Snoozeking Music

Every once in a while I find something I thought was lost for good. It usually makes me feel overwhelmingly happy – like I proved to myself that whatever it was really did exist and wasn’t a figment of my imagination.

Yesterday, while looking for audio tracks to a song I want to remix, I ran across a gem I had occasionally thought about but had relegated to the eternal recycling bin of life.  I found a 10-year-old CD that was cryptically labeled, and it had 6 CD audio tracks on it.

This was about the time that I first used Acid, man.  No, not that acid, I mean the once-revolutionary audio looping software. The first five tracks were garden-variety loop ideas, some of which turned into drunkdude69 songs.  The sixth track, however, was the special surprise I wasn’t expecting.

We had recently finished Tom Smith’s album I Need A Change, and I was apparently going no holds barred on loops.  I strung together a partial remix of the title song from Tom’s album as an experiment.

Years went by, computer drives were swapped and changed, and the track disappeared as far as I knew.  Until I found track six on that CD.  It sounds as wacky as I remember: dance loops under country guitar loops mixed with rock elements – all grafted onto Tom’s song.  Of course the original is far better, but this was a great reminder of having fun with music.

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Tom checks out some playback

It’s been great to get back to working on some music with Tom Smith.  He’s motivated and excited about finishing the current set of songs, and that in itself is motivating to me.

We got together to start mixing a couple weekends ago.  After years of mixing and trying out all kinds of different methods, I think I’ve finally hit on a methodology that works for me.  I think it’s a pretty standard practice, but it’s taken me a while to get around to it.

The setup is pretty straightforward for Tom’s tracks.  Generally we are dealing with a set of eight or so drum tracks, 1 – 3 acoustic guitar tracks, several electric guitar tracks, occasional percussion and keyboards, and lead and harmony vocals.

I set up a bus for each group of instruments: drums, acoustic guitars, electric guitars, lead vocals, harmony vocals.  I can then route the outputs of tracks to their appropriate bus.  I’ll send all the drum tracks to the drum bus, which allows me to control the whole drum mix volume with the bus fader while still maintaining the relative levels and any automation.

I can also run effects on the bus tracks as well.  For the drums, for example, I’ll apply a little compression to the whole kit to give it some punchiness.  I may have already tightened up the kick and snare with compression, so there is an element of parallel compression going on, but usually the bus compression is pretty light. I can also add a little overall reverb if the song calls for it.

I’ve gotten into the habit of using multi-band compression (Waves C4 is a nice plug-in for that) on drums and sometimes vocals.  That allows me to focus on managing certain frequency ranges that need more aggressive control.

Considering we cut the drums for all of these songs in one long session, it’s been nice to be able to transfer the settings from the first session we mixed to the subsequent sessions.  That has saved major amounts of time because we can get a baseline mix up and running, and then make changes to tailor things to the song we’re working on.

In the span of six hours or so, we nailed down the preliminary mixes for two songs.  I imagine the rest will go pretty quickly now that we’ve got some basics dialed in.  More to come!

TRS caught in the act

What better time of year to be inside working on some music?

While we on the north coast haven’t gotten hammered like Maryland and DC, we’ve gotten our usual dose of cold and snow.  Tom Smith has taken the opportunity to use this time to revisit the tracks for his second album tentatively titled “Out On Your Own”.

We must have tracked 16 or 18 acoustic guitar tracks during our day-long session.  We had about eight songs to record the tracks for, and we generally did at least two takes for each.  After each take we punched in to clean up any areas that needed attention, or we comped together a master take from all the takes we did.

I like to fatten Tom’s acoustic guitar sound by having at least two, and sometimes three acoustic tracks in the mix.  Generally I like to have one panned right and one panned left, although sometimes having a track in the center of the stereo field works better.  It depends on the final instrumentation.

After we created a master take for the acoustic part in each song, I used the remaining playlists to put together a second acoustic track that I could use for the purpose described above.

After a brief break for dinner, I returned to the studio.  Since everything was already warmed up, and I was feeling motivated, I tracked a whole bunch of backing vocals for Tom’s stuff.  I did some additional vocal tracking for some of the upcoming drunkdude69 material as well.

All in all it was a fantastically productive day in the studio, something which is (mostly) unhampered by winter weather.

We’re excited to return to work on the Thomas Reed Smith follow-up to his first release I Need A Change.  It’s definitely been a while since we picked up on the project, but it’s good to know that we’ve got much of the work done as far as tracking and instrumentation.

New sessions will be taking place soon, and we’re planning to finish both this record and the new drunkdude69 record in 2010.