Cupcakes and Mixing
I wish I was mixing in something like this:
However I am not.
So for the last few weeks, I’ve been really getting into making my songs sound as best as I possibly can. This has been quite a timely process, as I’ve been real anal and am aiming to make all my songs stand alone.
I’ve had a go at EQing all my songs. This is something that engineers take 20 years to learn. So when I dived into the deep end I’ll be honest I didn’t really know what I was doing. I hit a few forums and got some advice.
Basically, EQing is making sure that there aren’t too many instruments in your mix clashing. E.g. you want to make sure the bass drum and the bass guitar sit really well together, like in a pocket. You also want to make sure that the frequencies that the lead guitar are using aren’t clashing with the vocal track.
Doesn’t really make sense does it? Well put it this way… You have made heaps of cupcakes, but you want them to sit together nicely. So you don’t just throw them all willy nilly into the box. Otherwise when people see the box they’ll be like “OMG, there are like cupcakes on top of one another and icing is like going everywhere”.
However, if you were to place the cupcakes nice and tidily into the box, you can open the box and people can see all the cupcakes in all their glory, and know exactly what each cupcake represents and how good it will taste.
If my music was a tray of cupcakes, I’d like it to taste pretty damn good. Get it?
Old Stuff That’s Actually Quite Awesome
So today I was looking for an old piece of music amongst my many unorganised folders of music sessions everywhere. This is when I found quite a dated piece – a song that I wrote when I was mainly just writing instrumentals because I still wasn’t confident enough in my singing. Now the thing is I remember exactly why I gave up on this song – it was random, not complete, all over the place and just didn’t make any sense. However, since I wrote that song my music has in fact being pushed towards matching that exact style (That’s right, I make music that’s not complete, random, all over the place and that doesn’t make sense hehe). I listened through the song today and just couldn’t believe my ears, why did I ever ditch this song?
Its true that its a good idea to leave things and come back to them, hell even leaving a blog post and coming back to it the next day makes you see heaps of errors in your writing. Most of all my songs that I’ve left and come back to have made me face palm when I listen to them again. Except this song. So today I built on it, went crazy, and it was terrific (I bet you tomorrow I wake up, listen to it and think – oh god, why did I blog about this? this is song is horrid).
And you know what? I’m actually going to put it on the album. Yep. There’s been songs that I’ve worked on for about 8 times the amount as this one, but hey, I guess that’s just how the cookie crumbles.
Oh, and to be a jerk, I’m not going to attach the whole song, in fact just attach an excerpt. The song title will be named “Flint’s Adventures In A Rather Dangerous Land”. This is dedicated to my soft toy giraffe friend Flint, who has unfortunately been adopted by me, and has been the only witness to all my rather frustrating, enjoyable and downright crazy bedroom studio sessions. Sometimes I feel that Flint would miss his friends back at the soft toy store. So Flint, this song if for you!
Flint’s Adventures In A Rather Dangerous World
That Damn Last Song
So lately I’ve been trying to organise my songs and work out which order I want them to be on the album. This has become quite a frustrating process. I’ve already got my first track sorted out, which is cool. But finding a track to put on the end of the album is starting to annoy me.
You want the last track on the album to leave the listener on a good note, make them feel like the album is complete. The thing is, I’ve had a shortlist of songs I could put on the end of my album, but when I work on them for too long I decide that the song deserves to be higher up on the list – obviously being the last track the percentage of listeners actually listening to the song would be quite low in comparison to say my first 3-5 songs. Headache!
Anyway, to clear my head I went in search of albums I like that have a great closing track. Here’s my top ten:
Villains
I’ve added the song ‘Villains’ to the website. Its a few months old now, but the writing process and the lyrics for it took little time in comparison to some of my other songs. The main riff uses guitar and bass, and if you notice the riff continues throughout the whole song, with other elements just getting layered over the top.
The chorus ‘They are growing into villains again’ was inspiration from this kid who was playing music through his mobile way too loud on the train (it was awful music as well). Everyone on the train really wanted to punch him and in the end it was a nice old lady who told him to turn it down. The kid looked so pissed off that he had to turn his music down, was quite funny actually.
Highway 61 Revisited
This album has really grown on me during the past few weeks, it’s got to the stage where I almost prefer every song on it over “Like a Rolling Stone” (Madness!).
Still, the thing about this album that really draws me to it is the fact that it just sounds so raw – but in a good way. These days so much music is made to the best standards, using the best gear, and the best sound engineers (not me!). But this album sounds makes you feel like you were standing in the studio listening to them record in one take. In fact that reminds me – I heard during an interview with the Rolling Stones that they could only afford limited hours in the studio – so therefore they just smashed the song over in about an hour and just left it at that and went on with it.
Now days with people recording in their homes, like myself, we have this timeless period where mistakes such as a small lapse in time or an 90 percent guitar riff, starts to haunt you until it gets to the stage where you end up punching a wall cause you realised that the first recording of the guitar riff was better than your 50th.
Well, that’s just a thought or too, Highway 61 Revisited rocks – go listen to it, your father will appreciate you more.