Cheap Advice On Music

One of the biggest threats to your studio equipment, and your instruments, comes from a humble source: good old-fashioned dust. This invisible menace can make your faders fickle and your knobs noisy with the passage of time. It’s a miracle substance that can work its way into the tiniest imaginable crevices, borne on unseen currents of air, attacking your gear day by day!

Do you see those spaces between the keys of your keyboard? And the spaces around the fader shafts of your mixer? To a piece of dust, these are huge portals to the inner workings of your equipment. The consequences of an infiltration can be major. How are you going to turn that guitar up for a lead part during a mixdown if the fader for that channel makes a loud SCRZCHCH noise as you move it?

A related problem that you may or may not have at your place is animal hair, blobs of fur that fairly leap off of Fluffy or Fido and make a beeline for your mixer controls. And please don’t tell me you let your pet sleep on your gear just because it’s warm! Pets and electronics make a bad combination. I once saw the inside of a VCR I owned whose ventilation fan had sucked in enough cat hair to make a whole ‘nother kitten. It wasn’t pretty. (And the VCR never worked again.)

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When I first started recording, I used two reel-to-reel tape decks, bouncing each song back and forth between the decks, adding a new part each time. Hardly ideal, but there was no such thing as a multi-track recorder for home use at the time!

With this recording technique, it is not very handy to set a partly completed song aside for awhile to work on something new, what with the tapes being 1800 feet long and the song being somewhere in the middle! As a result, I usually worked on one song until it was done, then started a new song and worked on that until it was done, and so on. There were never more than two or three songs “in process” at the same time.

After I graduated to a 4-track cassette-based recorder, it was very easy to simply set aside a partially completed song on one cassette and start a brand new song on another. So, before long, I had a dozen or more uncompleted songs lying around. I came to realize that I am bigger on having a cool idea, writing a song, and starting to record it than I am on coming back later and actually finishing the recording. I’d rather go come up with something else now!

When I moved on up to the deluxe 8-track digital recorder I am using now, the problem became even worse. At this moment I would say I have about 25 songs on various discs that have been started but still need more instruments and/or vocals to finish them off. Some of these are fully recorded backing tracks that I have no lyrics for. Others have some of the instruments recorded and are now ready for drums, or bass, or keyboard, or whatever. Quite a few have a “scratch” lead vocal that should be re-done.

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Sometimes I write a song that comes with an arrangement “included.” That is, specific instrumental and backup-vocal parts “come to me” right along with the chords, melody, and lyrics. (Songs based on riffs or other signature melodic figures are often like this.) In this case, recording the song is simply a matter of laying down the needed parts one by one as they were originally conceived, or as close as I can get to it!

Most often, though, the “song” as written is basically just a melody and lyrics accompanied by chords strummed on an acoustic guitar. All decisions about instrumentation, textures, harmony, and so on are left to be determined when I finally record the song. But when that time comes, how do I decide what to actually play?

I have a standard sequence for recording a typical song that I can always fall back on. First I record a click track (to be erased later) and a strummed guitar to establish the rhythm and the chord pattern. Then I add drums, then bass guitar or a keyboard bass. A pad-type keyboard comes next, followed by a lead part on guitar or keyboard. Finally, I add a couple of backup vocals, one or two lead vocal parts, and maybe a tambourine or maracas. And there’s my typical song!

Assuming that I am making up the arrangement as I go, the various parts always get made up in the same order with this approach: rhythm guitar, then drums, then bass, etc. The later parts tend to be more inspired because more of the song is “there” when I make them up. In contrast, when I’m doing the drums I don’t really know exactly what I’m drumming along with because I haven’t made it up yet!

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Most home recording studios start out simple and small, perhaps consisting only of a studio-in-a-box standalone recorder or a bare-bones computer-based setup. But then we start adding things, don’t we? An outboard mixer for the drums, brought in on Aux Return 2. An effects unit we like better than any of our plugins so we use it as an insert on Channels 3 and 4. A new mic pre that we use instead of the built-in one on Microphone Input 1. Maybe even a patch panel!

At first, it’s easy to keep all this straight in your head as you leap to quickly make all the right connections and adjustments before you lose the inspiration for that new epic song. But as time goes by and you make more changes, you will find yourself losing track of the connections you don’t use very often. What inserts did I plug that effects unit into again? Argh! What is this cable in the #11 output jack on the patch panel?

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Most songs we write and record have instruments and/or vocals, but nothing else. Let’s face it, the most exotic sound on most of our recordings is a tambourine. This is not necessarily a Bad Thing. After all, “instruments and/or vocals” takes in a pretty wide range, from Gregorian Chant to Smooth R&B and everything in between! But every now and then, just for the sheer novelty value, you ought to consider using some kind of sound effects in one of your songs.

Some songs, like “Yellow Submarine” by the Beatles, are positively filled with scene-setting sound effects. Birds twitter throughout “Blackbird” by the same band. More recently, digital mixmeister Beck and others have combined “found sounds” and other effects with musical samples to create audio collages in their songs. Of course, this is a technique where a little bit can go a long way. There’s no need to overdo it!

As a songwriter, you can specify what sound effects will be heard when by adding notations like (alarm clock here) to your lyrics sheet, or at least having a firm idea of what specific effects will be used where as you write the song. In this case, the effects would be considered part of the song. Alternatively, you can wait until you have your Producer hat on and decide whether and where to add sound effects when you mix the song. Here, the effects would be considered part of the arrangement. Read the rest…

We know that musical creativity has a lot to do with our mood, the mindspace we are in when we are writing or recording a song. We also know that the visual environment within which we work has a big influence on our mood. So, with these facts in mind, take a look at your own home studio. Does it look like a stimulating yet relaxing environment that will release the imagination? Or does it look like a corner of a cinder-block basement with a bare light bulb overhead?

Two ways to instantly create a mellower mood in your studio both have to do with lighting:

• Make it dimmer
• Use a colored light bulb

Harsh, overly-bright light is a real mood killer. Other than maybe when reading lyrics, I find I don’t need all that much light to work. Are you the same? Try turning off as many lights as possible, and use lower-wattage bulbs in the ones you leave on. Emphasize indirect lighting. No bare bulbs, please!

In my home studio, I always have a red (or blue) floodlight aimed at the ceiling in a corner, in addition to regular (if dim) white bulbs near the recorder, keyboard, etc. The floodlight suffuses the room with a colored glow that I find conducive to creativity. Maybe the same will work for you!

[An expanded version of this Mini-Tip appears in my eBook, Cheap Advice On Home Recording.]

Among the many decisions we face when mixing a typical song, one of the most important is what effects, if any, we are going to add to the recorded tracks. In particular, the addition of artificial reverb to one or more of the vocal parts can have a big impact on how that vocal sounds in the final mix. In this article, I will use one of my own songs to demonstrate the result of adding reverb to lead and/or backup vocals.

Let me start with some general advice about using reverb. To begin with, I recommend that you record the vocals “dry,” with no reverb, to give yourself maximum flexibility at mixing time. You don’t want to get locked in to a reverb setting that sounded great during recording but now doesn’t “go” with the rest of the mix. (Note that I would put plenty of reverb on the vocal monitor signal you send to the artist - it’s a real confidence builder. Just don’t record the reverb.)

My second tip is to make your reverb adjustments for individual vocals and instruments while listening to the full mix. When setting reverb, it is always tempting to “solo” the vocal or instrument in question (i.e. listen to it by itself) to see how the reverb sounds. The fact is, it doesn’t matter how it sounds with the instrument alone, since that’s not the way it will be heard! Every reverb adjustment, whether to level, duration, or color, should be made in the context of the full mix. (After you get it perfect, then listen to each source alone if you want, but I’m warning you. Some will sound “wrong.” Don’t you go “fixing” them!)

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When it comes time to mix those 8 or 16 or however many tracks down to stereo, there are three basic factors under your control for each track: (1) volume level; (2) EQ and effects; and (3) stereo position (panning).

In this article, I would like to offer some cheap advice on stereo panning. This may seem rather unimportant compared with the other factors, merely a matter of placing the most important elements in the center and panning secondary guitars and keyboards to the right and left. There. Done! But of course there’s more to it than that.

A lot of today’s listening takes place in headphones, where the placement of sounds to the left or right is very obvious. Stereo drums sound very different from mono drums in headphones. Same with any other stereo signal, like the stereo return from a reverb or chorus unit. Everything seems exaggerated and hyper-clear in headphones, which is not surprising considering that the sounds seem to be coming from inside the listener’s head!

With this in mind, I have found the following practices to be advantageous.

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