing easy on myself so I don't have to do a whole lot of fader automation. One thing I like doing is to normalize all the audio tracks. Then I pull the faders down and readjust them. For vocal tracks, if there are big long silent parts, I'll cut those parts out of the track totally. EQ is the toughest part of mixing for me. It's not too hard to balance levels, I don't think, but EQ is difficult. You can't really EQ a track in isolation all that well, because it's part of the mix. With one exception - vocals. I like to solo vocals and sweep the EQ until I find a frequency range that sounds annoying to me. I'll boost it to make sure I've found just the right range, and then I'll cut it. Old trick.

Other tricks I use? I solo the drums and bass and make the bass roughly the same volume as the bass drum. I like to add some 100 hz to the drums for a little boost. I roll off a lot of low end on my acoustic guitar tracks because they muddy things up. I compress vocals when I record, at about a 4 to 1 ratio. Then on playback I compress them AGAIN, anywhere from 2 to 1 to maybe 4 to 1. And I put a limiter on them too. I use Melodyne Uno for pitch correction. I don't mind vocals that are ever so slightly out of tune, unless it's my voice... in which case it drives me absolutely insane. I'm anal about it.

For this CD, I will NOT be mastering it real hot. I'm going to master it like it's 1983. No "loudness war" for me. Maybe it won't stand up real good on the radio. I'm not expecting to be ON the radio too much. I also don't care what it sounds like in mono.

Well, there were some disjointed thoughts for you. I'm thinking that my CD should be done in about 3 or 4 weeks, at the rate I'm going. Maybe sooner.

67 - Zee New Home!

Welcome to my new digs!

OK. All I did was create a blog at blogger.com and I'm pointing my URL to it. I got sick of running my own Wordpress install and messing with it. Here is my most recent post:

After one week, I’m pulling the plug on my free downloads. After column 66, where I extolled the virtues of my forward thinking 21st century marketing skills, it’s not easy to admit I was wrong… uh, actually, it’s REALLY easy to admit I was wrong. I have no problem making mistakes. And this column is about what I’ve learned, what I’m still learning, and what I want to learn. So with apologies to harmonycentral forums, where I’ve already discussed this, here’s the deal…

I’ve spent the last few days talking to as many people as possible about the idea of free 128k mp3 downloads. And the results of those conversations were interesting. It’s always better to ASK people than to guess. Some key points:

• Younger people do not have a problem with going to a web site and listening to music streamed. Older people like it less.

• Some people actually prefer streamed music to downloads. One reason is they can listen to it from any computer. This did not make sense to me. If you download the song, you can put it anywhere. Doesn’t have to make sense to me - it’s how some people felt.

• The majority of people 35 and older that I talked to (who weren’t musicians) had no real understanding of higher quality file formats and what that means. To them, they thought I had just decided to give my music away, period. Eek.

• A few people actually got annoyed with me because they bought my CD and were wondering why I didn’t tell them my music was free. Eek again.

• Streaming music caused repeat visits, which is a good thing because it means people are thinking about you and coming back.

My biggest mistake was making assumptions instead of doing research - even limited research of talking to actual real people. A whole lot of people, young and old, have no clue that a 128k crappy sounding mp3 file is actually that much crappier than a CD.

So it seems to me that streaming music is much more likely to cause an eventual sale than offering free downloads of low quality format. I’m off to redo my bandcamp settings. I just thought I’d share the results of this, so people can avoid this mistake, or at least laugh at how stupid I was to try it. There’s some comic value in that.