Cheap Advice On Music

Here’s a mixing tip that applies to both home recording and live sound. With both types of mixing, your mission is to establish and maintain a balance of levels for the various instruments and vocals, while keeping the mixer controls set somewhere close to their “normal” positions. Specifically, the volume faders should never end up all toward the bottom or all toward the top of their range, as this indicates a problem with gain structure, which can result in noise and/or distortion in your final output.

Why would this happen? In a typical scenario, you start out with all the mixer faders at the default “0″ point, i.e. about 3/4 of the way up. (This is accomplished by adjusting the mixer’s Input Trim controls for each channel so that each input produces a “0″ peak reading on the output meter with its channel fader set to the “0″ point.) Then you set the mixer’s Master Volume control to produce a suitable sound level through the onstage speakers (or through your home-studio monitors). Everything looks great. Then the music starts.

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A lot of popular songs are built on standard chord patterns (see my article Standard Chord Patterns For Basic Song Segments for some examples of such patterns). The reason these patterns work in songs is partly because they are familiar. For music to be interesting to the listener, it must combine elements of the familiar with unexpected twists on those familiar elements. If a song sounds too familiar, we say it is “cliched.” If a song sounds too unfamiliar, we say it is “inaccessible” or even “arty” (gasp). Somewhere between these extremes lies the right combination of old and new.

All of this applies to your songs too! If the verse of your song is four lines of A D E A and the chorus is two lines of D A D A plus an E7 chord, well, that probably sounds OK, but it’s a little bit boring. Everything that happens in the song chords-wise is totally predictable. Patterns repeat; there is no chord outside the three chords in the key of A (no minor chords even!); the chorus is higher by an interval of a fourth compared with the verse. You know what’s coming next the first time you hear the song. Ho hum.

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When we mix a song, one of the things we are always listening for is tonal balance - that’s right, the old bass & treble bit. Too much bass and it’s boomy or bottom-heavy. Too much midrange and it’s squawky or boxy. Not enough treble and it’s muffled or dull.

Of course, problems like this are relatively easy to hear, diagnose, and fix with a bit of EQ. Drop that bass, boost that treble! But what about subtler problems? What about cases where you know there’s something wrong with the EQ but you aren’t sure just what? No problem! Riding to the rescue is the spectrum analyzer, which allows you to see what’s going on with your EQ, so that you can fix the sound.

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I don’t suppose anyone reading this remembers The Perry Como Show, a musical variety program that ran in various forms on NBC-TV during the 50s and early 60s. Perry Como was a Bing Crosby-like crooner who enjoyed immense worldwide popularity in those years. I remember watching his show from time to time back when I was about 9 or 10 years old.

At the beginning of each show I saw, Como would sit in what looked like an ordinary living room and perform an opening song. Now, here’s why I’m telling you all this. Before he started singing, he would turn and lift the tone arm of a phonograph on the table next to him and then drop the needle on the opening grooves of a record. Music would swell, and Perry would croon. That’s right, he sang along with a record, karaoke style!

At the time, I couldn’t figure out why he did this, but later I realized that it was a clever artifice to gloss over the fact that Como’s singing was accompanied by lush orchestration despite the lack of any actual musicians visible on the set. (Earlier versions of show had featured a live orchestra, but by the time I was watching it they were apparently down to just a record player.)

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When I first set up a simple computerized studio for MIDI-plus-audio recording, I used the audio hardware that came with my computer (a Windows machine from Hewlett-Packard) to get audio into and out of the Cubase software I was learning at the time.  Since I planned to record alone in that studio, my needs were simple.  I used an external mixer to route microphone signals to the “Line In” connector on the PC, and I used a MIDI-to-USB cable to directly input MIDI parts from a keyboard.  The PC’s “Speaker Out” connector was connected to a power amplifier and a pair of desktop speakers.

As I worked with Cubase, I came to realize that using the PC audio hardware was not the best approach for this kind of recording.  The main problem was that I was unable to use the various monitoring modes offered by Cubase, since everything that came in on the Line In connector came right out the speakers, whether I wanted to be hearing the input signal or not.  I needed a way to listen to only what Cubase was actually putting out as a monitor signal, not what I was putting in.

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If you write songs, you are always looking for interesting new ideas for lyrics. Chords and melodies you can come up with, but what should the dang thing be about? Sure, you can fall back on the tried and true, but how many songs can you write about your lover leaving you, or refusing to leave, or coming back, or refusing to come back? Or, you can write about the moving non-lover events in your actual life, but if you’re like most of us, there really aren’t that many of those.

It’s time to turn to your fellow man (and woman)! If you have a small notebook, a pencil, and a little imagination, you can come up with an endless series of potential song topics simply by listening in on the conversations of strangers. This eavesdropping is not difficult to do. In fact, it is generally unavoidable in this Age Of the Cell Phone, although actual overheard cell phone conversations tend to be hyper-mundane rather than usable song fodder. I am not talking about monitoring those conversations.

I am talking about discreetly listening to the conversation of the couple at the table behind you at Bob Evans, or sitting in front of you at the movies. Or the guys walking next to you on the sidewalk, or waiting in line at McDonald’s. If you keep your ears open, you’re sure to hear a phrase, a sentence, or a description of a situation that triggers a song idea in your mind. When it happens, be sure to make a note of it. This is the kind of thing that can easily “slip away.”

If you are a bit skeptical of this approach, I would ask you to at least keep it in mind the next time you are forced to listen to strangers converse. What’s the harm? As you pretend to read the paper (or whatever), listen carefully for a situation or a statement that you could expand into a song. Yes, many times you will come up empty, but you may be surprised at what you hear that one time when you get lucky!

P.S. Some visual artists use the same technique.

We’ve all gotten used to hearing recorded music in stereo by now. Only real old-timers (like me) can remember when all records were mono and a “hi-fi” system only needed one speaker. Stereo arrived in the mid-60s, and following a brief period when each record was available in separate mono and stereo versions, often with very different mixes (see Pepper, Sgt.), we finally reached the point where all records, all cassettes, all CDs are now in stereo.

Lots of bands that play live have PA systems with two main speakers. Since home stereo systems also have two speakers on the left and right, the question arises, should we create a stereo mix of the PA signals to play through the “stereo” PA speakers? My answer is basically no, but before I go into why, let’s quickly review exactly what stereo is in the first place. (Audio engineers can skip the next section.)

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A lot of songs that I hear online (and elsewhere) have the major problem of losing momentum at some point in the song.  To me, this is one of the worst things that can happen.  Think of it like you were talking to someone in person, telling an important story. What you don’t want to see is them looking at their watch, or at something going on behind you! That means you’ve lost their interest, which is a Bad Thing.

There are a number of ways to lose the momentum of a song. One is to repeat a song segment without development (”second verse, same as the first” is another Bad Thing). Another is to have lengthy “dead zones” between the verses of your song, the dreaded “wait for it to come around on the git-tar” effect. Here’s my advice for avoiding this: don’t repeat the whole song intro between the first and second verses.

When you’re writing your song, start by trying it with no space between the verses. OK, the lyrics will overlap, you have to breathe, whatever, it was worth a try. Then try it with just one bar in between. Musically awkward? Sometimes. But you will rarely need more than two bars of “link time” between verses, so don’t use four - or eight!

(An expanded version of this Mini-Tip appears in my eBook Cheap Advice On Songwriting.)