10cc – I’m Not In Love

You could read more about this recording in the wiki entry. But basically this was an attempt to use a 16-track recorder as a huge sampler before the age of samplers. Anyway, the end result was this ethereal wall of singing voices. You could easily do it today with DAWs but this was one of the first doing this kind of technique, back in the seventies.

Kraftwerk – Autobahn

This was for me the first record I got (my third) with just synthesizers doing mostly used in the production. Especially drums were all electronic  It was Kraftwerk’s fourth album, but they got very famous by the Autobahn track. This was then influencing a lot of other bands to move towards are more synthetic sound. Same with the arrangements, simple and to the point, style rather than substance.

Phil Spector – Wall of Sound

Anyone producing should take a listen to any of the Phil Spector productions using his ‘wall of sound‘ method, singles such as Ronettes’ Be My Baby, The Crystals Then He Kissed me and many others. This then influened other bands and artists such as Beach Boys (Good Vibrations), Bruce Sprinsteen Born to Run (some tracks had 25 guitars!) and many others.

Basically the sound is produced by using multiple musicians/instruments paired up, multiple pianists, multiple bass players, multiple guitar players, even multiple tambourines. The end result is a wall of sound where you can’t really recognize any original instrument lines but it all works well together. It even sounds good over an AM transistor radio! This is another technique worth testing out today as it’s very easy to achieve with DAWs.

Todd Rundgren – A Wizard  A True Star

For a long time albums were just a collection of songs on vinyl. Bands like Pink Floyd started to work on conceptual album formats with themes. I guess I should have mentioned Dark Side of the Moon. But I took instead Todd Rundgren’s A Wizard a True Star as the example, this because it opened this up even more, to  a pure stream of consciousness album where one style is weaved into the next track. There was certainly a lot of tape splicing going on! Today you could achieve this easily by just taking individual tracks and making a master with track cross-overs and so on. It also requires a multi-instrumentalist, arranger and a very open mind to make something like A Wizard A True STar.

Frank Zappa – Merging Live and Studio Takes

Frank Zappa pioneered a lot of studio techniques. For me the most exotic one was to merge studio takes with live takes on the same track. To some degree this was dictated by economical needs; it was cheaper to take a bunch of musicians, train them for live songs, play these live and then record them as raw material for later album releases. But with the technologies of the seventies it would have been tough to match together studio takes with live takes seamlessly. Sometimes a solo was lifted from a live recording into a studio recording, or all kinds of other combinations. This made the final result very ambient, you could not pinpoint it as a live recording or a studio recording.

I created 15 instances of sound instruments. Then populated them with various pads and long-scaped synths. Each midi track has different lengths and is looped so this will go on for a while. The actual MIDI information was created randomly by just using the paint tool.

The rest was to set the BPM to 5bpm, maybe the slowest song I’ve ever created. And the total lenght is 600 or more bars.

The final touch is to add a couple of big Space Designers on the output to get that spacey sound.

That’s it. Took me less than ten minutes. I will let it run in the background in case it provides creativity or not. Sometimes this kind of music is so simple to make so it’s not even art, any longer.

It’s about also filtering any reverb and delay output. For example, Logic’s Space Designer has a dedicated EQ section where you could filter out any areas (or boost). In my case, to get that shiny guitar sound so over-used in the eighties, I’m removing the low end for the bus where guitar tracks are beeing fed to the Space Designer dedicated with a plate reverb.

Similarly, Logic’s Tape Delay also has this, some use it for those spacy dub feedback loops with high-end only, but it could also be used for other purposes. Also, Izotope’s Ozone reverb has a similar way, you could even carve out a specific spectrum where the reverb operates — a little bit like doing shoe-polish finish with a high-end reverb in the final mix.

Another feature good to explore is that many of these reverbs also have a pre-delay setting. If you use that one the reverb will not kick in immediately. The benefit is that the original instrument has the attack sound preserved so the initial starting part sounds clear and then the rest could have more or less reverb.

As with anything else, experiment with your ears, but I hope you take a closer look at the EQ options available in reverbs. In my case I’m on a constant battle against rumble frequencies that does not make sense for the final production.

One is the spontaneous creation of music — Miles Davis and his cats (musicians) just showed up at the recording studio to record. There was even this story in the documentary how he fired one player when he found him rehearsing solos in the hotel room.

I’ve fallen so many times into the trap of getting to the studio to write a specific kind of song or track; then feeling miserable when it does not happen (of some reason.) There’s nothing wrong to have a general idea where to go, but then the outcome should be what it should be.

So in honor of Miles Davis I took a one-hour session here and tried to write songs how Miles Davis would do if he had access to something like Logic Pro 8.0 today.

This was an interesting experiment as I first made a very complex drum pattern. This exact same MIDI pattern became the bass line. After that 18 different Zebra synths with different settings use the same MIDI pattern!

To shuffle it up, I took selected MIDI regions in the bass and drum sections and used the Logic MIDI function editor to reverse the MIDI notes or otherwise random shuffle them around.

This is a rough mix, from beginning to end this took one hour, but it shows the general idea of just going with the flow when doing music and not worrying about details. Tomorrow I will worry about those when finishing this up — don’t know where to use it, though, unless I do more jazz-centric music. Maybe jazz musicians should use more DAWs to make interesting music instead of getting stuck with their instruments?

Here’s the song, Made in Japan (Miles Davis-like, Rough Mix): Download audio file (MadeInJapan.mp3)

Anyway, part of the project I do then is to isolate the drums further so each of the drum sounds have their own track. It’s very easy, I just hit the +/file icon next to global tracks to duplicate an existing drum instrument track with all the plug-ins and so forth. Then I go into the piano editor and in one case remove all the kicks and in the second case all the snares. So I now have a separate kick and snare track. Do this with the rest and suddenly you have a nice set of drum controls in case you want to have separate drum sounds for each element. Yes, you could export all the instruments from Ultrabeat as separate tracks but this way I have more control of the instrument selection.

Which leads to the main trick. I had a hard time using the kick from the Ultrabeat’s Studio Tight kick, had some kind of booming sound that I could isolate with the the decay settings of the sample but I was still not happy with the actual kick sound.

Enter Ultrabeat’s Acoustic  Kick Bank patch. It has 25 different kicks mapped across the 25-key midi range. After selecting this patch for the kick track, all I needed to do was to increase the transposition in the top-left pane for the kick instrument track and circulate through all the kicks until I found one I liked in the actual mix — in this case Box Kick. So this is a handy way to key in the specific kick you want, if you don’t like the 25 in this set you could switch to another patch, or even load in another drum SW synth.

Needless to say, Ultravox has other similar collections of the same drum sound in the 02 drum banks sub-selection: snares,  hihats, acoustic, digital and so on. As you could also change the sound with those concerning the ADSR, filtering and so forth, you suddenly have enough options to spend your nights figuring out the perfect drum sound for the track.

This time I installed Massive as I’m looking at more electronic-centric film music as a project. It was indeed fun rediscovering this one. Here’s a quick sample I did as one of the first sounds: Download audio file (massive_pad.mp3)

Still with plenty of RAM and an Intel MacPro, Massive is still a massive CPU-eater, that’s for sure.

However, in most cases either freezing or bouncing is quite fine to do. I use bouncing quite a lot nowadays to render down material that could be played back later with less manipulations. It forces me to make production decisions on the fly so that I don’t get stuck in endless tinkering. I even re-configured the default key bindings so that Command-E in Logic is now exporting regions, not exporting whole tracks, as that’s the more common operations.

Another option is to save it as an AppleLoop and drag the green AppleLoop into an audio track. This way the saved 24-bit audio file is used rather than the midi file with the plug-in. And if you ever want to change the MIDI you could drag it into an instrument track and re-tweak. So there’s plenty of flexibility in the Logic environment. I tend to avoid freezing tracks as it takes a while to freeze a whole song track, but that’s always an option, too.

It was an interesting experiment. I loaded a home made guitar loop that was clean and created a Fender amp simulation with Line6 PodFarm. The drums were done with Superior Drummer 2.0 which I just love. And the bass I recorded quickly in and run it also through a Line6 PodFarm bass amp simulation.

I eq:ued each track heavily, the guitar track I took out the bottom end and made the mid-range somewhat more present. The bass I used the 100Hz as the main range to be heard. The drums were very much Superior Drummer with more ambient reverb added.

As for the actual mastering. First I boosted the mid-range with VintageWarmer. After that I loaded in Izotope’s Ozone — been reading those manuals a lot recently as Ozone has so many interesting gems here and there. I went through some of the presets, including the nice ones other Ozone users have uploaded to the Ozone site and found one that had nice exciter settings for the pop-feeling as well as the multi-band compressor worked fine for the low end. So it always makes sense to go through presets and figure out new avenues.

I also used reverb quite a lot, the plate versions. For guitars I used Logic’s Space Designer with plate impulse reverb settings. Both guitars had a common bus for this. The guitars are the same but with two tracks, pan:ed out in stereo and a -7/+7 delay so they are somewhat out of sync. 7 is a nice number, but you could try out any millisecond delay differences. I also added Ozone’s Plate reverb to the final mix to get more ’shimmer’ to the total sum of all the audio. Not much, one could easily get overboard with reverb.

Finally, to get the matching FM sound, I took Bourgeois Taggs’ Waiting For The Worm to Turn, loaded it into a separate audio track, took the matching EQ values from this using Ozone’s Matching EQ feature — Logic also has a similar EQ plug-in. The Ozone and Logic documentation has all the details so it’s not worth repeating it here.

I keyed in about 40% matching from the original, you can’t go 100% as the eq curves are very fine granular and it will just make it all sound metallic so you need to slowly get towards the original EQ setting. You could even fine-tune it more to your liking.

Here is the result: Download audio file (FM_Guitar_Shimmer.mp3)
.

I spent 2.5 hours on this and I’m sure it could be done better but now I have the recipe if I ever need to produce similar guitar-centric power-pop in future.

Still, there’s a lot of usage of loops in unexpected situations I realized recently. One is songwriting. If you have a big set of private loops that you have saved for a while, Apple Loops or in case Ableton Live, any kind of audio material, you could quickly put together new songs from pre-existing material.

If it sounds good, then you could just re-record all kinds of parts and remove the loops after a while. The green AppleLoops are especially handy as they contain MIDI information so you could go in and edit each loop so they are unique across the section.

Next I will talk more about AppleLoops and my current vacation strategy to once-and-for all solve my workflow and organization concerning saving and keeping track of looped material.

After this I imported back the guitar riff into another track in Logic and now exported it as an Apple Loop so I could use it as an Apple Loop in Logic projects.

The idea is to have a huge set of guitar riffs and simple guitar melodies and then put together song structures using these riffs. The clean guitar signal is then processed with PodFarm entries so I could make the simple guitar sound to nearly anything. It’s a little bit like having MIDI files and use different software synths with the same MIDI file.

It actually works really well. The quick test showed that I could make a 3 minute arena-rock like track by taking three of the guitar stems, use heavy-distortion PodFarm patches, pan two guitars left and right and have something useful within minutes.

So, basically, having a set of private guitar riff parts makes it possible to quickly make songs and as they are tight  and as AppleLoops useful in all kind of places. It does not hurt to play real guitar tracks now and then but for exploration and making new songs this is a very interesting workflow I recommend. If you have 100+ riffs you could do nearly anything.

I must say, Melodyne Plug-in works really well. I set the grid view to 1/32 notes and nudge the entries along to the right positions. So far I’m happy with my playing, there’s some nudging needed but the less the better.

So why the philosophical spin? Well, what’s the difference between re-recording the bass line over and over, maybe with multiple takes and then put together the final version. This versus playing once and fixing the timing issues? I think it does not really matter. The problem is that a recording, not a live one, is a frozen moment in time. Most studios spend a lot of time fixing timing issues. Long time ago it was recording the same take multiple times and then a poor engineer had to splice together multiple tapes with razor blades and tape for the final product.

Ten years later it was a copy and paste operation in combination with nudging values inside a digital editing window. And now it is Melodyne and similar operations. Even recordings such as Michael Jackson’s Thriller went through thousands of re-edits, even with the calibre of musicians used for those recordings.

So I think this is just fine. It opens up so many avenues, especially with creativity. You record something down, fix it and then use it in various scenarios.

The other story is that you then later need to learn how to play it inside out for live purposes…

Meanwhile, today when I worked at the gym I was reading the latest Mix magazine where there was an article about the new Killer album. Basically the band members purchased a studio in downtown Las Vegas, and for the third album they just sat there and did lots of ideas they recorded daily, where many ended up in the final product. So there was no pressure to make something special, more of an attitude to see what happens.

Same when I saw tonight a documentary about Genesis. For one album in their later days they showed up in the studio with no material, just jammed along and after two weeks they had plenty of raw material for the album. In this case they didn’t own the studio so I suspect the studio bill was astronomical.

Anyway, what these indirect pointers showed me is that one should not have any predefined goals, that puts pressure on the creative side resulting in a mental block due to just this fixed goal-setting. In my case it’s even mentally lethal — suspect many have this problem.

I have plenty of stuff and it will be used but this time the whole future result is a blank canvas, let’s see what will be painted on it.

Download audio file (hydrogen.mp3)
.

So there’s a lot of interesting experiments that are doable with Melodyne, not just the most obvious things such as tightening recordings and singing tracks as well as fixed singing not in tune.

So I suspect my family is now worried about me sneaking around with a recorder and picking up conversations…

Maybe it’s also that they take a lot of elements from the eighties sounds that I was part of, too…

So I went to my studio today for just plain jamming purposes and of course ended up doing a base track that sounds half-way like Killers, speak of influence.

Here’s the current rough mix after three hours of quick takes and mixes: Download audio file (PR-1-test.mp3)
.

So what are the ingredients to get to a similar Killers sound? Well, you have a definite rock drumming with some accents that the eighties drummers used a lot, a driving kick. I recorded all the drums from beginning to end using a Yamaha DD-65 just to get the MIDI information based on real drumming (instead of programming) and then used various EXS24 and Ultrabeat sounds to trigger the kick, snare, hihats and so forth.

Before the drums I recoded a pick-played bass with a gnarly sound (using a click drum loop) — I’m using Line 6 PodFarm Ampeg SVT simulation. Also play a lot of eight notes with the bass.

Then I added two eighties-kind-of sounding synth pads. As well as two tracks of distortion/phaser guitar stuff. This is still work in progress, tomorrow I need to put in a couple of synth-pad lead melodies and then a guitar chord that is played in an arpeggiated style.

Finally I need to figure out how to sing like Brandon Flowers, add a little bit dramatic flair to the singing style.

Hopefully it will not become a real Killers copycat — they have their definite style and it’s fun to see what one could do from it but then take it off to another direction.

The video here explains it inside out. Also, check out the interview with the Melodyne developer/mastermind Peter Neubäcker as he talks more about the ideas with DNA. For example, you could then extract MIDI information from the audio material.

This is like the holy grail, you could move between the recorded analog signal and a pure MID-based data world, back and forth. Not to speak of all the functions you could do with Melodyne in general to generate singing backtracks with any kinds of harmonies, create brand new solos from a single take of let’s say a saxophone melody line and so forth.

Yes, it’s on my radar screen to get the Melodyne plug-in now. Yes, I know, real musicians to takes until it sounds good. But time is money, it’s kind of fun to do such sessions the first week, then it gets boring. As for singing fixes, if famous singers do it nowadays what could you do? The problem with recorded material is that it is a time stamp, it will live forever compared with a live situation. It’s a matter of singing the same lines over and over until it sounds good, but again it takes time and effort.

Just to be clear: I don’t support the idea that musicians, singers and producers totally rely on such tools of many reasons. To start with you could never do any live playing (unless you are prepared to do playback from tape/DAT/computer file.) Secondly, there’s something good about sloppy and unpredictable playing from time to time, gives the recording character. But as with all other kinds of spices in the studio, it is just another one to be used.

You have a multitude of ingredients, but it does not make sense to put everything in with any kind of combination or rations. There’s a certain pattern that will work well. Through hard work and practice someone will get this in place.

Also, chefs have good taste so producers should have a good ear. They should know when something is missing, there’s something too much of something, or otherwise is balanced or wrong. Usually it is best if you know exactly what you want as the final product — not that experimentation in the beginning makes something interesting later.

That’s really it. Make sure each and every element of a track has its meaning. Sometimes less is better than more (note to myself.) Sometimes more is needed. Think of the final result. Serve something good.