My first experience releasing songs I wrote and performed in my first album was intimidating. At the time of the first release I happened to be working as an intern with Clive Romney in his home studio and I had help from him in getting my vocal and instrument tracks balanced just right. There's a few things I've learned since then that I felt it appropriate to pass on to others who are trying to get into recording. Some these are lessons I've learned about what I'm glad I did and a few others I wish I hadn't. And all those lessons went into my re-mixing and re-release of my album Seeking For The Savior, which will be available wherever you stream your music shortly. Basically, this is a list of things I've observed from my own experience in recording and producing, and a lot of it has to do with patience and not letting the excitement of having your music on Spotify override good judgement. I've had a lot of experience since then getting vocal tracks just right, get a better hang of using the overtone series properly and what good marketing actually looks like.
- LISTEN TO YOUR MIX ON A LOT OF DIFFERENT DEVICES
Music nerds and audiophiles have done a lot of R&D and released quite a few products over the last 10-15 years that are meant to make the recording and mixing process more efficient. We have tools today that let us mix without having to actually listen on car speakers, a phone, a friends phone, a neighbors house, ear buds, headphones, casting to a TV or whatever else. Some of those tools are great. Others… probably not so much. I remember being at a demonstration by the guys at Nuendo when I went to NAMM a few years ago where they had come out with this new 3D room renderer that allowed you to use the same kind of VR tech as Meta Quest or Samsung Odyssey to construct your own virtual mixing space. It had all the bells as whistles. If I remember correctly, it let you place several different kinds of acoustic treatments and wall types wherever you wanted, choose which type of speakers you wanted, where you put them, what kind of mixing board settings and more. The idea was that you could get much closer to having a professional studio setting right there in your headset, emulated by the virtual room you put together. When the presentation was finished, I asked them how close they thought they were to 100% sound fidelity with this emulation and I think the guy I asked almost scoffed at me when he told me something like “oh you'll never get 100% fidelity when working with any kind of emulator, obviously, nothing will ever be as good as simply being physically in the room you want to create with the actual real world speakers and environment.”
Obviously for the sake of promoting his product, he still said it was well worth the money, but the point is that 100% accurate replication of what the human ear hears in a recording is impossible. What does this have to do with listening on different devices? I'll get there shortly. I think of this relationship between technology and the human ear like an asymptotic curve. You can get close, really close, so close it's hard for some people to tell whether a sounds is a recording or a live instrument; but I promise you, you'll never get perfect reproduction of what the human ear hears from a live instrument. Since you'll only ever get “really close”, it's more important than many artists realize to actually listen in each physical environment where you can imagine your listeners enjoying your music, at least as much as possible. (Please do not break into a venue and hook your device up to their sound system, lol.) I learned this overall lesson the hard way one time when I had exported an audio file for a class at SUU. I listened to the MP3 and then tried it out in my car, my phone and my studio speakers, but when it was played on the big speakers in class, there were several notes right at the beginning (worst place to happen) that were quite screechy. The speakers in the class had a much better frequency response to the treble end than my speakers at home and it became obvious to me the mistake I had made. Something similar happened in my wife's car. The sound of my music in my Hyundai is actually quite a bit different than in our Buick.
Trust me, it makes a difference. I know it may seem tedious so someone who's just getting started, but as I said in this Facebook post, I have actually studied in my AAS some of the neuroscience and psychology of how music affects our brains and how certain frequencies work in our heads… and the average person may not know when their brain is telling them that something sounds weird or just ever so slightly “off”, but us producers have been trained to hear those little details, trust us! What sounds decent on one device may sound really shallow, grainy, too thick, diluted or piercing on another device. Taking the time to create a well balanced mix is worth it!
- REMEMBER THAT THE MIC AND RECORDING SPACE MATTER
My original release of Seeking For The Savior had vocals recorded in a smallish room, with generic acoustic treatment cover the entirety of the walls from about 2-3 feet upward and the ceiling. The instrumentals were all from Cubase Plugins. What I had at the time was my laptop, a Blue Yeti USB mic and one of SLCC's Scarlett Focusrite interface, and I thought “wow this sounds so good!” And don't get me wrong, compared to what I had before in regards to my mic and recording space, that was a leap forward in quality, but there were issues I wasn't patient enough to address. At the time I was equally focused on getting a good grade for the song I was writing and recording and the overall quality of the sound. I really wanted to make it as professional sounding as I could, but one thing I know I could have done better, in retrospect, was making better use of the mics SLCC had at their studio instead of being lazy and sticking with my own equipment. I was so determined to make a professional sounding result with my own equipment - even when I had access to way better - that the quality suffered. I let my pride and wanting to do it “all by myself” override better judgement. Don't do what I did on that song.
It was still way better than that “homemade” sound, but I know for certain today that if I had maybe used their R-88, a pair of C414s or maybe the KM184s or something like that (and actually booked the studio space), I could have had a track sounding 10 times more polished that it was at first. Once I understood better from trial and error the real difference it makes when you have the right equipment, everything changes. The right mic with the right frequency response, polar pattern, angle, gain level, etc. and especially the right materials and arrangement of acoustic treatment in the room really do matter. I recently financed Shure's KSM313 Ribbon mic - which I highly recommend! - and in recording vocals for this re-release, I used that on the reverse side of the ribbon in combination with Digital Reference's DRV200 in an narrower version of an XY pattern and… Oh. My. Gosh. The difference was huge! In a beautiful way! My wife even said she noticed a big difference and she does not have any ear training with professional sound and music production. I was doing some last minute editing with timing in the vocal tracks on one of the songs where she sang harmonies with me and I know I picked the right mic (the KSM313) because the frequency response was so well balanced and we sounded soooo much better together!
For those reading this who don't have that kind of equipment or don't have the budget but still want a good sound, I recommend looking for a local public library with something equivalent to Salt Lake County's Create Space. Find a place where you have access to an acoustically well treated recording room and a mic with at least decent frequency response. I promise you it really does make a difference. If you don't believe me, try recording something on your phone and then record it with better equipment with your mouth at the same distance and you'll see what I'm talking about when you compare the two.
- DO SEVERAL TAKES AND HAVE IT COMPED
At this point I've had a ton of experience with Cubase's native audio editor, Variaudio. It's become my regular partner and friend in the recording and editing process. Sorry to all you Melodyne nerds out there, but I'm going to use this as an opportunity to make a shameless plug for Steinberg's technology over Avid. Yes, I've had plenty of opportunity to use Melodyne with Pro Tools as well and had many chances to compare features first hand. Steinberg's technology in my opinion is significantly superior, especially in the sheer scope of the kinds of editing tools Variaudio has.
But for those of you who don't care about that, I'll move on now. Every time I've had a vocalist in my studio, I always make absolutely sure we use all the time they booked to get as much content to work with as possible. I remember when I was recording my first single at NoiseBox Studios in Provo, it took us an hour to get three takes all the way through the track with Kristen Scott (from BYU Noteworthy) and another hour for comping (basically compiling or “gluing” the best parts of each take together). We ended up needing all three takes. This was not because her talent was lacking. In fact she was an incredible vocalist. The reason we did three takes is because no one ever sings a song with the exact same pitch, formant shapes, syllable transitions, or inflection every time. It's just not something humans can do; and when you're recording something that you want people to listen to thousands of times over, you need to make sure you have everything just the way you want it. This isn't like live performance that people can listen to once and after it's over, have a “perfect” version of it playing in their head (and no performance is actually perfect) until they hear it again. With recording, once it's out there, the time to fix mistakes is over for whatever you've released. Whatever the audience hears is what gets stuck in their head, including any mistakes or awkward bits.
It's always better to have multiple takes, no matter how incredible of a vocalist have (or are). I guarantee you will find something later on down the road that you don't like when you've been able to take a break and are no longer “ear blind” to the little things you didn't notice the first time. Being able to get multiple takes of a track and compile ("comp") them together into the very best of all you've done is a MUCH easier way than feeling like you have to re-record the whole thing because of that one part that's just not quite right. I always have to comp some, take a break, come back a day or so later, edit some more and repeat the process when I give my brain some distance with my own songwriting projects. In fact, if there anything I've learned from habit in producing, it's that my first few sessions editing something are never sufficient to catch everything I want to polish up a little more. Often times, I come back after a few days and realize “wow, the voice range on this one really needs a multiband compressor” or “why did I think I needed that much reverb on this percussion track?” or something like that.
Multiple takes and comping, especially with live recording, makes a huge difference.
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These are at least a few lessons I've learned as I've rerecorded and remixed Seeking For The Savior. Thanks to Clive Romney for helping me to understanding some of these elements early on in my recording experience in his studio and to all my professors at SLCC and SUU who have given me the chance to learn these lessons from my own experience. To be totally honest, the other reason why I rereleased the album was because, in the original, I had three cover songs, arrangements of three hymns, and the cover licenses were costing me $12.99 a year per song and I just didn't want to spend that anymore. So the new one doesn't have the hymn arrangements, but you can still listen to those on my Music page.
If you like Christian music, listen to Seeking For The Savior here when it comes out (or wherever else you stream your music). For those of you who have heard some of it before, hopefully I can get a better version of it stuck in your head now. ;)