February 7, 2011 – As you may have noticed, my posting hasn’t been as regular as usual. In fact, I haven’t even had a chance to check out the changes that were completed last week on the collaboration project!

There are some pretty big changes happening in my life right now, and some of it is music related. Even though I’m easing back into a music schedule, it’s hard to find time to actually write. Finding an appropriate time to work on writing has always been a problem for me. How do you find time to write music? Do you schedule regular Saturday afternoons? Do you work on it evenings after your day job? In between baby feedings?

December 9, 2010 – Ok, we are a go! Participation for this project is closed, and I’ve sent out invitations to the Dropbox account to everyone who showed interest. If you missed out on this project, we’ll get you on the next one. Hopefully this will all work out awesome, and will be the start of a cool collaborative community.

First off, I want to really thank you guys for your enthusiasm. I started this site a couple years ago, wanting to get a musical dialogue going. I wasn’t really sure how I was going to do that but I hope this project will be where it all ramps up.

Alright, enough with the sappy stuff, and down to the meat and potatoes of how I think this will go down. I’ve uploaded the starting loop into the Dropbox folder. It is a glockenspiel melody I recorded last week. In the course of this project, you are allowed to do whatever you want to it. I’ve CC-licensed it under Non-Commercial so if you want to use it for something else as long as you don’t sell it, I’m cool with that. I’d appreciate the attribution though.

Since I’ve never done anything like this before, the way this works may change as we see how everyone reacts. To make this truly collaborative, everyone will have a specific task in relation to this song. Whether that is laying down a drum or bass line, or mixing the track, tasks will be delegated by me. If you want to fill a specific roll, please let me know in the comments and I’ll try my best to accomodate. Please keep in mind that I still may not be able to give you the task you want. The list of tasks will change as the song begins to take shape. I will attempt to manage the project and keep everything in check, but I want you guys to feel free to cut loose.

Off the table currently are drums and mixing. The former claimed by Travis and the latter by Jon. Of course, the starting loop is also taken…after all I already recorded and uploaded it. For those who will be writing and recording melodies or filling in, you are able to do whatever you want as long as you respect the work of those who came before. In other words, feel free to create, but don’t bury others’ work.

As suggested by Jon over at AudioGeekZine, we will be working in Reaper. Reaper is a cross platform DAW that is available with full functionality even in the trial version. You can find it at www.Reaper.fm. If you need to pull the project into your own DAW to leverage your tools, go ahead, but be sure to export what you’ve done and re-import it into Reaper for the next person who works on the song.

If you are not part of the mixing team, please do not mix the track for the next person and especially do not “print” the mix so that it cannot be undone. As well, please keep the effects to a minimum unless it is a part of the sound you’re adding. Not everyone will have the same effects which will undo your work. If you must use an effect for a certain sound, please keep the original version without effects (muted of course) and “print” a version with the effect recorded on it.

As everything progresses, I will post updates on how the song sounds at every stage, probably using Soundcloud. This allows everyone to see what everyone else is doing, and also serves as a chronological timeline, which I think will be pretty cool in the end.

I’m very interested to see how this all turns out. When I produce music, I usually do everything from the songwriting all the way to the final mix. It never gets done the same way, or in the same order. With all the different ways we all create music, it will be interesting to see how our talents and weaknesses will fit together.

Ok, so the loop is out there. The first person to work on the track will be Travis Whitmore. I realize that the loops is simple and short, but I’m hoping his drums will bring a feel that the rest of the song can be built on. I expect the drum work will be short, and will only be played over the initial loop. After that, the song can be built, and we’ll bring Travis back near the end of the writing to flesh out the drums with all the other instruments.

So far the following people other than myself are in this project:

Darren Levy
Travis Whitmore
Jon Tidey
Jamal from True Brew Records
Dan Foley
Mr. Fresh
Bryan from the ImaginationConsultant
TC Helentjaris
Moveair
Andreas
CD
Paul Schaeffer
Doug

For all those listed, please confirm your interest in the comments, and if I missed any of you in the Dropbox invitation, please let me know. Also, let me know what your preference is to work on.

I would like this track to be accessible to people who aren’t music nerds like us, so while it doesn’t have to be commercial, it would cool if it wasn’t too out there in the end. I’m also going to provide a theme that we should think about as we get to our tasks. The theme will be music you would enjoy listening to while driving. Could be a plane, train, or automobile; whatever works for you.

Ok, the track is now in Travis’ hands. Who wants to work on melodies next? Let me know in the comments. Goooooooo team!

Collaboration Project Loop for KeyOfGrey.com by keyofgrey

Update Jan. 17, 2011 – Here is what the project sounds like as of 1/10/2011. Sounds great so far guys! Jan 10 Rough Mix of Collab Project by keyofgrey

November 18th, 2010 – So several of you have expressed interest in the collaboration project, and those that I have contact info for through your comments have been added to the shared DropBox folder. If anyone else wants to be part of the project, please comment on this post and enter your contact info in the form (email addresses won’t be shown publicly). Also, please tell everyone about this project as the more people we have, the better it’ll be.

After reading the comments on the last post about the project, I realized that I may not have been clear about what I had in mind. Originally I had thought that we would all submit samples into a shared directory and then everyone would create their own song from the same sample pool. At the end, we would share what we had all created.

I discussed this a bit with Travis from SilverLakeStudio, and Jon over at AudioGeekZine (who just had a beautiful baby girl so head over to his site and send him well-wishes) and they thought that instead we might create one song together with tasks separated to each interested person. I think that this is what many of you had thought I meant, and this is certainly more in keeping with the collaborative spirit. However, I’m not sure how this will work logistically as certain tasks are linear and cannot be done in tandem with others. For example, someone responsible for mixing cannot begin work before the song has been produced.

We would also need to make sure that everyone had their tasks done on time, and that no one bailed on the project. Because of this difficulty, I hadn’t considered this type of project. I’m thinking that perhaps we can start with the “common sample pool” project, see how that goes, and then try out the real collaborative project. What do you guys think? I could really use the feedback to decide where to go with this! Oh, and before I forget, I really appreciate the interest everyone has shown. Let’s get this thing going!

November 13, 2010 – We’ve all been there fleshing out a track and thinking “Oh this is the chorus”; Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V. It happens in every genre, but especially to independent producers who do everything themselves. After all, if we want another chorus, we just need to clone another one and maybe add some new stuff on top right? Wrong.

Have you ever finished your production and it sounded a little flat. With stellar mixing and careful production, why doesn’t it sound as good as the latest record by so-and-so? The reason is groove. Of course, feeling a groove in traditional instrument music is important because otherwise it ends up sounding like cheap karaoke.

If you listened to the latest Taylor Swift track and it was a copy-paste affair, the production would be so generic that you would naturally tune the song out completely. However, she uses real session musicians who play the song through, even if a part repeats, allowing the nuances of their playing to keep the track interesting.

That’s all very well and good for big budget productions that can afford seasoned Nashville players, but what about the rest of us toiling away in our basements? It’s especially hard when we’re dealing with loops or with sequenced instruments.

Emulating the groove of a live performance is the best way to add interest to your productions. There are two main ways to do this in your home studio, play the instruments all the way through live (not an option for many) or to sequence the instruments and add groove templates.

Growing up, I was very fortunate in that my parents wanted me to be a musician. Over the years I’ve learned how to play enough instruments to be able to record a full session by myself. For those of us who are already instrumentalists, the process of adding groove is pretty easy: just play things all the way through instead of copy and pasting. You should also keep your quantization to a minimum.

This even works for hip hop tracks which may be built strictly with loops, and electronic music. Using a drum machine or a MIDI controller to trigger samples live adds the producer’s own groove. A lot of the most successful hip hop producers use a drum machine to play the samples in live, essentially making the loops an instrument. It doesn’t sound boring because the loops are triggered by a person and not by a square on a grid. For producers like Ninth Wonder, this is the bread and butter behind their soulful beats.

For electronic music, artists like Justice and Daft Punk play their electronic performances live and record them. Some parts may be sequenced, but mostly they are recording a band full of electronic instruments. In Justice’s case, they used Apple’s Garageband which comes free with the computer. I can guarantee you that the ability to add groove after the fact is severely limited.

So what about those who can’t play the parts in live? You can always add the groove of someone else. In most DAW software, there is an option to add a groove template which basically overlays MIDI timing from another person. You can buy the grooves of someone else, or you can sometimes extract it yourself. Then as a quantization option, you can apply that MIDI groove. Ever wanted to get the drum feel of John Bonham? Extract his groove from an old Zepplin track and apply it to your own sequenced drums.

Just the little bits of off-timing will add a whole new dimension to your productions. Your audience might not be able to put their finger on it, but they’ll know there’s a difference between one with live groove and one without.

November 11, 2010 – When I first started working with Logic, I immediately maxed out its processing power on my laptop within the first 5 minutes. In the time since then, I’ve done full 36 track mixes with effects, and mixed my own complete productions; all of this involved eking out as much processing and hard drive performance as I could from my laptop.

One of the problems with Apple is that upgrading your machine (in terms of processors) just doesn’t happen. As such, most users who spent all their money on their current computer often don’t have the money to upgrade as often as a PC user might(although I’m sure the rich fashionable set do). I’m sure Apple’s Logic team (consisting of legacy Emagic employees) quickly understood the limitations of Apple’s closed hardware model where a user might not be able to upgrade their hardware, and started to program clever little ways for a user to get the performance they need.

One thing they added was the ability to “freeze” tracks. Freezing a track basically tells the DAW to bounce down an a new audio track that’s a recording of the original with all the effects. At this point, the DAW will disable the original track and all the effects, and play the recording which has the effects “printed” on it. All you play is an audio file, thereby saving processing power, and the process is completely reversible.

The other awesome feature that they added was smart disabling of effects. As anyone who has used Space Designer can tell you, Logic effects are processor hungry. Smart bypassing means that when a track isn’t using an effect, Logic will automatically disable it upon playback; this saves your processing power for when you really need it.

Of course, this relies on Logic to make the decision for you. Because I don’t like to leave anything to chance, I automate the bypassing manually. If you press “A” on the arrange page, you will be able to draw in automation curves. I actually prefer drawing in automation to twiddling fake knobs (that’s what she said), so I will do volume automation almost exclusively here.

When you click down the dropdown for the track you want to automate, you will be given a menu that has a few standard options like Volume, however you will want to navigate further to “Main”. In this section, you will see a number of inserts corresponding to the effects you have inserted on the track. Select the insert number of the effect you want to automate the bypass for (the numbers represent effects top to bottom on your track). A coloured line will appear over the track in the Arrange window. Draw in your bypass automation which will be either on or off.

A quick note, smart disabling may give you a false sense of the max processor load since it will disable the effects in parts where you don’t need it, but if you have a chorus that has a lot of effects, bringing them all in at once may cause a core audio overload. You might not have expected this since the verse didn’t experience the same problem when the effects were smart disabled.

Hope this helps!

November 3rd, 2010 – I’m sure you’ve all heard that Protools, along with going native, now has an SE version that ships with either a USB microphone, an interface similar to the Mbox mini, or a MIDI keyboard. You may also have heard that you don’t have to go to your local Guitar Center to buy one either; you can get them at Best Buy.

Power users may scoff at the baby Protools (after all it has a maximum of 16 tracks) however I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss it. At prices starting at $99 for the Avid Vocal Studio, $119 for the Avid Recording Studio, and $129 for the KeyStudio, the value is strong.

For the consumer that’s going to be picking up one of these bundles, 16 tracks will probably be more than adequate. Of course, maybe my perspective is a little skewed; when I first started recording, it was on four track tape reels (cassette and ADAT were way out of my budget). I quickly learned how to bounce down tracks to be able to record more.

Even when I tried the first versions of Cakewalk (one of the first consumer DAWs), I was limited in tracks because the computers weren’t fast enough back then. To me, 16 tracks would have been a huge luxury. But even today, I think that it would be adequate. Most of the people who are going to be buying the pack, are likely going to be recording themselves and won’t need tonnes of tracks.

I think Avid is being pretty smart with these low-cost offerings. They are including everything a person needs to get started at a super low pricepoint. When the user is ready to move on, there are plenty of higher priced offerings. I’m sure this is a direct effort against Apple’s DAW strategy: bundle Garageband for free, get users hooked and interested in Logic Express which is also very inexpensive, and then finally up to Logic Studio. Avid is one-upping this strategy by bundling hardware; what used to be a detriment in their professional offerings is now an asset in their lower ones.

When I worked in someone else’s studio, I used a combination of Protools and Logic. Logic to write songs, Protools to record vocals, and back into Logic for mixing. Even with all the improvements Logic has made with their audio editing workflow, I still find Protools faster, and more intuitive.

I am not currently running Protools (although I could get the M-Audio editions since I have FW410), so these low cost versions are enticing. As I would be using it to cut vocals only (16 tracks should be adequate for recording quick and dirty demos), the Vocal Studio is the most interesting to me. A hundred bucks for an M-Audio (on a side note, I’m sad that M-Audio as a separate brand from Avid no longer exists) USB microphone and Protools editing workflow? That seems like a very compact mobile recording solution.

I’m actually curious to hear what the bundled gear sounds like. Obviously the microphone isn’t going to compete with any Neumann, but will the interface included with the Avid Recording Studio hold up to my old FW410, or even an Mbox Mini? Have any of you had a chance to try them out?

Avid Vocal Studio

November 1st, 2010 – It seems the majority of remix contests out there are for Americans-only, but this time I have one just for those in the UK. Audio-Technica has a contest going on for interesting takes on classic Christmas carols. It’s open to all categories of music, from DJ’s to indie bands.

The winner will receive £500 with five runners-up winning £100 worth of Audio-Technica equipment. The first 100 will also get £30 Audio-Technica headphones. Fire up your webcams and post up your songs on Youtube. For information on how to enter, you can check out their press release here.

October 17th, 2010 – Imagine you’re a mix engineer and you get a song to mix recorded by another engineer. Unfortunately, it has a lot of noise: hissing, pops, background noise. When there’s something playing on that track, for example the vocalist is singing, you can barely hear the noise, but if the singer isn’t singing constantly, you can hear it.

Perhaps it will be hidden by other instruments that play during those gaps, but when you’re trying to do the best job possible, you want to take out as much of that noise as possible, so it doesn’t compound upon itself (unless of course, you’re going for a certain stylistic choice).

There are three main ways to deal with this noise: you can cut out the unnecessary spaces in the audio to minimize noise, you can automate the volume to either mute or turn down the audio, or you can use a noise gate.

A noise gate is a device that acts very similar to a compressor, with one huge difference; instead of turning the volume up in quiet parts, a noise gate turns the volume down. In the picture above (I should probably point out that I just opened and screenshotted the noise gate, it’s not set up for the project I’m working on), you can see that the main settings on the device are shared with compressors: threshold, reduction, attack, hold, and release.

Like on a compressor, the threshold is user settable point that triggers the device. On a compressor, when the source goes above the threshold, compression is triggered. On a noise gate, when the source goes below the threshold, the noise gate will clamp down on the audio. Just how much it will lower the volume depends on the amount of reduction that is set. Attack, hold, and release, as with compression, need to be set on a source by source basis.

I should also mention that noise gates aren’t always used as a tool to get rid of noise; sometimes they’re used as an effect. If you listen to a lot of electronic music, you will no doubt recognize stuttering vocals and synths that pulse in rhythm to the song. While sometimes the effect is managed manually through edits and automation, it has been traditionally created through the use of gates. Usually, a noise gate will be put on the desired track, but it will be triggered by something on a different track using the noise gate’s sidechain option. For more information on side-chaining check out this previous post.

October 1st, 2010 – Today I want to talk a bit about when to make edits, and when to warp audio tracks. While there are some artists that are vehemently opposed to any editing of their performance, most want you as an engineer to make them sound as good as possible. In many cases, this will include fixing little timing issues. Sometimes you won’t be able to re-record a performance (time is money after all), so you will need to make changes to the recorded performance after the artist has left.

There are two choices when it comes to fixing timing: editing and warping. With editing, you are cutting the audio track apart, and pasting it back together in time. Engineers have been doing this as long as they’ve had magnetic tape to work with (they physically cut the tape with a razor blade and used adhesive tape to put it back together). The benefit of this method is that the audio performance is exactly the same, just shifted on the timeline. The downsides are that it’s time consuming to “pocket” all the audio if there is a lot to fix, and some things are impossible (or at least very difficult) to fix. For example, if you want to fix timing on a word that drags out over a long melodic phrase.

The modern way to fix timing is warping. Warping uses a software algorithm to stretch and render new audio to fit user-defined timing. Generally a user will define anchor points and then drag the audio around within anchor points to set timing. The benefits are that it’s extremely easy to do, and you can adjust almost everything. The downside is that it’s a software rendition of the original performance so some fidelity is lost. In situations where audio is stretched an extreme amount, the loss of quality is readily apparent.

So when should you use each? As usual, I’d like to first state that there are no hard rules, you should figure out what works best for you. There are, however, situations that generally call for one method over another. When fixing timing issues with drums, I would suggest editing the audio over warping. Editing will keep the pitch and impact of the original audio, and since the hits are short, it lends itself to clean edits. For working with melodic instruments, such as guitars, bass and vocals, I would edit as much as I could between phrases, and then use warping for detailed pitched audio phrases. For example, a guitar note that is played legato with the note before and rings out would be hard to edit. That’s a good place to warp instead.

On an interesting side note, Reaper seems to have a pretty effective system for pocketing audio. You can move audio portions of a track around as if they are being warped, but they are actually just being edited, with extra space added or removed when needed. Of course, it doesn’t stretch the audio if that’s what you need, but It’s a pretty nifty time saver for edits.

Photo courtesy of Oliver Chesler

September 26th, 2010 – You may have noticed that I haven’t written in a week. I probably should have posted up a “on vacation” notice…oh well. I just got back from San Francisco/LA and I picked up a Native Instruments Maschine so check back for a review on that soon.

I also chose this week to install the Seagate Momentus XT I posted about a while back. I decided to do a clean install of my operating system which means that I’m finally on Snow Leopard. This also means that I have no excuse to move up to Logic 9, which I’m installing as I write this.

Since this is going to take a while, I thought I’d write about producer-songwriters. When you hear that term, you might think of such artists as Timberland, The Neptunes, David Foster, Butch Walker, and any other number of very successful producers who also co-write many of the songs that they produce. In the old days, a producer was the person who put together the songwriters and performers (not always the same people), and took care of the money side. Today, while this is still part of a producer’s job, many producers are expected to add to the creative process.

This secret sauce could mean as little as suggesting that a chorus be repeated once more, or as much as complete songwriting, producing, and mixing. I would imagine that many of us that are toiling away at home, are doing everything ourselves, so we would fall under the category of producer-songwriters.

One thing that sets us DIYers apart from contracted professionals (for example, in house producers), is that we can say no; you’re your own boss and are the only one that answers to the consequences. It may mean turning away good money, but you have the power to do what you want.

Let me explain why this is important. When I started working in music, I was an in house songwriter-producer. Since I had bosses, I had to write for, and record whatever and for whoever I was scheduled for. While some clients were awesome to work with, some were not. Over time, the “were nots” dragged me down and I started to dislike work. About that time, the owners had a falling out and the studio closed down anyways.

Don’t get me wrong. The time spent there wasn’t bad; in fact, I learned tonnes, and my skill level progressed much faster than if I had been left on my own. However, now that I’ve experienced that environment, I’m not eager to go back. I, like many of you, have a regular job that pays my bills so I have the luxury of choosing who I want to work with. This also means that I can work on projects that won’t necessarily make any money, but are creatively rewarding.

I know that hitting it big is an alluring goal, however I would argue that creating music that feeds your soul is more important. These may not necessarily be mutually exclusive, and everyone perceives this relationship differently. All that I’m saying is to sit back and consider where you are now, and where you want to be.