Keith Handy 1.999

So you want to make an album? (part 15)

As I start to type this, I don’t know whether this is a “so you want to make an album” installment or not. I only have a vague idea about what I’m going to write, and it’s regarding an area that I’m not sure I excel at, so I can’t exactly claim expertise. I’m just hoping that by writing about it, some wisdom will emerge that I too can benefit from.

It’s sort of about the broader subject that would include time management… but time management would only be a part of that. It’s about synchronizing with the natural life rhythm that allows you to keep working on something without being totally burned out. It’s about admitting when your tank of inspiration is on “empty”, and knowing you can do something to replenish your fuel… instead of beating yourself on the head for not being as productive as you think you should be.

But that said, it is about time management too. See, we creative freaks have a weird, off-kilter concept of “time”, and so the conventional time management tools don’t work for us. Not for what we want to do.

To read the entire series, go to the “So You Want…” category.

Installment 15: In and out

For most of the process of making this album, you presumably want “flow”, and you want a “moving forward” feeling. You probably want your hair to still be the same color when you finish. When friends ask you how the album is coming along, you want to have some exciting news about how things are progressing. You don’t want to be stuck.

Let’s start with some things that don’t work:

Plan the album out in detail, in advance, and stick to your plans religiously. Right down to where everything will be panned in the mixdown. This is a carry-over from when indie artists had to pay by the hour for studio time. There is no better way to suck all the fun out of the music-making process. From your first drum track to your final de-essing of the vocals, your music will broadcast to the world how passionless of a worker bee you’ve become.

Refuse to switch tasks until you’re absolutely sure you’re done with the one at hand. After all, you might suffer from total amnesia and forget what you were doing.

Refuse to work on other creative projects. Can’t you see they’re only competing for your attention and distracting you from the important project?

Refuse to do anything “fun” or “recreational”. The ninety minutes you’d waste watching that mediocre family-friendly comedy could be devoted to agonizing over what the heck is bugging you about that keyboard part, and getting that much closer to the solution. And don’t you want to show everyone else how much more serious you are than them? The inspiration for a better keyboard part couldn’t possibly be lurking somewhere in the film’s soundtrack or anything.

Be hard on yourself. You’re not getting as much done as you’d hoped? Well obviously you’re a bad person. Shame on you. Now lock yourself in that studio and force yourself to put in more time.

The unifying misconception in all of the above is that your creative output will be in proportion to your masochism. If you’re surrounded in your day-to-day life by people who aren’t making albums, then it’s logical to reason that maybe they would be making albums if only they weren’t so relaxed all the time, and that the only way to transcend this creeping complacency is to keep yourself neurotic.

The underlying fallacy is that you are an output machine, creating something out of nothing, and the more time you spend outputting, the greater your contribution to humanity. A less false (but equally crippling) version of this is that you already have so much accumulated junk in your brain, that now you have no room for new ideas, and you’d better just focus on outputting, until eventually you get it all out, and feel fresh and clear-headed again.

You can’t really not have input over any period of time — even staring at the wall is input — but you can resist it and refuse to let it help.

“So if I’m doing all the same things other people are doing, won’t I be not making an album, just like them?” I didn’t say you would be living exactly like everybody else. A mistake I once made myself, though, was to live a more closed life than the average person — I frequently perceived situations and events as obstacles, thinking I knew better than the universe what would be best for my work — as opposed to living a more open life, and making music out of whatever life threw my way. You can live what appears to be a completely ordinary life (save for that hour or two a day when you retreat to your underground laboratory with all the dials, blinky lights, and invisible one-eyed hunch-backed assistant engineers), but there is one thing that sets you apart: no matter where you are, no matter what you appear to be doing, you are now a scavenger, gathering useful ideas.

No place or situation has a monopoly on these. Libraries and museums are great, but you can just as easily get useful ideas at Wal-Mart, a monster truck rally, or one of those small-church barbeques where they give you chicken and cole slaw in a styrofoam box. You don’t need to alienate your friends with constant exclamations of “this gives me a great idea for my song!”, nor do you even need to be consciously thinking of this every waking second. Obsession can work for you on the back burner just as well as, if not better than, on the front. But you do need to make a conscious declaration that this is now the meta-purpose of all those seemingly unrelated activities and events in your life. Just be sure your conscious brain checks in every once in a while with some tangibly empowering questions, like “how can my album benefit from this?”.

Here are some things I would suggest, although admittedly I’m being a hypocrite here, because I haven’t truly given them all a serious chance:

Discipline yourself to switch gears after a certain amount of time on any particular thing. I can’t say for sure what that ideal amount of time is: Half an hour? One hour? Two hours? Experiment with this. Pull yourself away from a song while you’re being productive, and then pick up where you left off next time. Finishing up some mundane task is an easy way to begin a session and will “warm you up” to start the next task.  Staggering tasks across multiple sessions challenges you to remember what the heck you were doing, which is why I’ll also suggest:

Keep notes on every song. Things you haven’t done that you still want to do, and if you stopped midway through doing something, what part of it is still left to do? (Example: “cleaning up background noises on vocal track, still need to do from 1:50 to end of song.”)

Try “finishing” the whole song/album really quickly. Then, instead of always needing to finish it, you’re only ever doing things to improve it. This might be less stressful in a way. Any rough demo can be transformed track by track into a solid final product, and at any time along the way, you always have something you can play for other people.

Try devising some system that randomly tells you which song to work on today. I’m really curious to see how this would go. It would certainly get some of my more neglected songs out of the closet. I’d also like to try setting a time limit for each song, and using the same random system to pick the next one. Being sure to update my handy-dandy notebook between songs, of course.

Repeat after me: “This plan is tentative”. Plans are fine. They’re a great way to kickstart your creativity. Just make sure you don’t shut the creativity off somewhere between planning and doing. Think of your plan and your creativity as two cars headed for the same destination (a finished album), and you want them to arrive there at the same time. (You did this in math class, remember?) Replacing or rewriting songs halfway through the project is healthy and normal. It’s a living thing, not a stone tablet.

Hand some of the work over to your subconscious. And affirm that you’ve done so. And affirm that your subconscious is, in fact, doing a good job. And give it a tasty biscuit.

I don’t know if I’ve made as much of a dent into this topic as I want to, so this may be expanded either here or in a follow-up.

Possible future installments for the “So you want” series

Here are some ideas I’m thinking of for future installments in the So You Want To Make An Album series:

Follow-through - is your flow on album #1 stifled by your refusal to touch album #2 too soon?

Meta-rhythm - swimmers (and other non-dead people) know it’s okay to breathe out into the water, as long as they breathe in from the air above. How do you synchronize music to your life for the best inflow (inspiration) and outflow (expression)?

What is originality? - is it pulling something brand new out of thin air?  Or is it drawing from a larger, more varied, less predictable pool of influences?

So you want to make an album? (part 14)

To read the entire series, go to the “So You Want…” category.

Installment 14: Installment fourteen is the new installment one!

Yes indeed, thirty is the new twenty, white is the new black, and now, installment fourteen is the new installment one. Since I have so much momentum going with this “so you want to make an album” series, where you would expect to find you everything you ever needed to know about cutting your own number one, it’s time for me to stop yakking about all the drugs I’ve taken and all the parties I’ve gotten naked at, and time for… reader participation!

If you haven’t started work on your album, I don’t want to hear about it. I know you’re confused, because you’ve been told all your life that the green light means go, and the red light means stop — but you’ve entered the bizarro parallel alternate world of recording, where things are different.

Yes, that’s right, red means “tape is rolling”. And in your case, tape is most likely a metaphor for hard drive space. But it’s also a metaphor for something much larger: your life. Your life is rolling. The red light on your life is always on. So the only reason for the red light on your recording equipment to not be on as well, is to maintain the comforting illusion that this particular moment doesn’t count.

Are you ready? That’s a trick question, and I’m only asking it because that’s the question you’re asking yourself. The answer is: you have always been ready. And also: you will never be ready. There is no such thing as “ready”, so purge yourself of this paralyzing concept right now.

Name any excuse why this is not a good time for you to put down a track, and I’ll tell you exactly why that makes it the best time to put down that track. At the risk of getting all “lemons to lemonade” on you, I sincerely believe that every perceived obstacle is really a gift to help us each find our unique sound — if we let it. Sore throat? You’re about to discover an interesting way of singing the melody. Injured left hand? Obviously that guitar bit is destined to be played with a slide. Power outage? That’s the pad and pencil calling your name. Malfunctioning equipment, or lacking a critical piece of gear? Congratulations, you’re an inventor. Broken string, and no stores are open? Fresh, “innovative” guitar part on the horizon, or maybe a keyboard part you hadn’t thought of. Bad mood creeping up on you? New song en route. I suggest you thank whoever or whatever is guiding you with these helpful nudges, and nothing says “thank you” like hitting the frickin’ record button.

How many songs need to be written and/or selected when you hit the button? Zero. Are you plugged in? When you hit the button, can you make a sound? Can you play just one note? Play it. Can you improvise well? No? Can you improvise badly? Do it. Nothing to sing? What’s in front of you? What’s to your left? Talk about it. Talk about how boring it is. Talk and talk and talk until something comes out that you like. Then sing it.

Creating is sort of like fishing. You don’t just magically burst forth with product. You simply elect to begin capturing what flows through you anyway. And unlike fishing (hence the “sort of”), the very fact that you’re doing it at all feeds back into your well of inspiration and accelerates your “magic moments”. Think about it: if you were an angel, seeking a worthy conduit for an awesome guitar solo, would you give it to someone with a long track record of avoiding the button?

You don’t need to have everything in place in order to start. You don’t need to know everything you’re going to do, or how you’re going to to it. You don’t need to read the rest of this series, or even the rest of this post. You can start with a click track, or you can use the internal sense of tempo yo’ momma gave you. You can have the levels set wrong. You can use a crappy microphone. You can play like shit*. You can have zero ideas. And no matter what winds up on that track, you might still find something on it worth using as the foundation for a great song.

*Sensitive readers: if you don’t like the word “shit”, be forewarned that I use it a shitload in the following paragraph.

So why doesn’t everybody do this? Well, because it’s about starting with shit and turning it into greatness. But in order to do that, you have to hear the greatness in the shit. As young people, we do this naturally, sometimes to the point where we don’t even realize it’s shit. But as we get older, we only hear shit as shit, as if resigning to its shittiness somehow makes us more sophisticated. The third level of awareness, the one I’m evangelizing, is to hear both the shittiness and the greatness. You need to be able to fill in the blanks in this sentence: “This is such a shitty ______, but it would be great as a ______.” Experience teaches you how to fill the blanks. The more recording you actually do, the more happy accidents you experience, thus the fuller your bag of tricks, and subsequently the keener your ability to perceive the greatness in the shit. The only way to kickstart that cycle is to hit the button.

Are you getting the point yet? If you still have no idea what to do, I’ll spell it out. Consider this a homework assignment. Pick an instrument that you feel most comfortable with. If it’s your voice, pick your voice (although when you read the rest of the assignment, you’ll change your mind). Set aside one full hour, including setup and wrap-up time, when you will hopefully not be disturbed; but, if you must be disturbed, then promise ahead of time to use that disturbance as a source of inspiration. Record yourself improvising continuously for at least thirty minutes. HOLD THE PHONE, BUSTER, I can hear you saying, I CAN’T IMPROVISE MY WAY OUT OF A PAPER BAG. Shhh, calm down, it’s okay. You can play one chord. Get a rhythm going. When you feel like changing the chord, change it. Pick one that you know will sound good, or pick one at random. Just go with it, and no matter how bad you think your choice was, play it as if it was fantastic and you really meant it. Go back and forth between two chords. They don’t have to be super-original. When you get sick of what you’re doing, change it to something else — change the feel, change the rhythm. Do strange things with your instrument to get strange sounds out of it. But whatever you do, don’t stop, for at least thirty to forty minutes.

Now for the hard part: listen back to the whole thing, either that same day or as soon as you get a chance. You may well hate most of it. But I guarantee there will be a minute or so somewhere in the middle that makes you think, “hmm, that part actually isn’t so bad”. Feel free to delete everything else, but preserve that one little bit. Now you can loop it, play around with overdubbing something on top of it, or just take advantage of your newfound courage and record something new from scratch. It’s up to you!

Your life is rolling. Hit the button. We’ll worry about “making it good” later.

“Loudness war” clarified

If you’ve seen me mentioning the “loudness war” in previous posts, and aren’t 100% sure what I’m talking about, GO HERE. NOW. THIS IS ME WHACKING YOU ON THE ASS WITH A PADDLE. GIT, GIT, GIT!!!

So you want to make an album? (part 13)

To read the entire series, go to the “So You Want…” category.

Installment 13: Be a drum slut (you’ll love it!)

When it comes to layin’ drum tracks, I ain’t no vanilla cherry, honey. I am, indeed, a drum slut. I’ve done drums in every place you can name, in every imaginable way. Before recording the other tracks. After recording the other tracks. Real drumset played by someone else for my song, with or without a click track. Real drumset played by someone else for their song and “stolen” for use in my song (mmm, so naughty). Real drum set played by me. Back when I was under-age, I recorded myself hitting pillows with sticks (and I’ll be damned if it didn’t sound just like… pillows being hit with sticks!) — and I was also using the built in rhythms on organs and toy keyboards. I’ve created makeshift drum-like sounds with a synthesizer, and likewise with a Commodore 64. I’ve done oral. (Yes, “oral” — I was mouth-drumming before beatboxing took off.) Played a drum machine by hand. Programmed a drum machine. Programmed a computer sequencer which then played the drum machine. Played a drum machine by hand into the computer’s sequencer, and then used that to fix/tighten/clean up my performance. Programmed a computer sequencer to play samples of real, actual drums that I’d originally hit with a real, actual drumstick (this is one of my favorite positions methods lately). Ain’t no lie, I’ll try anything once, sugar.

Why so many different ways? Lots of reasons. Sometimes you just have to use whatever is available to you. Sometimes you want to try something different. Sometimes the song demands that you do something different (I love it when the song gets bossy). Sometimes you think you’re being super-creative and all you’re really doing is making a mess. But that’s okay too, because we all gotta learn.

Since 1.) this series is geared more at home recordists than at bands going into pro studios, and 2.) home is where the revolution is happening anyway, I’m going to assume you’re recording one instrument at a time. The logical thing to do is to record a drum track before anything else, whether it’s real drums or machine drums. If you’re a little crazy, it is actually possible to record other instruments like guitars first, but only if there’s a good reason, or if you have experience doing so. (I know one guy that always does his drums last — he has to crank his headphones to the max to hear what he’s playing along to — but he’s so intimately familiar with his own songs, that even when there are breaks between sections, he can intuitively “feel” how long to pause before starting up again.)

On some of my own songs (listen to Have You Heard the Good News? for an example), the guitar holds the groove for most of the song, and the drums only come in on one verse. I could have started with a click track for the whole song, but then the rhythm of the initial guitar track might have felt too rigid, and I wanted it to be natural. So I played the guitar part “free”, i.e. not to anything, and then played the drum machine by hand over the third verse. On Never Turn Back, I actually did it this way (guitar first, then played the drum machine) for the whole song, partly just because I’m nuts, and partly because, again, I wanted the acoustic guitar to have a really natural feel to it. No click or reference was used, so the song is at whatever tempo I naturally played the guitar at. Playing a drum machine to an existing track is at least a little easier than doing so with a real set, because you can do it at a volume that won’t make you deaf. Be picky, though. If a bit doesn’t “feel” right, do something about it, because a half-assed drum part will kill a song.

If you know drums will be playing for most of the duration of your song, as in most pop/rock songs, the logical and sane thing to do is to record them first. This is not without its own challenge; if there are fills, accents, or breaks that happen in certain spots, you need to be able to mentally keep track of where you are in the song. Even if there is a section where you don’t want drums, say an intro for example, you could just play a “placeholder” beat for that part and remove it later. Always give yourself a one-measure count-off at the beginning, or you will be cursing yourself as you try to nail the first chord on overdubs. Setting the ideal tempo can be tricky; for drum machines, play and sing along with it to see if it feels right before committing to it. For real drums, maybe play and sing the song with your keyboard or guitar first to get the tempo in your head, and watch out for that human tendency to speed up as you go along.

Often times, after creating what you think is the ultimate drum track, you will put your overdubs down and then wish the drum part was a little different. There’s no easy rule for how to avoid this; it takes a certain amount of experience and foresight. If you’re not sure, it’s generally better to keep it really simple than to get fancy, because everything else you do will be adding to it. Something like a cymbal crash can always be overdubbed later if you think a transition isn’t getting enough emphasis. Another thing I’ve noticed with drum machine parts is, if you have velocity sensitive pads and some hits are a lot quieter than others, the quieter hits can rapidly disappear into near-inaudibility when you start putting overdubs on. So it’s best not to overdo the dynamics if you know there will be a lot of other things on top.

Recording the sound from a drum machine is a no-brainer; the work has already been done for you. Just patch it directly in and record it. Comparitively, recording a real kit in your home studio will prove to be a challenge as far as microphone placement and setting levels. The tight, clean, well-defined drum sounds on studio recordings are the result of microphones being placed right near the drumheads, generally one mic per drum, plus a pair of overhead mics to capture cymbals and room ambience. In all likelihood, your project studio may not have as many mics or recording inputs as you would like, yet you may still want to record a set anyway. This is fine, just be aware that your sound will be a compromise, and you may need to experiment a lot with the overall mix to get a sound that you find acceptable.

If you record with only one or two microphones, it is best to hang them several feet above the set, and then some after-the-fact multi-band compression might help you bring out the lacking “oomph” of the kick drum without muddying everything up the way an ordinary EQ might. If you have a couple more mics, it’s generally recommended that you close-mic the snare and the kick, and record them to separate tracks so you can adjust them afterwards. If, however, like a lot of home recordists, you don’t have a multi-channel soundcard, you can combine the sounds from multiple mics on the fly with a small mixer — you won’t know what it sounds like until after you record it and play it back, and you won’t be able to re-adjust the balance later, so you’ll need to record and listen back to some short “test takes” before starting work on the actual song.

Do a Google search on “miking drums” (without the quotes). A lot of what you find and read, you may not be able to do with the equipment you currently have, but the general principles will still be valuable. I’ll link to a few of them, but there are so many good articles out there that you really should do a full search yourself when you have time for explorin’.

A few years ago, a friend and former drummer of mine left his drums at my studio for a while, so I tried a session or two of playing the set myself. Your mileage my vary on this, but from my own experience, it may be helpful to let you know that I wish I had played them a bit louder, or rather, more consistently loud. Because drums are so much louder than other acoustic instruments, a non-drummer will tend to play relatively quietly. It will sound loud in the room, but you can tell on playback when you didn’t capture the familiar sound, timbre, or character of “loud hits”.

From these same sessions, I isolated, copied, and saved some of the better sounding drum hits and cymbal crashes to create a personal library of drum samples. When you think too hard about individual sounds, you tend to over-embellish them. These natural sounds — cleaned up a bit, but not “sweetened” much — sound nice and organic when I use them in conjunction with a sequencer. On my old Windows box, I used Cakewalk as the sequencer (think “the robot that plays the instrument”) and Mellosoftron as the sampler (think “the instrument being played by the robot”) which produces the actual sound. On my Mac, I can do it all self-contained within Tracktion.

It’s worth mentioning here that seemingly dull and ordinary drum sounds are often ideal in the larger context, since you usually don’t want the drums to be hogging all the listener’s attention anyway. Having realized this, my current “drum set” sounds pretty realistic, and I can use it in a lot of songs without getting sick of it — whereas a while back, particularly in the competitive climate of 80s, the pressure was on to blow everyone else off the charts with the ultimate, big, bad, in-your-face “snare drum to end all snare drums”. It took me a while to recover from that.

A whole universe of techniques, some of which might be considered “cheating” if you were in a “real band” with a “real drummer”, is out there for less-pigeonholed artists to explore without guilt. Don’t be afraid to try recording your drum parts in separate layers, or to combine the drum machine with a real drumset. Try, for example, using the drum machine for a simple, tight, clean kick/snare groove, and then overdubbing real cymbals. Try playing the drums at half the actual speed of the song, and then speeding it up on playback for a cute and infectious “toy drums” sound. Try looping your best measure or two (or four, or thirteen) of drumming. Try using the drum machine for the hi-hat, the drumset for the kick, your mouth as a snare, and the contents of your silverware drawer being dumped on the kitchen floor as a crash. (Try to get your pets involved too, and if you can get your neighbor to scold you for something, that’s always a fun thing to catch on tape.) Remember, a good sounding rhythm track will only give you half of your satisfaction; the other half will come from the scandalous stories you can tell afterwards about how you did it.

So what are you waiting for? Be a drum slut. You’ll love it. It’s a way of life.

So you want to make an album? (part 12)

Installment 12: Standard sound recipe 101.

I recently uploaded some “unplugged”-type acoustic performances to YouTube. I did some originals (I recommend watching at least one of them before reading the whole post) and some covers; as of this writing I haven’t edited and uploaded the covers yet. While this is a fairly popular thing to do nowadays, I decided that I wanted better than average sound. So, I set up studio-quality conditions, using a few simple guidelines that I can spell out for you here, which should kind of establish some helpful basics for everything you ever record.

1. Quiet the room.

Duh. But seriously, if you have heaters, fans, air conditioners, or dehumidifiers running all the time, you probably cease to notice them. My heater is weird, and if you supposedly turn it “off”, it likes to throw temper tantrums at random intervals; so I befriended the circuit breaker. Since I was shooting video too, I “quieted” the room visually by using a simple black sheet for a backdrop, which had the side effect of helping to define my mental focus and establish that I was doing a “performance”.

2. Quiet your mind.

Of course, before your pre-performance mental psych-up, you should have the technical stuff all up and ready to go. Once it is, and you’ve done some mic and level testing and so on, put that out of your mind and give yourself a few moments to switch to performance mode. Take a short walk, have a small snack, visualize your audience, and/or contemplate your reason for wanting to do that song.

3. Quiet your voiceless bilabial plosives.

A windscreen or “pop filter” is very important if you plan to record any vocals. The violent low-pitched “thud” you hear every time the letter “P” is uttered is very difficult to remove once you’ve already recorded it. It may not be so noticeable on small speakers, but for anyone with a subwoofer, it will sound like someone is trying to kick their door in. (Maybe that’s a good thing.) No, the little foam thing that fits on the end of the microphone is not good enough.

If you’re not vain, you can make your own filter with nylons stretched over any kind of hoop. Set the screen at least a couple of inches out from the mic, and keep your mouth at least a couple of inches away from the screen. You should be able to feel it suppressing short gusts of air when you try to blow through it, but it will be otherwise acoustically transparent. Make it two-tiered for extra-anal pop prevention.

4. Choose your transducer.

I’ll confess — for what I do, I should have condenser mics, and I haven’t gotten around to buying one. Last I checked, Behringer made some that started at only a hundred bucks each. Alas, the mics I’m using are Shure SM-57s, a popular example of dynamic mics, which are more ideal for the stage than the studio. They don’t have quite as crisp and “open” of a high end as a condenser would, but they are more directional, so at least they have the advantage of picking up less extraneous sound, like the scuffling of pet mice, or the mating calls of drunk twenty-somethings just outside your window. You can record decently with dynamic mics, but again, you could record even more decently with a condenser.

By the way, the above-linked wikipedia article is impressive; I’d never heard of liquid microphones or laser microphones before!

5. Give yourself head.

Er, that’s supposed to say headroom. Damned union typesetters and their rigid break schedules. “Headroom” is the amount of leeway available for you to get even louder without distorting — the distance above your loudest recording level before you hit the ceiling. This is especially important if you record digitally, since overloading a digital signal does not make for a pleasing, “musical” kind of distortion. Make sure that at the very first stage, wherever in the chain your signal converts from analog to digital, that when you are loud, you have at least six to ten more decibels above that, just in case.

If you have three different places in a row where the level of your input can be adjusted — say there’s a knob where you have your mic or instrument plugged in, and then some kind of overall recording volume for the computer, and then a record level on the recording software, you want to set all but the first adjustment in that chain to either “100%” or “0 dB”, which both mean the same thing. Then, adjust whatever is at the very beginning of that chain to get the ideal level going to the hard drive — again, -6 to -10 dB when you get loud. Maybe you will only be hanging out around -20 dB most of the time, and it might seem like it should be louder, but in digital this is definitely okay. You want to be free to play and sing without worrying about distortion.

6. Be naked and unashamed — initially.

Sometimes effects are part of a performer’s sound, like when a guitarist uses distortion, wah-wah, and a zillion other fun toys. But the “finishing touches” — reverb, compression, and equalization — should not be committed to the track as you’re putting it down, because you will want to have control over these when you mix. Most recording software allows you to hear your sound through special effects while recording, even though what you’re actually recording is just the raw sound. In other words it keeps the recording stage separate from the effect stage. This way, after you record it, you can increase, decrease, or remove the effect; whereas if the effect was part of the recording itself, you would not be able to change it; you would only be able to pile more effects onto it.

7. Perform.

If you have the above items taken care of, you should now be able to hit “record” and dive right in. I recorded continuously for about an hour and a half, so I was able to forget about the computer and just focus on playing, singing, and enjoying myself. I considered wearing headphones, but it would have been distracting. If you don’t create a situation where you can liberate yourself mentally from the technology, you won’t be completely in the performance. You will need to do some mixing later, regardless; but mixing an inspired performance is a pleasure, while mixing an uninspired performance is a nightmare.

8. Normalize.

Now that the element of chaos has subsided, and you’ve recorded everything a bit on the quiet side, it’s safe to bring it up to a more useful initial volume. Most software has a “normalize” effect that you can apply to a track. It’s nothing fancy, just a volume boost that automatically scans the whole clip first to see how much it can safely increase it by. Go ahead and normalize each track to 100% and/or 0 dB. (On the software I use, the waveforms shrink and grow interactively as I adjust the level of the clip, so I can just do this visually.) This has the added benefit of making the waveforms easier to see.

Note: if you are using a stereo input to record two different things simultaneously, say guitar and voice, the left and right will have to be split into two separate tracks so you can work with them independently. How to do this depends on your software.

9. Compress individual tracks… a little.

Almost anything with that “pro” sound has at least a bit of compression on it. Not to be confused with data compression which is used to create smaller files, dynamic compression is the nearly-instantaneous smoothing out of amplitude over time. A friend of mine who was less familiar with this term told me he was surprised that it made the sound so “big”, when the term “compression” in his mind made him think it would “sound smaller”. The reason for this is that it gives sound more overall energy relative to its peaks, so you can create the sense of a louder sound while the maximum remains the same. I won’t go into the role this plays in the loudness wars, because that’s a whole article in itself. But suffice to say, a conservative amount of compression on the individual tracks will give them a little more energy, and make them easier to mix together.

10. Add reverb to whatever needs it most… as little as it needs.

If you’ve ever heard anyone talk about using reverb to cover something up, they probably use too much. Sure, there may be times when there’s a good aesthetic reason to put something in a cavern or a cathedral. Even in those cases, you shouldn’t go that far on every instrument; there should be something more “dry” in the foreground to contrast it against. Remember that reverb is sound. When you use it, you are adding a sound to the mix. This might seem like a dumb thing to point out, but the point is, if a song is getting cluttered, reverb can compound the problem. In most cases a vocal should have just enough reverb that you can hear a difference when you switch it on and off, but not enough to be more than barely noticeable otherwise.

11. Equalization… huh! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing! Except…

Use EQ when you need EQ. Again, this sounds obvious and dumb, but the point is, you usually don’t. There are a lot of different kinds of filtering effects that manipulate the highs, lows, and mids in a wide range of precisions and proportions. These include graphic equalizers, parametric equalizers, FFT filters, “scientific” filters, highpass, lowpass, and bandpass filters. They’re all about slicing the audible spectrum into bands to be adjusted separately. A “graphic equalizer” would be the most intuitive for the beginner, as you’ve probably already played with one on your home stereo.

If you have an instrument or sound that doesn’t use the full spectrum, it’s sometimes good to filter unused frequencies to minimize noise. For example, you can easily reduce treble on a bass guitar to remove hiss without taking anything important away from the sound of the instrument. Likewise on higher instruments you can reduce bass to remove rumble. (I rolled off a little of the “boominess” of the acoustic guitar, and left my vocal un-equalized.) On a very mid-rangey instrument like a distorted electric guitar, you can usually roll off a little at both ends.

On acoustic instruments, you generally want to be sparing with any kind of equalization, as you can easily make them sound worse — especially when your ears are getting tired. Try to get the sound right in the first place with good microphone placement. If you must use EQ creatively to solve a problem with the sound, try to cut bands rather than boost them, or you may run into problems with unpredictable spikes in volume at the boosted frequencies.

12: Chip away at everything that isn’t part of the statue.

How hogwild you want to go with this is a matter of personal preference, but if your voice doesn’t even start until five bars into the song, you might as well erase that track up until the point where it starts. Your guitar intro will thank you for letting it be all the cleaner. Just be careful whenever you cut a clip; if you’re not careful there will be a “click” at the point of snippage. There are two ways to avoid this: either always do a fade-in or fade-out at the edit point, which can be as short as a few milliseconds — or always cut the clip exactly on a zero crossing, which is exactly what you would expect it to be: a point where the waveform is crossing over the “zero” line.

13: Take care of the mix while the master is away.

Another thing cool new software lets you do these days is to place “mastering effects” onto the whole mix so that you can get a slick, cool, “produced” sound right away. This generally amounts to “multi-band compression”, the bastard lovechild of compression and equalization. It’s like using equalizers to split the sound into bass, midrange, and treble, and then running each of those three bands into its own separate compressor. It sounds f’n great. HOWEVER, you should try to get your mix sounding good without it first.

The fact that you’re going to apply some compression to the overall mix is one of many good reasons to be sparing with it on the individual tracks. Why would I recommend using it on individual tracks and on the overall mix? What’s the difference? A little compression of any kind on a full mix — and multi-band is all the better for this — will just help to blend and cement the various instruments together a little, and make them sound more like parts of a whole. At this end of the project, you’re shaping the whole puzzle, whereas previously you were shaping the pieces.

If you are a noble soul, you will use these tools for primarily for aesthetic reasons. You want that little “boost of life” that a mastering effect or plugin can give you; as far as the loudness wars go, you can still be a conscientious objector (and damn well you should be). But, that said, when your song comes up, you don’t want someone dropping the shopping bag with the eggs in it just to fumble with the volume on their iPod — so that bit of volume increase doesn’t hurt.

So, okay, Jimi, you say you want your recording to be wild and artistic and unconventional, so why am I teaching you how to bake white bread? Because!!! Because you can’t color outside the lines if there are no lines to color outside of. Because you can’t push the boundaries if there are no boundaries to push. Because you can’t fuck the man if there’s no man to fuck. Just trust me — someday you too may be old, boring, and grumpy, and just want a vocal to sit in a goddamned mix. You’ll thank me for this someday.