Rough to Release

Some video content for you to wrap up the series. In the video below I'll show you how I worked through the process we've talked about, and used a lot of the tools and techniques we've discussed, to create the song Some Things Break.  And that's it from me, but I'll leave you with one last thing. You'll remember back in Part 10 we talked about the recording hierarchy and how the material and the performance trumped everything further down the line? Well as proof I present to you The Mountain Goats, The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton . Now go finish your song.

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 Part 20 - Appendix 1 - Experimenting with SubmitHub. Part 21 - Appendix 2 - Experimenting with paid promotion

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...

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 ...

In the previous chapter we looked at production and setting out the vision for the song. So now we have our spark and spice mixed together and our direction set, how do we go about turning that into a reality? If you're a proper composer or you're just really good at thinking about musical parts, it might be as simple as writing down everything you want to play, hitting record, and playing it all.  If you're anything like me then you might be quite a long, long way from that. So I have a 'Demo Dub Delete' cycle, and you might find it helpful too. Demo Firstly, and most importantly, capture the essence of the song as completely and accurately as you can. For me, this involves practicing to a metronome a few times and then recording to a click. As well as being a bit of good discipline, this also makes it easier to add midi parts later if the baseline is solid. It can get a bit awkward if you have a tempo or time-signature change, ideally work out where those things a...

 I've gone back and forth about the order of these next two chapters several times, I'm still not sure they're in the practical order, but I think this is the right order for the finishing-your-song flow. What is 'production' when we're talking about music and home recording? In the 'good old days' the music producer was someone who would work with the band to help them establish and execute their vision. They would cover things like artist management (making sure everyone was happy and productive), label liaison (making sure everyone was getting paid and deadlines are hit), session management (making sure the engineer and artists were on the same page), but they also had a hand in the arrangement of the track, the composition of any supporting parts and that all important job of taking the vision out of the artists' head and getting it on tape. Sounds like a fascinating job, but how many people here can afford to pay a professional to do all that? Y...

Hello again. Last time we started talking about recording, the hierarchy, and intent. We left it with a promise to talk one of the easiest ways to get your recordings sounding better-than-average: sound-treatment of your room. Now some people might be nodding along at this point, but not really believing. I mean, it's just the room right? It's not what's making the noise, and it's not what's capturing the noise, so how much difference could it make? Well, fortunately I have some pertinent examples: Untreated, unfurnished room:  https://www.youtube.com/shorts/pJnGeDsly6M Same room, treated, singing into the 'live' end:  https://www.youtube.com/shorts/t2iIhiyjm6A Same room, treated, singing into the 'dead' end:  https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7c4hKBWk6Ac So we're starting with this because it will apply to all of the subsequent options and it's cheap and easy. Sound treatment is about controlling how sound bounces around your room, and we need...

  Welcome back. Last time we summarised the various tools and tricks we'd covered so far and largely wrapped up the initial 'writing' side of the 'rough to release' process. And if all you require is a finished set of lyrics, a chord structure, and / or a melody line scribbled on a stave then your work may be done. But my memory doesn't work like and I don't read music, so firstly, I require a recording of the complete piece so that there's a permanent record. Pun very much intended. Secondly, during the writing process I will often get ideas for how I want the final piece to sound; and that's rarely as simple as a single guitar and vocal part. My songs tend to be musically very simple and I rely on production and arrangement to keep the interest going. Blame it on my lack of music theory... So I need to be able record my parts, add elements to them, remove other bits and generally screw around with things. And for that I will need some 'stuff...

 Welcome to either the half-way point of this blog, or the end of the blog, depending on your perspective... This series is titled 'rough to release' because for me, the release is the end* of the process. It's the point beyond which there are no more re-writes, re-arrangements or just general tweakery. In releasing it to the public it is committed to the record. But not all of you will work to this definition of 'finished'. For some it is enough to have a set of lyrics written down, a structure established, and a chord progression or tune notated. And if that's you then you might be pleased to know that your work here is all but done. After this blog we'll be moving onto the 'release' part of the series. So before we take that step, let's have a quick refresher on what we've covered so far. In part one we set the scene but didn't really broach any finishing techniques, so let's go straight onto... Part Two - Space and Permission. Th...

Welcome back to Trollholm and Rough to Release, our series on taking your half-finished ideas and turning them into finished songs.  So far we've assumed that your creative process is you, alone, slaving away by the midnight oil in your artists garret. Or in the train on the morning commute, whatever works for you (according to part 2). But obviously this is not always the case; you might be working as part of a writing group, you might be working with a partner, you might be taking your song ideas to a band to develop into a live show. All of these scenarios bring both advantages and dis-advantages, but there are some consistent points as well. Let's have a look... As part of a band In my (limited) experience, bands tend to be run either as dictatorships or communes. Under the dictator, the band leader tends to bring the songs and sets the rules about how they'll be played. If it's a benevolent dictatorship they will allow the other players control of their parts and a...

Spock: why is that music playing? Kirk: Tension Spock! Atmosphere. Spock: It's space; there is no atmosphere. Kirk: Hence the tension! There's an old saying about writing a novel that the sequential passage of events is the story, but how you chop up and present that sequence of events is your plot. And one of the key ways in which you can dice up your novel is to simply chop things out. This idea applies double to lyrics, it also applies to the music and the production as well. We'll come back to production later, but before we delve into lyrics, let's talk briefly about the music. Subverting structures To keep people interested you obviously need an attractive melody but, unless you're writing for the Baby Shark audience, you also need some variety and contrast.  In terms of song structures an easy way to add a bit of variety is to extend or contract a segment. If you've established a verse-chorus structure, then adding an extra bar or two to the second v...