Rough to Release

Links to all the posts in sequence. Part 1 - the pitch: from ideas to completion Part 2 - Space and Permission Part 3 - Spark and Spice Part 4 - More Spark and Spice Part 5 - Beyond Verse and Chorus Part 6 - Story Arcs Intermission - Tackling Writer's Block Part 7 - More Tension and Release Part 8 - It's not all about you! (Co-writing) Part 9 - Define 'finished' - a summary so far Part 10 - Recording Basics - The Hierarchy Part 11 - Recording Basics - Making the most of what you've got Part 12 - Production Part 13 - Demo, Dub, Delete Part 14 - Arts and Crafts Part 15 - Beyond Self-Recording Part 16 - 'Finishing' or 'mastering for cheapskates' Part 17 - Distribution Strategies Part 18 - Problem Solving Part 19 - The End - and a worked example

Over the last four months(!) we've introduced a number of tools and techniques, but we need to use them to get something finished. Then we need to keep going. The sports scientists will tell you it takes 66 repetitions to build muscle memory and create a habit; I'm not saying you need to sit down and write 66 songs (though that's not a bad target) but you do need to go and flex those new metaphorical muscles. So here are a few suggestions, some of mine and some from my friends at the Sound On Sound forum, to help unblock the process and finish the job. Tackling preventative behaviours. The first step is recognising this as a problem. If you're not sure what I mean by a preventative behaviour, this cartoon by Asher Perlman should explain it adequately:  https://www.instagram.com/asherperlman/p/C0b7oCwuyMj/?hl=en Do you suddenly find yourself gripped by a compulsion to re-wire your studio? To write to your estranged aunt in Bogota? Do you convince yourself that you can...

So you've 'finished' your song up to a standard and loudness that you're happy with, now you just lob it up on your website and let it go viral right? Depending on your definition of 'finished' then potentially, yes. If our objective is to get something written, recorded and released then our job is done and we can give ourselves a pat on the back and move on. Seriously, that's a piece of art that is out in the world that didn't exist until you turned your hand to it. You created something from nothing, and that's a kind of magic.  But if we're hoping to attract a few more listeners, and we don't have the same levels of 'brand recognition' as Taylor Swift, then we're going to need to put in a bit of work. This work is 'marketing'. It's a dirty word, and a dirtier business, but at some point you're going to have to face into it.  Well, it's not really. Basically marketing is just letting potential customers (you...

Hang in there buddy, we're nearly at the end, but I have had to split this into two parts. We'll get to copyright and distribution next time. Mastering On the wider internet there is a fair bit of nonsense spoken about what mastering is and why it is, or isn't, important. Let's unpack some of that now (in a somewhat simplified way) so we can get to our goal of finishing and releasing our song. In the Good* Old Days (TM)  a mastering engineer's primary job was to take a recording and make sure it was in good shape to be transferred to the physical medium it was going to be distributed on. With vinyl this meant understanding a great deal about the physical limitations of the medium and how that affected things like low frequency extension, loudness and even where on the record certain songs needed to go because of the difference between the edge and centre of the record. They would also, therefore, need to understand how to work within these limitations without ruinin...

This episode was originally going to cover group recording, loudness, mastering and distribution but that would have been far too long so we're just looking at the recording side today. Recording more than just yourself. So far we've largely assumed that you're working for, by and with yourself; the key exception being Part 8 where we looked at co-writing . We're going to build on that now and briefly talk about recording / producing groups and remote collaborators. Broadly speaking, groups fall into two categories when it comes to recording. There are 'traditional' set-ups, where the group is self-balancing and arranging (perhaps with a conductor) and your job is to faithfully capture that sound. Classical music, brass band music, and a lot of folk music fall into this camp. The other set-up is the more modern approach, typically used in pop, rock, country, metal and similar productions, where each instrument tends to be captured separately with a view to much ...

 OK, so we've written the song, established the creative vision, recorded all the parts, and deleted half of them. Now we just need to mix it all together.  Easy right? Guess what, I've got another book recommendation for you... The companion to Recording Secrets is Mike Senior's Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio . Now I'm obviously not going to attempt to summarise an entire book / career into a blog post, but for the purposes of finishing our songs, here are a few suggestions about approaches. Lo Fidelity I'll start with a mistake I made when I first started to think about my recording and mixing in a more detailed way than 'stick a mic in front of it and plug it into the 4-track. The mistake I made was in chasing fidelity. I reasoned that if I wanted to create a recording that sounded like a bunch of real instruments then I should start by making each instrument sound as much like the real thing as possible. Then mixing should just be a case of setting the ...