Rough to Release

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 ...

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...