I'll be honest. I should be working on the remaining mixes for Invertebrate Waltz... but instead, my head's been in a very different place over the last few weeks.
A few months ago, I had it in my head that I wanted to write a song for someone by Christmas... But writing a song for someone (with that person as an intentional and singular audience) is a very strange and ugly task, and it's not something that I feel super comfortable doing as a songwriter. I think it's kind of a psycho move, to be honest- to just say "Hi, I wrote you a song. Here it is! appreciate it. đ€ " Frankly, I don't think it ever ends well. People are fickle and complicated things, and there's just way too much to consider. My feelings (the kind that I muck around with when I'm writing) are seldom something I feel clearly about. The recipient of that song also then evaluates and inevitably uses it to inform what they think you think about them... and that's a lot of pressure to put on a song! I don't know about you, but I seldom think my songs precisely and perfectly say what I want originally thought I wanted them to say.
A friend suggested to me that I record a cover of a holiday song instead, so I started practicing and recording that... and it quickly snowballed into a full mix/ arrangement. Ultimately I don't think it came together quite like I'd hoped. But, as I was working on that mix, I started to get back into the swing of mixing and recording demos. I knew I had a lot of songs piling up from all the attempts at writing a song for someone as a gift, so I started recording and tinkering with a few of those...
This week I wrote one more, and suddenly I start to see another album taking shape. I don't think any of the individual songs is quite the singular song I originally wanted to write, but I can tell there's something good here, and something does start to emerge from the conglomerate that is sort of right.
Last night, after I recorded a demo for what I expect to be the final track on that collection, I took a minute to think about what exactly this new project is trying to say. I don't think I have all the answers yet (often the broader themes of the work emerge over time/ as you step away and view everything as a whole) but I realized that I am definitely NOT writing this FOR someone. That's never been how I work. Many of my projects start with a particular person or relationship in mind, but I think the project is like firing a gun next to them, rather than at them. Thinking back to some of my earliest complete songs, this has been a theme of how and when I feel creatively inspired to make music.
My songs aren't always nice - they are often quite critical. Sometimes critical of me, and my relationship with my feelings surrounding a situation, and other times critical of someone else, and their relationship with their emotions or actions. I think this creates conflict in my songs and helps give them a reason to exist. It gives me a reason to want the song to exist in the first place. It helps me discover/identify and give a voice to things in my life that create difficult or strange emotions.
If I had to try (flailing, like a newborn baby trying to turn experiences into words for the first time) to articulate the theme/ concept of this collection of music right now... I would say it's about looking forward to a certain vision of the future. It's about having hope, and being excited for things to come, while also feeling fearful and anxious about the unknown. It's about how strange it is to believe in a particular future- comitting (in the present) to something that has not happened yet but intends to change your whole life. It's about the exciting potential in something new and unproven. It's about what it feels like to want to cash in favors in the pursuit of something new- to cross things off, spend some savings, and pack up your old life for something exciting and new! It's about understanding the soupy mix of fear, excitement, and dread of putting yourself in a situation where things will be very different for you. It's about the glorious, difficult, and anxious anticipation of actually doing something that might change your life.
I'm excited to see where this project goes. At the moment, it's hard not to let it eclipse Invertebrate Waltz a bit...
In the last 48 hours, an entire song came together, from draft to full demo mix
Usually, I work much slower and take a lot of time to sit with a song and let myself find the things that are good about it and develop them further until I end up with something refined that I feel is as good as it could possibly be. But not this time-
Last week I gave a breakdown of my process for recording and mixing my demos, and while much of that is true (those steps do usually happen in some form or another), it's also very true that I'm constantly trying to re-invent my process and shake things up. I think I'm the most excited and interesting creatively when I feel like I'm breaking my rule, or doing things wrong. I don't think of it as taking shortcuts, I think of it more like... cheating, lol.
Trying to get away with a process that I know is strange or flawed puts me in a position where I have to come up with interesting solutions to interesting problems. I think some amount of problem solving and discovering the sound of the song as it emerges is good, and makes the mix feel more flexible and alive.
Late Monday night, I was sitting at my piano and stumbled into a song that I thought had some potential. It came together quickly- my first pass at lyrics and melody worked out okay (but I tweaked some things later) and the structure was alright, not too crazy, but not too boring. I feel like the verse sections still were kinda weak, but the chorus presented some interesting development, so I decided to run with it.
The next day sitting at my desk at work I jotted down a midi outline of the song with beepbox (an online midi editor designed for quick sketches that runs entirely in your browser). I do this at some stage for most of my songs, just to better understand/ visualize things link structure and flow. Sometimes, I export these sketches and upload the midi data into my daw and let that serve as part of the skeleton. This whole process can be good for getting a project organized and identifying any areas where unexpected complications might exist (an odd measure or beat here or there that sounds perfectly natural while playing, but really throws things off when trying to put the song on a grid).
I also spent some time editing a voice memo recording I made of the song last night, and formed that to the grid in my daw as a scratch track. Along the way, I had a few ideas for percussion, and dropped some samples in at some key moments that really helped give the song some dimension.
I've been experimenting with incorporating more of this midi tracking into my mixes lately. I wanted to experiment with keeping things simple this time, and playing with a lot of layers that mostly all play the same thing in unison. I knew I could use the midi outline to control my synth and do a few takes of that when I got home later, so I went ahead and set up the midi outline. Because this song has some tempo and time signature changes, my midi export was not able to mirror the song exactly, and I had to do quite a bit of chopping, stretching, and restructuring after import. Normally, a lot of these sorts of kinks would work themselves out over time as I sit with and work on the song in the writing stage, but this song didn't get that.
I really love using beepbox to develop ideas for percussion and rhythm. Because beepbox is built around repetition (and my normal sample-dropping percussion process is so... not...) the ideas I tinker with here can sometimes provide a useful structural foil when they work their way into the mix later. I also love beepbox because the pallet of sounds in one channel is very consistent and limited, which allows me to focus on the beat in very broad terms- "does it go up/down, and how loud?" Any questions about voice and tone get put aside and answered later.
Until now, a huge problem for me has been how to make the beepbox percussion export control something that sounds good in the context of a more developed mix. The raw beepbox percussion noise I use (rendered as a wav file) often doesn't sit right in a bigger mix and doesn't hold up well to being tweaked with extensively because of its limited bit depth and sonic range. This time, however, I found a way to route part of the midi information exported by beepbox (essentially the note volume envelope) and connect it to a very noisy, full-sounding reverb plugin, TAL ii. This, combined with my current go-to midi voice bank, the Ramzoid 808 Cooker, allowed me to emulate something functionally similar to beepbox's noise-sample based percussion, that sounded satisfying and could sit nicely in a more developed mix.
Another challenge was to find a way to make a track of steady synth notes that runs through the whole song. Usually this is easy for my synth because everything is already lined up and plays through at a consistent tempo, but since I have a few sections that change the tempo and time signature, I needed to find a way to either map my tempo more accurately, so the actual DAW grid was 100% true to the song as it should be counted, or make a midi track that I could stretch and chop the same way I did the other midi tracks so it would stay consistent. I opted for the latter, and went back to beepbox and made a new track that was straight 8th notes, and ported that in, and stretch and chopped it in all the same places so it would line up. (This ended up being a very interesting move, and would set me up for interesting creative choices later.)
That night I got home and recorded a few isolated piano takes. As I was recording, I realized this song sounded better and more more interesting when I kept everything a bit more staccato. Spending a day with the mono-phonic midi tracks made me accustomed to hearing the song with no reverb or tail on these notes, and I was curious how everything would blend together if I kept this more neutral. As I started to add synths, the sound developed more and more, and this really felt like the right call.
When it came time to do the track that was straight 8th notes, I realized that my midi-track based solution was forcing not only timing, but also notes from my synth, so if I wanted to change notes, I would have to do it in some way other than inputs from the keyboard... I ended up muting the primary oscillator and slowing controlling the pitch of the second oscillator manually with a knob. This created lots of interesting in-between spaces, and let me control where, when, and how the pitch shifted from one note to the next. I also decided it might be interesting if the pitch only shifted very gradually and infrequently, and only goes upward, building energy through the song, rather than following the same contour as every other track (which, recall, are all playing a layer of the same thing). This track was interesting, but not amazing. I did a few takes to try to get whatever goodness I could out of the idea, but ended up taking some of the basic principals and applying them to a new track, where I did essentially the same thing, but played it live and controlled the pitches in a more traditional way. This gave me something that was both easier to work with, and more organic and natural feeling in its timing. Ultimately, I kept both, and layered them together, and this felt very right.
Then I dove into vocals. I didn't want to do the vocals "right" so I dragged my mic into the bathroom and did a few takes in there with all the hard echo-y surfaces. I just let myself have fun. I don't think the lyrics are perfect, but the basics are there and some of the moments felt strong enough to run with. After I did a few takes, making sure to at least get the timing and energy right at every part once or twice. I made a new track and recorded some "crazy" vocals, full of energy and drama. I layered this into the choruses and felt pretty satisfied with how much they lifted things up.
And that's where the song is now- I did a bit more mixing and balancing today. I don't think the song is perfect, and there's a lot more that could be done to develop and refine things. I feel like the song isn't fully realized yet, and if I'm being honest, I still think the verse need some work, but there are a lot of moments in this demo that I'm quite proud of too!
This was a fun little project, and if you want to listen to it, you can check out the full demo now on my Patreon! đ
I've been working on a TON of new mixes the last couple weeks. I've made lots of progress and I'm feeling good about how things are going, but I know there's still a lot of work to do if any of these songs are ever to see the light of day.
For me, there are lots of stages to making a good mix. Every mix is a little different, and I'm constantly tweaking the process and experimenting with new ways of getting a mix started. I find that changing up the building blocks you use early-on can have a really big impact on the final mix and sets you up for different successes/challenges later.
Typically, for a lot of songs that actually do get successfully completed, once I feel like I've settled on a structure and the lyrics are at least 80-90% there, I go for a scratch track that's just piano or guitar and vocal, recorded together (or sometimes I just import a voice memo if I already have something I really like). I want these scratch tracks to be super rough and exaggerated with lots of feeling. This scaffolding informs the flow of energy in the song and gives me a framework to follow once I start adding more parts. After I get a decent scratch going, I spend a little time going over it and tidying up anything that feels *really* off beat, or that I think might mess me up later.
Then the fun part. I add... and add... and add... and add... I freely improvise over that scratch take about 4 or 5 times with my synth (any more than 5 takes and feel like I'm burried in editing later...) While I'm recording these tracks, I follow any little ideas or motifs I want to bring out. I let each track be informed by and respond to the track that came before it. I think of each track as a different character listening to and responding to the mix it arrive into. I start to think about how these tracks will develop into a mix that gets wider, brighter, and more energetic as the song unfolds. The scratch track is often a guide for where, and when the synth should really start to drive, but sometimes it's nice to let the synths surprise me, and bring something out of it that I didn't fully expect. My synths at this phase are typically all monophonic, which I feel gives me more flexibility in editing later, and really lends itself to thinking of each track as a character.
As I start to hear things come together with the raw synth tracks, I'll sometimes grab an electric guitar and give that a few takes over a moment that I really want to emphasize. If the mix feels like it calls for it, I might do something crazy with some live percussion tracks (cymbals, floor toms, etc...)
Before I start making balance adjustments, I scrub every track as clean as I can and buff out any mistakes or hiccups in my playing. This process takes AGES. I edit them in the order they were recorded and chop out sections I don't like, fix notes that I missed, and make subtle adjustments to timing and volume. If I feel like I understand the sonic space that this track is going to have, I'll start doing a little equalizing and compression here, but they usually stay pretty raw at this phase. I also use this opportunity to iterate and play around with some of the takes- repurposing things that I think are interesting but don't really fit, or hard-editing some tracks to bring out new ideas that come to me as I sit with the song and start to understand the flow of the the mix a bit more.
Once that initial pass is done and everything has been tweaked into shape, I'll start to deliberate and cut things. Now that I can see everything at once, I get to zoom in and decide what parts art interesting and fun versus what parts feel distracting or wrong to me. Often this is where decisions about the structure and arrangement start to get made. I shuffle things around, sidechain tracks against eachother, add compression, turn up/down brightness/warmth, until everything starts to feel like a cohesive organism, and each of the tracks feels like it has a reason to be in the song.
Either after or during that process, I start to dive into percussion... For most of my mixes, the percussion is almost all sample based. I feel like there's such an interesting flexibility and playfulness to what you can do with purely sample driven percussion. Most of the time I don't even use a drum machine or anything at this phase. I dive into a few folders I have full of sampled snares, hats, kicks, noises, etc, and start dropping things in. I typically let my mix play in the background while I'm picking out a few samples to start with- just so I have some idea if I'm picking a sound that blends well and/or fills some kind of sonic niche in the mix.
I don't usually think of percussion as 'beats' or rythms when I start dropping things in. In a lot of ways, I think of them more like just another layer, playing along and responding to the song, rather than driving it. I usually don't start at the beginning, but instead jump in wherever I feel like I have a solid idea and/or the new sounds would be welcomed. In order to keep things from ever sounding too mechanical or stale, I typically start out by tapping markers onto the mix as it playes and dropping my samples onto those, instead of putting them right on the beat. As that goes on, I start to hear a beat in my mind and/ or start to notice some patterns emerging based on what I've started to set up. I try to run with this and develop it a bit more, sometimes repeating and iterating, sometimes just continuing to build forward an not worry about wether the next section is at all similar to the last...
Usually I don't get percussion right on the first pass. I often end up putting everything from the first attempt in a bus called 'perc 1,' and just muting it, lol. Then I carry on and try again with 'perc 2', which is usually a bit more structured and less ambitious than my first attempt. After a little while, if perc 2 also feels wrong, I might mute that and give it another shot with 'perc 3'... By the time I get to perc 3, I feel like i've typically learned what *doesn't* work for this song, and settled on some ideas that do feel like they could work... at least that's the hope. After I give it another run, if I still feel like it's not sitting right, I'll just unmute all three iterations and let them play together... I find that this percussion soup contains all the successes and failures of each of these brainstorming sessions, and I can usually find some common ground. Of course, I have to then balance these buses against each other and make some tweaks, but with 3 complete passes going at once, I feel like I have lots of material and ideas to work with.
After I get all that relatively balanced and sitting right in the mix at about -20db VU, It's time to go back to the beginning get some better takes of the live instrument (guitar or piano) and the vocal. I mute the scratch track and make a full render of the song without any vocals or instruments. Then I sit down with my microphone. I typically start with the instrument, giving it a handful of takes, making sure to nail every part least once or twice for good measure. I typically want a combination of live takes that run straight through the whole song, and takes that start/stop to zoom in on specific sections to get details right.
Often I do vocal takes in the same recording session as instrument. This is the moment with the lyrics need to be DONE. Any changes made after this point will be significantly more tedious to fix. I start with the main vocal and give that as many takes as I feel like I need to, to get something I can work with. Then I move on to harmonies and more colorful 'character' vocals. This is where the vocal really comes alive. I get to give it 110% of whatever the moment calls for and do things that are silly, weird, bad, dramatic, dumb- you name it. I want to make sure I'm having fun with it and staying loose at this point. Drink lots of water to make sure I don't throw my voice out yelling or doing something silly. Most of these takes will get cut, but often they supply the raw material for background layers and interesting moments in the vocal performance. Everything I do here is going to end up being layered and edited a lot, so it's okay to try things that don't work.
In the next day or so I sit down with the new vocal and instrument track and start comping. I find all the best moments of each section from each take and splice them together. I typically start with the instrumentals, then go in and make a few mixing/compression decisions. Then I unmute just the main vocal and comp that as well. I'm looking for takes that follow the energy of the song, I'm also making a note (sometimes a seprate track) of takes that stand out to me as particularly energetic or smooth and clean sounding.
Once I feel like I have a vocal comp that will be serviceable, I start to comb over it and manually adjust the pre-fx volume to sit at about the same level for the whole track... This takes hours, but it makes a huge difference on the sound and polish of the vocal. This is also a great opportunity to do manual de-essing. Once that is done, I can start doing the fun work of adding compression and coloration to the vocal. I typically end up making 2 or three copies of the main vocal and running different effects on each of them, something for space, something for color, and something for punch. Some or all of these might contain some tuning or pitch correction- it all depends.
As that's happening and I'm feeling out the flow of the song, I start to unmute some of the more colorful 'character' vocals and harmonies and pick out moments where I really like what they're doing. I like to get playful and figure out how those should sit in the mix texturally as well as sonically. Often, I end up keeping some of the more dynamic takes in the song as a super distorted layer and blending that into the mix at certain moments for extra energy or coloration.
Once that process feels like it's mostly done, I go back to the master mix and import all the tracks I worked on in the separate project where I recorded the vocals and instrumentals. Now I make my final adjustments to the mix. I tweak things that I might have made notes about while listening to the render in the other project, and I balance the vocal and blend it into the mix with the synths and percussion. I typically end up doing some subtle side-chain compression to help keep things balanced that might compete for space with the main vocal. I often have to do some side-chain compression of the instrumentals against a synth or vocal to keep the new track from getting too loud and poking through or drowning things out too much at some of the bigger moments.
And by that point, I usually feel like I've given the mix all I can. I know my mixes aren't perfect, and there's still more work that needs to be done. But, by the time I've done all that, I feel like I've at least realized the track better, and I'm in a position to know what to say to a real mix engineer and help them help me get everything out of the track that I intended. This process leaves me with a a mix that is usually about 30-60 tracks deep, with lots of layers and coloration tracks and separation of parts for different effects processing.
I'm glad I took the time to write this down while I'm in the middle of it, and can specifically articulate the process as I'm going through it. And maybe my explaination of my process illuminates something for you, too!