Cheap Advice On Music

Sharing your home-recorded music with others is easier than ever in these enlightened days of the Internet Age.  Your DAW, whether hardware or software, undoubtedly has a way of exporting your song as a WAV or AIFF computer file, which can be easily converted to a space-saving mp3 file.  The mp3 file can then be carried around on your thumb-drive keychain, loaded into your iPod, or even uploaded to the web for all the world to hear. Cool!

Still, there’s a special satisfaction in having an actual high-quality CD with your recordings on it to give to people - like family, friends, booking agents, whoever. And, for those who treat their music as fine art, the ability to design the CD label and the booklet and the back cover of the case presents a wonderful opportunity to extend the artistry and themes of the recorded album into the visual realm through its packaging. Let’s face it, a CD with well-designed artwork is a lot more impressive than one with “New Songs 09″ scrawled on the label with a Sharpie!

Read the rest…

It’s natural to want to write songs that sound like the current hits or to follow the lead of a favorite band or subgenre that’s in favor at the moment. But if you want to stand out as a songwriter, perhaps you should cast your net a bit wider, so to speak. Older song styles may be outdated or little remembered, but that doesn’t mean they’re invalid!

It’s not too unusual for current songwriters to hark back to the Beatles or other Titans Of the Sixties, but in this article I’m going to suggest going waay back. I’m going to suggest listening to songs that were hits before your mother was born (though she was born a long, long time ago) and then writing your own song in a similar style. If you end up recording your “retro” song, this might well extend to the instrumentation and production as well (or not).

Read the rest…

You know what they say about a picture and a thousand words. Well then, I have about two thousand words’ worth for you in this article!

I sometimes get e-mails from people who are uncertain about what components are part of a typical live sound setup, or exactly how to hook them up. Instead of trying to describe all the interconnections that are commonly involved, I decided to draw up a diagram (two, actually) of the setup that Rusty Strings, the band I run sound for, uses for their live shows.

Read the rest…

The monitor speakers you use while mixing and mastering are a key factor in how your mixes will sound on someone’s stereo or in someone’s car. Although there are reasons to use headphones to verify the details of your mix (see my article Check Your Mixes In Headphones), there is no doubt that a good set of monitor speakers are required if you want your mix to sound good on a wide range of systems.

Sadly, though, the room you do your mixing in has a huge effect on how your monitor speakers actually sound, and the effect is usually to mar the sound in some way, generally by over- or under-responding to certain frequencies or frequency ranges. The room shape and dimensions, wall reflectivity, etc., are optimized in “real” mixing studios so that the overall frequency response is essentially flat. But what if you do your mixing in a basement or spare bedroom? Acoustic treatments are expensive, and no, egg cartons don’t work. So what to do?

One workaround that will definitely improve the situation is to put an EQ box between your DAW output and the monitor speakers. I use a 15-band unit, but any kind of EQ will help. Listen to CDs that you know well, and adjust the EQ a little at a time until the system consistently “sounds right.” In most cases you will apply the same EQ to both speakers, but if one of them is in a corner it may need a little extra bass reduction.

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

People like to joke about “three-chord songs,” the implication being that a song containing only A, D, and E chords must be too simple-minded to bother thinking about, much less listening to. And what kind of songwriter only knows three chords?

It’s obvious that there are plenty of great songs that have only three chords! But it’s also true that a really sophisticated melody is likely to need a really sophisticated set of chords - and more than three - to go with it. Being kind of simple-minded myself, I sometimes go in the opposite direction: how few chords can I use in a song? For me the answer is always the same: “One.”

I consider it a challenge to craft a song based entirely on a single chord and still have it be interesting and compelling. The objective is to have nobody actually notice that it is only one chord until you point it out. “Oh yeah,” they say. “I guess it is all one chord!”

Read the rest…

Most of my articles about PA systems, mixers, etc., are in terms of running live sound for a multi-member band, perhaps because that’s what I do for Rusty Strings. But I sometimes get questions from individuals who are interested in performing alone on acoustic guitar and vocals, or keyboard and vocals, in small settings but who are uncertain about what kind of sound reinforcement to use or how to achieve a particular echo or reverb effect on their vocal.

Before I even start discussing configuration options or specific recommendations, I must stipulate that I will not be addressing computer-based setups for live sound, that is, where a laptop is used as a mixer. Such a setup calls for a different kind of audio interface hardware that I will discuss in a future article. Here, I will be talking about systems based on conventional mixers. With that attended to, I will begin by describing the basic system configurations for solo performers.

Read the rest…

I can still remember the very first time I heard music through stereo headphones. It was (ahem) 1960 or so, and I was in the home of neighborhood buddy Kevin Ritchie. (When I say “neighborhood,” I mean that Kevin, a doctor’s son, lived on the street where the rich people lived, just around the corner from my neighborhood.) Kevin put on his dad’s favorite record by twangy guitarist Duane Eddy, put his dad’s headphones on my head, and said “Listen to this.”

Wow! I don’t think I had even heard stereo through speakers before that moment, except the time my high-tech cousin George made me lie face-down on his bed to listen to a taped comedy program that he played through his stereo headboard. That twangy guitar music sounded incredible in the headphones - it was the coolest thing I had ever heard! Of course, I immediately developed Stereo Envy, since my own Bozo the Clown record player was a mono unit.

These days, much if not most listening to pop & rock music takes place via headphones (or, agh, earbuds), so it is more important than ever to give special thought to the left-to-right stereo image you are creating inside your listener’s head as you mix. One method I use when mixing for headphone listening is the Triangular Approach, which attempts to produce a pleasing, non-jarring stereo image that will not distract from the music.

Read the rest…

In the Ancient Days, it was fairly common for pop bands to record a biographical song telling the real or partly imagined story of the band. Like “being on the road,” this just seems to be a topic idea that often occurs to a songwriter who is in a band. I’m not aware of many recent examples (anyone?), but who could forget Creeque Alley by The Mamas and the Papas:

(Note the many “in” references to fellow starving musicians who would later become rich and famous.) Even teenybopper titans Paul Revere and the Raiders contributed The Legend Of Paul Revere (is everything on YouTube?), which begins:

The rest, of course was history, although the exact identity of Revere’s “bun boy” is left unrecorded.

Read the rest…