Category Archives: Production Techniques

Road Maps

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I’m a true believer in “starting with the end in mind” as it can make all the difference in whether a project is completed or not. So when it came time to identify what I wanted to do for the 2019 Spring Concert I had a brainstorming session with my whiteboard:

For those that can’t read my scribbles, here’s what it says:

Spring Concert 2019
Location: Home Living Room
Duration: 30 – 60 Minutes
Theme: Spring, new life, budding, becoming, cycles
Genres: Acoustic and electric

TTD
Pre-Production:
Select Songs, Determine: length/arrangements/instrumentation/melodies/lyrics

Production:
Scratch Tracks, Determine tempos & keys, drums/percussion, bass, guitars, keyboards, vocals

Post-Production:
Editing
Mixing (template?)

Visuals:
Photos/videos (fractal generators?)

Prep for live performance:
Bounce tracks to RC 500 or to use in Ableton Live?
Determine live rig
Determine visual projection system & how to sync to music

Looking back I pretty much did everything listed on the board. Granted I ended up creating various spreadsheets to go into greater detail:

I also created an outline of how I would like the contour of the concert/album to be:

Here’s the translation:

Contour of Concert (Songs/Album)
• String Piece ( string quartet -> symphony)
• African Drums Piece
• Spacey Lead Guitar Piece (using the Dark Side and Freqout pedals) <- use “Thaw” for the inspiration and title?
• Piano Piece
• Electronic Piece (“Crushing Minimalism”?)
• Acoustic Guitar Piece (“Tempest”)
• Tibetan Bell and Bowl (perhaps to begin and end with or to use in the middle

All of which ended up being what I did for the concert and album. The String piece became “Enchantment”, the African Drums piece became part of the middle section in “Signs of Life”, the Spacey Lead Guitar piece became “The Thaw”, the Piano piece became “Frost”, the Electronic piece became “Signs of Life”, the Acoustic Guitar piece is “Tempest” and I used the Tibetan Bowl for the beginning of the concert.

Best Laid Plans…

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One of the things that I was hoping to do during the first quarter of this year was to continue my studies while making an album (and preparing to perform said album) for our 2019 Spring Equinox Concert. I estimated all the timelines needed for studies, pre-production, production, editing, mixing, concert prep and setup. I thought I had a reasonable plan.

I had a good run for most of the quarter, maintaining a daily study schedule of ~4 hours a day with ~4-5 hours of production/prep all throughout January and February. It felt really good to be making progress in so many areas on a daily basis.

That was until the beginning of March when I realized that I had exceeded the amount of time that I had allotted for pre-production and production. I was supposed to be editing and mixing when a majority of the songs were nowhere near being ready. I had a strong feeling that I could get everything done if I abandoned the study regimen.

So that’s what I did. Throughout March, I focused 100% on the production/editing/mixing of the songs with some concert prep along the way. This went on until the _very_ early morning of the Spring Equinox (3/23). I met my deadline, all the songs were finished but at the cost of not meeting my goals for other areas of development.

Looking to the future, I hope to return to my days of studies _and_ production. This time allowing more leeway for production either in the number of songs or as to when I expect them to be done. Perhaps I will spread things out over two quarters. One being dedicated to writing and pre-production of the songs with a concert of the stripped down/basic versions. The other being focused on production/editing/mixing and concert of the fully arranged songs. As of now this approach seems reasonable, then again I thought the plan for this past quarter was reasonable… We’ll have to try and see what happens!

“Nets”

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(Continuing on from the “Welcome to Real World” post…)

Before even meeting my collaborator for Beatcamp @ RealWorld 2018 we received an assignment from the camp director Marc Langsman: select an image from the National Geographic archive that would serve as the basis of inspiration for the song that we would produce during the workshop. 

At first this felt a bit daunting, as there are well over 9.3 million images in the archive, but I held the attitude that I was going to find it quickly and that I’d know it when I saw it. Within 10 minutes I came across this fantastic photograph taken by Oliver Apicella:  

To me, it said everything about what we would be doing for the project: casting our nets, hoping to catch the big fish – inspiration.

Fortunately my collaborator, Patrick Hill, agreed and suddenly we were working together in the same direction. (Great idea, Marc!) We also agreed to create a completely new song, just for the camp and that everything would be done from scratch.  

From there the song came together rather quickly. We had the chord progressions, riffs, melodies, lyrics, arrangement and drums all done on the first day of the camp. The next day we built the song up by tracking bass, guitars, piano and vocals. The final day of the camp we recorded a violin solo, edited the tracks, mixed it all down and gave it the name “Nets”.

You can listen to the entire BeatCamp at Real World 2018 album on Spotify or iTunes/Apple Music.

Aside from having a dream come true (getting to make music at Real World) the camp taught and reminded me of quite a few things:


1) To stay focused on the goal and feel as if it is already done. I’ve been doing this with great success for a couple years now and it helped a number of times during the camp. Particularly given the time constraints and the ever-present temptation to try too many things.

2) Strive to hear my inner voice even in the midst of chaos/activity all around, as well as differing opinions. This doesn’t mean “ignore everyone else”, it simply means don’t forsake my own intuition/vision just because of what’s going on around me.

3) Go with the path of least resistance. E.g. don’t insist that I do something myself if someone else can do it better/quicker. Early on in the camp I made a conscious decision to involve the studio musicians as much as possible. Normally I would opt to do everything myself but here we had a small army of professional musicians/engineers/producers ready and willing to help out. I realized that I should make the most of this opportunity, particularly if I wanted the track to be finished on time.

4) Be open to seeing how someone else might do something. Originally my plan for mixing was to do a first pass myself and then get feedback as to what should be fixed. Then I had the thought “I pretty much know what I am going to do and how it will sound, why not see how a pro would do it”. So I asked the Head Engineer Oli Jacobs if he wouldn’t mind handling it while I looked over his shoulder and he said “sure”. Turns out that this was one of the highlights of the entire camp for me. It was fantastic being able to see his workflow, his choices/decisions and being able to ask him questions as to why. He was super helpful, responsive and kind throughout the process. 

Thanks again to everyone involved in making “Nets” a reality. Here are the credits:

Glenn Schoonmaker (Composer), Patrick Hill (Composer), Nicole Fermie (Vocals), AD Chivers (Vocals), Howard Gill (Drums), Paul Whalley (Bass), Graham Kearns (Guitar), Jonathan Page (Piano), TiiT Kikas (Violin), Oli Middleton (Recording Engineer), Oli Jacobs (Mix Engineer), Tim Oliver (Mastering Engineer), Marc Langsman (BeatCamp Director), Rena Biring (Beatcamp Organizer) 

Welcome To Real World

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Man, what can I say? I am a lucky so and so. I just got back from an amazing time doing a 3 day music production workshop focused on collaboration at Peter Gabriel’s “Real World” recording studios. I have fantasized about making music at this studio since I first read about it in the early 90’s.

“Beatcamp at Real World” is a fantastic experience and I recommend it to anyone that wants to work in one of the world’s finest recording studios with consummate engineers, musicians and producers who are ready and willing to help you make your creative vision a reality. My thanks goes out to everyone involved in making it an incredible weekend that I won’t soon forget.

To read about the song that my collaborator, Patrick, and I made during the camp go here.

Vancouver (Revisited)

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I thought it might be cool to take what I’ve been learning about compression and EQ and practice with previous music sketches. I decided to start with the very first music sketch that I posted, “Vancouver”. It now feels like a completely new song to me.

In fairness, the original focus of the Music Sketches project was to create simple new song ideas, quickly. That being said it inspires me to know that I can take old ideas and make them feel new again.

To celebrate the new audio mix I did a video with new visuals as well.

Here’s the original:

Here’s the “revisited” version:

For Kicks

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One thing that I have been meaning to learn more about was how to tune kick drums/low pitched drum samples to the key of a song, at the very minimum to ensure that they won’t clash with other low frequency instruments. Sometimes this can be done by ear, other times it’s good to get more analytical about it.

First determine the fundamental frequency of the drum as described in this great article on Mode Audio. This can be done by opening up a EQ with a frequency analyzer (e.g. “Channel EQ” in Logic) on the drum track in question to see where most of the energy is being displayed, like so:

Then analyze the fundamentals of any other low frequency instruments that may clash in this range.

Look up the relative note names of the frequencies on a table such as this one from Liutaio Mottola.

Then you can tune the drum using techniques outlined in Attack Magazine’s article. The highlight of this article for me was: “A neat trick for making the job a little easier here is to transpose the kick upwards by one or two octaves, do the fine tuning, then transpose it back down by the same amount. It tends to be easier to determine the pitch of the drum hit and hear how nicely it interacts with bass notes when it’s transposed up an octave or two.”

Humanized

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Had fun trying out the “Transform MIDI > Humanize” functionality in Logic, which I learned about through this really useful video on YouTube (starting at about 8:48).

One of the problems with not being a world class keyboardist is that I tend to rely quite heavily on quantization which is great for making things “perfect” but not so great for emulating real human performances. Essentially this “Humanize” feature randomizes your MIDI data within a defined range (default values being 10 ticks). Parameters that can be modified are “position”, “velocity” and “length”. Worked great!

UPDATE: Be sure to reapply quantization with an adjusted Q-Strength (e.g. 40%) after applying the humanize values a few times. It really helps to make things sound natural yet tight at the same time. Works really great across large ensembles like orchestras.