Producing an Album for the First Time: Part IV–Creating Monsters

Now, I'll preface this with saying, these aren't tutorials.  There might be some nuggets of "how-to"-ness in there, but these are softer, more philosophical pieces that take you into the challenges I faced and how we got from "sure, I can help!" to "that's it!  It's perfect as we're going to get it!  Let's do this!"  For the record, we're not there, yet.  Are we ever there, yet?

So…there’s this song.  It’s got a good hook and a good guitar line.  The vocals are good on the scratch track.  All in all, it sounds like a good track, probably on the back end of the album to help balance it out and make for a solid album start to finish.  Then something happened.  We brought in this fella John who was to play “fiddle.”  Well, John so happens to be brilliant and talented through and through and within one practice take with this song, we were all looking at each other like…”wow!”

At that point, the rest of the track needed to be laid down and with each piece, the monster grew.  Soon, there were re-recorded vocals, guitars, bass, bagpipes, bodhrun, djimbe, drums, and violins.  Some didn’t make the final cut.  Some takes got spliced and reworked enough to make a couple of solid tracks with the best all in one place.  If you were to place all the tracks into the mix and just let ‘em go, it would make you twitch – there’s THAT much going on in this song.

As happens, there were, in total, 48 mixdowns of this song to get it “right,” and, I think I mentioned, I’m not sure we are 100% there, but, we’re really close and part of it came from understanding that compression does when met with four main sources of volume in a track, even when there are 16 total tracks (excluding fx tracks).  We ran into a problem with the monster, once everything was fixed, tonally through EQs and light compression, some reverb here and there, and so on.  What’s the problem, you ask?  The monster gets hungry and has to eat things.

OK, so the metaphor may be getting stretched a little, but here’s the bottom line – when one thing gets loud, something else gets soft, and finding the balance is the true monster.  I tried so many methods to get the vocals to sit nicely while still allowing you to hear each part clearly.  It was almost comical, though, as I’d have what I thought was a good balance, and then after mixdown, the vocals would either be lost or so up front to a point where everything else sounded lost in the background…   So many iterations!  I finally discovered the culprit – the compressor in the Master track.

Full disclosure – I use the Slate Digital FG-X Mastering plugin and I really like it.   That said, it does what compressors/limiters do – when one thing gets louder than the threshold, it makes it quieter and when one frequency range is dominating the mix, bad things happen, overall.  What I found was, each individual track sounded absolutely fine when solo’d.  When I had vocals and “instruments,” it was fine.  The culprit?  The drums.  The train driving to oblivion was, in fact, obliterating the mix.  When I added the drums back in, the overall sound dropped ~3dB and, specifically, the vocals sank closer to 4dB. 

So, how does one tame a monster like this?  I basically figured out that I had to do what I tried a while ago – mix down the instrumentation and vocals separately and bring them together for a mixdown and then send that mixdown to the mastering round.  It wasn’t the most elegant solution, but it was the only solution I found – remember I’m a bit of a rookie with this! – that allowed the full dynamics of the instrumentation (all of it!) and vocals to coexist.  The end result?  An Irish Rebel Rock song that feels a lot like the Motörhead “Orgasmatron” cover train looks.

Producing an Album For the First Time: Part III–Style’s Substance

We live in a world that’s largely driven by the notion of style over substance and, to me, that’s pretty sad.  That said, that’s not really what this is about.  This is about what substance your style brings to the table, especially when you’re working with something that isn’t necessarily your style.
A little more opaque, this morning, with this entry, it would seem, allow me to clarify.  The artist in question can be described as an acoustic, Irish, rebel rock musician.  I can be described as a heavy metal, sometimes acoustic musician.  While an unlikely pairing, there are more similarities than I really thought, at first.  His musicianship and delivery bridge the gap, quite nicely, and I can appreciate the “slower stuff,” too.  It’s what we bring to the table and it’s what colors our views.  Learning to understand when it was just my “metal sensibilities” taking over and when it was something that would benefit the song was an slow process, mainly because there had to be an understanding that it was happening.  You also learn how much you appreciate listening to other styles of music when you can switch gears between them.
The most prominent example of this comes from a song that might get put into a “building a monster” entry, sometime later.  It’s been the most technically challenging track to nail down of any that I’ve dealt with.  Now, as a rookie, that doesn’t leave many – just all the other tracks on the album and then all the previous ones that I’ve practiced on in the past.  So, with that, the song grew from a jangly attitude song to a freaking beast over the course of recording.  Naturally, the metalhead in me screamed for a serious thickening underneath it all with double bass drums, pounding bass, vocal doubling ( or more!) and some effects on the violin to make it scream.  This, my friends, would make an even more gigantic mess than what have 26 tracks already makes, especially when 3 instruments are all fighting for the same frequencies – bagpipes, guitar and violin.
So, I had to step back and listen to some songs that brought those instruments together and get more in that mindset.  What it helped with, more than anything, was placement.  More on that in a later entry, but needless to say, when it comes to “wall of sound,” metal has a pretty good bead on it – though, not a corner on the market, as this song proves.  Still, letting the song be an Irish Rebel Rock song and not a slightly acoustic metal song was a challenge for me because of my “style,” but I couldn’t let my “style” run over the obvious, power substance of this track. 
We all bring our own style to everything we do.  I’ve learned that the wisdom is when to let the style take a backseat to the substance at hand and let it have the spotlight.

Producing an Album For the First Time: Part II … Don’t Fear the Reaper

Not just a fun reference to one of my favorite bands, growing up (BÖC), but also a nod towards my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) of choice, Cockos’ Repear.  Now, going into this album’s production, I had *just*, and I mean within the previous week and a half or so, switched over from ProTools.  So, with that, it’s probably wise to go into why I switched and then how it influenced the production process.

Why I Switched

It boiled down to CPU bludgeoning, plain and simple.  Basically, I learned how to do everything I could do in ProTools with Reaper and with maybe 1/4 of the CPU cost which became very important as I started mixing a goodly number of tracks that, in Reaper, caused stuttering.  In ProTools, it just choked and died.  If there’s one thing that REALLY kills a workflow, it’s making a tweak, rendering the output, listening to it, going back in, making a tweak, rendering it out, and so on.  So, it was really simple for me to switch when one was able to give me everything I needed and not die a horrible death when asked to do just a little more.

The Impact

The impact was immediately discernable.  Full disclosure – behind closed doors, I created the projects for the first song in both ProTools and Reaper.  I still wasn’t willing to give up the familiar, comfortable, “industry standard” without a side-by-side comparison doing the exact same thing.  So, again, the impact was obvious and definite.  I added all the drum stems (kick, snare, tom 1 – 4, hi hat, crash), bass stems (di & mic’d), guitar stems (R & L), violin stems (takes 1 & 2) and vocal stems (primary, double).  So, it total, I added 16 tracks to each DAW.  Then I pressed “play.”  

Background: my system, at the time, was an AMD Athlon II Duo-core 3GHz system with 8GB RAM.

So, I pressed play, first in ProTools then, later in Reaper.  The result?  ProTools chopped, stuttered, stopped.  Reaper, played, though with choppiness, at first, which smoothed out after about 30 seconds.  Now, I know there are settings in each to optimize playback so that it’s not quite so bad, but, to me, if you can’t handle the first song I throw at you with your default settings, I’m sorry but…it’s not me, it’s you.

So, the impact on production was that, at least on my desktop system, I was able to track and edit every song including one that’s a 22-track romping wall of sound.  My laptop, on the other, was less forgiving than even the desktop and Reaper was the clear choice, there, though even it couldn’t play the two monster tracks…poor laptop. 

What sealed it?  Actually adding effect inserts on the tracks.  Reaper kept chugging while ProTools seized and just refused.  So…yeah, from a workflow standpoint, being able to do things with the tracks was a major plus, as I’m sure you’re aware.

Update to the above number – because of the necessity to layer the vocals even more and add some “oomph” to the drums in places, it’s become a 28-track monster, but that also includes side-chained bussing for effects sends and better overall track organization.  That said, it still choked ProTools dead.

Next installment – Part III – Style’s substance

Producing an Album For the First Time: Part I

This is going to be a multi-part retrospective and exposition on what it has been like being tapped to produce an album with, literally, no previous experience.  In a case of “we all have to start somewhere” mixed with “I know a lot of theory” with a sprinkle of “well, here were go, then!” I charged forth with dark gusto into a land heretofore unknown and full of peril, reward, but most of all, potential.

First and foremost, you might ask how this came about.  Basically, I know an artist who’s busted his hump for the last few decades and hasn’t hit a break, and was coming up on another roadblock and it all seemed to revolve around money.  It was at that point that I took what little knowledge I had and, yes Ms. Mosby, “a little learnin’ is a dangerous thing,” and threw my hat into the ring, offering whatever assistance and expertise I could to help him get this record not only recorded, but produced and into the hands of fans, new and old.  For the record, I had NO idea what I was getting into.  This is, of course, to be expected.

I had just made the full defection from ProTools to Reaper and, as such, was currently learning the ropes with it and had no established workflow to speak of, no real concept of what I needed to do, template-wise, and no understanding of how much it was going to take to get from “artist arriving” to “handing off a CD.”  For the record, we’re still not to that last point, but we’re getting there.  It’s a process – that’s something you need to understand from the outset – and it’s a living, breathing thing.

1. Step one – Recording

The discussions are over and it’s time to get the musician in there.  Now, there are some things to be done!  I had looked over all the checklists.  I had looked at all the preparatory documentation we should need and printed off individual track worksheets.  I had read so many blogs, forum threads, eBooks and articles that my head was swimming.  It was at this point I was eternally grateful that my partner in this venture had quite a number of years’ experience with the recording side of things.  He took over the reigns for recording, but that, also, set up an interesting dynamic later on.  He’s Mac based and we ended up doing all of the recording and preliminary editing in LogicPro X. 

Honestly, as the mixer/producer, my role in this situation was mainly as cheerleader. I kept notes to the best of my ability and tried to keep my burgeoning cold at bay so as not to ruin many takes with a rogue cough or sneeze.  Two and a half minutes never felt so long as when you’ve got a tickle in the back of the throat and a sneeze on-deck and you pretty much have to hold your breath the entire time.  Since this was late December, a lot of us were sniffly, including our brilliant violinist who despite coming in and just blowing us away, had a little “snurf!” at the end of just about every run.  I felt bad, but with a little editing, those were mostly editable and those that weren’t, I quickly figured out how to bury in the mix.

All in all, with all the musicians, from scratch tracks to “final takes,” it took around 7 days, spread over a couple of weekends.  There was travel involved for a few, and some broken up sessions, tackling a few songs at a time, as one would expect, and it was amazing to watch, learn, and hear everything start to come together.  We were hearing it go from mere ideas and hopes to an actual album with a metric tonne, as it were, of potential. 

The vocals were – and still are – a significant challenge in this because the artist is not some pop diva or emo mewler, but rather an Irish folk-rocker (rebel rocker!) who had not only a fairly wide dynamic range, overall, but a strong set of pipes that took a lot of finessing to tame.  It was also a voice that, as the mixing process progressed, seemed to defy all of the common “standards” and I found myself confused and searching in a lot of ways as to how to make the voice sound big without sounding thin or “crispy” which is something that you know when you hear it.

We used quality mics for the recording and thought we had it all finished.  We were wrong.  I was finding that I had to really work with and mess with and tweak the vocals in order to give them “life.”  This went on for a couple of iterations back and forth and tweaking and grumbling.  Finally, the artist re-recorded the vocals with a different mic, sent the files, and they sounded good: warm, up front, and not really needing much by way of an EQ treatment.

This brings us to a logical stopping point and leads us to part 2 – Don’t fear the Reaper…