Cheap Advice On Music

In the band I run sound for, Rusty Strings, there are three singers and two lead instruments, namely guitar and keyboard (the keyboard player also plays flute on some songs). Each different combination of lead vocalist, harmony vocalist, backup singers, and lead part(s) calls for a slightly different mixer setup: turn Singer 1 up and Singer 2 down for this song, get ready to bring up the keyboard solo in the middle, and so on.

For me, it is vital to at least know what the next song is so that I can preset the mixer appropriately for it during the prolonged applause for the song the band just finished playing. Having a simple list of songs may be enough if the sound man really, really knows the band’s songs and arrangements. But even then, it’s nice to have something beyond just a list of titles to go on. If the sound man is unfamiliar with the band, it’s even more important to provide a proper set list. OK, what would be a proper set list look like? I’m glad you asked!

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If you’d really like to record a shiny new song but you just don’t have any decent lyrics on hand, I say don’t let that stop you. Try borrowing ready-made lyrics from a poem, the more obscure the better. You don’t want people recognizing your source - unless of course you do!

I have recorded a setting of Kyrie Eleison, which a few people have heard of, and I have set some of Robert Louis Stevenson’s words to music, and I suppose someone might recognize them. But my favorite experience with setting an obscure poem to music came a few years ago (ahem), when I came across a poem by Ada Smith in a little book of poetry I found on my grandmother’s bookshelf. The poem goes like this.

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The best place for a band’s sound man (or woman) to sit is right in the middle of the audience. (That’s where you see them at Rolling Stones concerts and the like.) If the sound man hears exactly what the audience is hearing, he can adjust the sound until it sounds good to him, confident that it will sound good to the audience as well. But how often does the sound man sit with the audience?

From my experience as the sound man for Rusty Strings, the answer is “hardly never.” I have been way off to the side. I have been right up front, right next to one of the main speakers. I have even been onstage with the band! None of these are optimal positions for creating the best sound for the people who are actually listening to the music.

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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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