Music Tech Forum: What If I Had My Secret Bliss

It’s the beginning of the end and I was one of the first to stand in the line of fire. Granted they were only bullets of fear, but it seemed like many of us were unprepared enough to get hit. We started our presentations of our real world remixed assignments, and a few of us it seemed weren’t quite as prepared as we would have liked to have been. Myself for example, if anyone was in class last week and is reading this please disregard my handout and refer to version 2.0.1 posted below. This one was spell checked in English.

The first thing I found interesting about the presentations was that so far only three out of seven possible tracks were chosen. What You Are, My Secret Bliss, and If I Had My Way. Although the advantage of this was that you could compare the differences in production, arrangement, and mixing styles between the people. Of the three people doing the Afro Celt Sound System track My Secret Bliss I found the most interesting thing was that no one really embraced the vocal track. Daniel Trembath went as far as explaining that he prefers music without singing. All three people presenting this one had hand outs (Daniel, Jake, and Stuart) which was great, although when Stuart got up and presented his I think we all felt a little deflated after seeing the quality and detail of his analysis.

Less people did If I Had My Way by Little Axe than I had imagined, although maybe this Thursday will end up being a mini Little Axe concert. I found a big part of the mixes on this one was the drum beat they had decided on. As the track had no set drum beat and just a couple of samples they had to come up with the actual beat from scratch. It made a huge difference in the sound of the track and I remember Scott H’s track actually feeling a lot slower than I remember the track being from when I tried to mix it.

I would like to hear a couple more takes on the Joi track What You Are which is the one I presented. It was very interesting hearing the differences between what I thought it should sound like and what Simon did. He used a vocal predominantly that I hadn’t even touched and our two versions sounded very different. Knowing what he had to work with I really enjoyed his presentation and hearing what he came up with from the same sound files.

Links-
http://www.realworldremixed.com/download.php - In case you still need it.
http://www.realworldremixed.com/toptwenty.php - Now we've done ours here are the best ones submitted to the site.

Music Tech Forum: Real World ReMixed Project

Band Name: Joi
Song Title: What You Are
Taken From: Without Zero
Length: 5min 49sec
Bpm: 110
Key Signature: Bmin
Genre: Alternative Dub/Dance
Instrumentation : Acoustic Guitar, Electric Bass, Synth Bass, Synth Kit Sounds (Bass Drum, Snare Drum, Hi-Hats), Oud, Vocals, Synth breaks, pads, string lines, etc.
Performers: Female vocals. Two to three different vocalists. Many synth sounds. Very few sounds played live. The ‘Oud was played live.
Performance Issues: Most of the sounds are from a synth of some kind, and of the few live sounds I didn’t really detect any major issues with their performances.
Recording Issues: I found there was a lot of noise in the background of the Oud recordings, and the synth sounding kit drum sounds pretty dead.

Research:
Mixonline, The Inside Track: Mixing Vocals, Mixonline.com, Viewed 20th May 2007 <http://mixonline.com/recording/mixing/audio_mixing_vocals/>
This site had a great section on mixing vocals and gave me this idea to add the medium delay to the effects vocal section of my mix.

EQ Guide, Sirgalahad.org, Viewed 19th May 2007
http://www.sirgalahad.org/paul/music/eq-guide.html
Great reference guide for different EQ settings. It was very useful for getting the acoustic guitar sound I was looking for.

Sound On Sound Magazine 1999, 20 Tips On..., Sound on Sound, Viewed 19th May 2007
<http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/oct99/articles/20tips.htm>
Point 3 interested me, after reading through it I actually took the point as to keep the same volume for the drums throughout to keep a dance like feel. However I did build up the volume of the percussion in the synth section as to make the song feel like it built up to something.

Davis G & Gray M (), Sound Reinforcement Handbook – Second Edition, Pg 39. Chapter 4.3.3 How to Fit Wide Program Dynamics into a Sound System with Limited Dynamic Range, Hal Leonard Cooperation
Although the book is primarily about Live sound, I found it a good read on understanding compression.

Joe Bochar 2002, Guest Column: Creative Panning 101, Guitar Nine Records, Viewed 19th May 2007
<http://www.guitar9.com/columnist221.html>
Good panning article. I experimented with a number of techniques, but in the end being a fairly dance track (and most of the track were stereo already) it’s a fairly mono image.

Notes:
First off I started with a different song. I was doing If I Had my way and it just didn’t do it for me. I think the biggest issue was that I’d heard the original a couple of times and was trying to recreate it while not recreating it, and that just wasn’t working. I started my mix of What You Are before hearing the song. So the main arrangement of the parts was created without prior influence. I went to listen to the original before doing the final mix and realised mine was less than half the length. I found the original quite repetitive and boring. After sourcing my research I started doing the mix, applying the techniques and experimenting with what sounded good. I ended up with something that while a little short I liked. My biggest problem was in the middle and end sections stopping the audio from clipping. Eventually I overcame this by removing some instruments from these sections all together and thinning down the instrumentation. The song I used to reference was ‘Hypergeek’ by The Devin Townsend Band. I used this because it was a mix of a high quality to reference against, something I was used to, and had an acoustic guitar sound I wanted to emulate. I used the EQ guide I had found on the internet to help me find which frequencies to boost and cut and how they would affect the sound. In the end I didn’t really achieve the same kind of sound as the one in Hypergeek, but I did get one I thought fit well in the context of the track. The articles I looked up for this project really helped me create the track. I was using them while creating the arrangement as well as doing the mix, so I feel that they probably influenced both sides. For example I made sure there was a section for the solo vocal with effects after reading the mixonline article, so I arranged the song in a way that it would make sense. The only thing I would change about my mix now would be the volume of the vocals at the end. This probably came out because I was only mixing through headphones, but looking back now they are clearly too loud and I am disappointed I didn’t pick up on it before the presentation.


Bibliography:
http://www.guitar9.com/columnist221.html
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/oct99/articles/20tips.htm
http://www.sirgalahad.org/paul/music/eq-guide.html
http://mixonline.com/recording/mixing/audio_mixing_vocals/
Sound Reinforcement Handbook – Second Edition
Gary Davis & Mark Gray
Hal Leonard Cooperation
Pg 39. Chapter 4.3.3 How to Fit Wide Program Dynamics into a Sound System with Limited Dynamic Range
http://www.realworldremixed.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joi_(band)

Music Tech Forum: Rant On...

What’s the difference between a band that wears its influences on their sleave and a copycat band? We got into this point while talking about grunge, being on of the simpler genres musically there are a large amount more copycat bands than many other genres. It’s a hard one to distinguish sometimes, but I think most of the time it comes down to image. I mean its one thing to sound exactly like another band, as Steve pointed out with his story about the guy who sounded like Mark Knofler, it’s possible to do without even hearing anything from the other artist. Generally however if you both sound and look exactly like, or very similar to another band you are well aware of who they are and what they do. I think copycatism as I will now call it can come from two main things,

a.) Not having a wide enough range of influences. This one you can tell pretty easy, if their favourite band has never written a song using an Amin7 chord, don’t expect them to even know what it is. Sometimes in this case they discover new music and their style changes and starts to develop… sometimes they go on sounding like Green Day forever.
b.) Wanting to be just like the other band or a member of that band. Grunge suffered pretty heavily from this one. The worst part about this one is the songs lack any kind of realism as they aren’t based on the experiences of anyone in the band. People idealise someone and basically try to model themselves around them.

While I would like to list some bands that might fall under these categories I can’t really think of any of note, as they generally aren’t very successful if at all. If you’re not being something new at all to a genre or style you generally won’t succeed. If I wanted to listen to Green Day I’d just put on a Green Day C.D. If…

http://www.greenday.com/ - Do you sound to much like them?

Music Tech Forum: So many genres so little time

This week we looked at different production styles based on genres and genre clichés. We started off with funk and looked at the difference between American, English, and Australian production styles. The British were more dry and dark, the Americans had more reverb and we just tended to copy one or the other. I wonder about Australian production, is there really an Australian sound? I think there probably is but it really differs from band to band instead of being a sound that you can pick from any band as ‘yep that’s gotta’ be Australian.’ We moved on and did Reggae/Ska, Blues, Jazz, and Hard Rock/Heavy Metal.

I think one of the most interesting things about many of them were the kind of ‘rules’ or ‘conventions’ involved with different genres. Like if you recorded a Jazz record and just compressed as if it was squared under an elephant would it still really be a jazz record? Or has it become such a large part of the Jazz sound that it starts to define it? I’ve really started to wonder about how much control production and mixing techniques have had over the over all defining sound of a genre. I think that maybe too much of a defining sound is what can make a genre die out or become boring. Nu Metal for example was really built on a specific production sound; all the bands really sounded the same. Not just in the content and arrangement of the music but the actual ‘sound’ of the records.

This contrasts I think with the Heavy Metal/Hard Rock stuff we looked at which changed over time. While musically the genre has diversified over time, not every band in it writes a record and than has it sound exactly the same. Granted they probably all use double + tracked guitars, I mean it certainly has it’s conventions but there is enough room left for bands to sound different from each other. Also I imagine I need a better understanding of each genre to really understand something like this, but for me the big question lately is, how much can change between a band writing and arranging a song to be recorded and how it sounds at release? But more importantly, how much should change? Or, how much change is too much?

References/Links: Music tech forum 10th May
Metallica at Last.Fm.com - http://www.last.fm/music/Metallica
An example of a Metal band with changing production styles.

Music Tech Forum: Phil Ramone, or Phil and the Ramones?

This week in Music Tech Forum we finished off the producer presentations. We had a mix of old producers this time Seb started off with Steven Wilson. He talked mostly about his work with Opeth, we was very interesting. I've always been a fan of Opeth but never really looked at the production on their records. He mentioned also that he is a member of Porcupine Tree, which are very similar to Opeth in style and would be worth checking out if you liked what you heard of Opeth. Lisa talked about Trent Reznor and I realised I'm not really a big fan of industrial music. The interesting thing about both these talks for me was that both these producers were part of a band themselves. This got me thinking about the benefits of disadvantages of that scenario. At least in these cases it seemed that they really only produced bands that were of a similar sound and style to themselves, like Lisa said 'He go to Trent Reznor when you want to sound like Nine Inch Nails.' This also got me thinking about Bob Ezrin who I talked about and how it seemed he wanted to turn everything into a 70's rock and roll record because that seemed to be where his passion lay (He had enough writing credits on Kiss and Alice Cooper albums to almost be considered a member at times.) Simon talked about Phil Spector. Interestingly enough it seems just before his murder trial he had plans to work with The Vines, which would've been well, um... interesting. Dan talked about Groove Terminator and taught us quite a lot about some of the different tricks that can be used to sell a song. I had to throw my headphones on the second I got out of there just to get that stuff out of my head. Finally Josh did Phil Ramone. Must be cool to lay claim to have the first CD ever printed being something you worked on. Unless of course you really hated the idea of CDs at the time, then it would've been awkward. This brings me to something that popped up a couple of times during the talks, some producers not embracing new technology. I wonder what advances are coming ahead that this generation will be scared of?

Links
http://www.philramone.com/Informational/Biography.htm - Phil Ramones website
http://www.porcupinetree.com/ - The official Porcupine Tree webpage, with audio and video samples.

Music Tech Forum: Vanilla Korn?

There was a time when everyone wanted to be Nu-metal. After the lesson I got the cd Rowan used for his talk about Ross Robinson and listened to one of the tracks he didn’t get to play. Too Cold by Vanilla Ice was produced in 1998 by Ross Robinson and is really really awful. I thought I’d mention this first as you really have to hear it, the best I could get was a 30 second sample off the Vanilla Ice website but give it a listen. http://www.vanillaice.com/audio/swallow_07.wma

I noticed a theme in a couple of the talks about drum sounds and it got me thinking that a different or unique drum sound really goes a long way to defining the ‘sound’ a producer brings to a record. One of the things I found interesting about Jake's talk on Kevin ‘The Caveman’ Shirley was the way he liked to mix drums. He was saying that he likes to treat drums as one full instrument and had a fairly simplistic approach towards the mic placement and recording but I think this statement applies more to mixing and post production on drums. Instead of going for the best sound on every individual drum (ie Toms, Snare, etc.) he prefers to have the kit sounding good as a whole, I thought this was an interesting way to look at it. At least a way that I have previously for some reason not really thought too much about. This leaked into Rowans talk and a similar thing with Ross Robison. With acts like Sepultura the drum sound is very raw and ‘tribal.’ By the end of the lesson I realised that in production the sound of the drums is a very major factor in the sound of a record and the way it’s mixed or produced.

We also got our major assignment for MTF which looks like it will be pretty interesting. I headed on over to the Real World ReMixed website and checked out the tracks. Having a listen to them I decided upon ‘If I Had My Way’ by ‘Little Axe’ fairly simple stuff. Some people were talking about seeing how far away from the original they could get, I’m not really sure what I want to do with it yet but just putting it back together seems to be a pretty daunting task at this point. Hopefully I’ll get something good out of it in the end.



Links:
http://www.vanillaice.com/ - …
http://www.realworldremixed.com/ - If you haven’t checked it out yet.
http://www.cavemanproductions.com/ - Website for Kevin Shirley