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All done and dusted
Here we are at the end of the road. Time to thank you for staying with me throughout the journey (I’ve had some interesting comments en route, thanks for those). Time also to hope that you’ve found at least a bit of what I’ve said useful and can apply it to your own music.
And
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Keeping songs fresh
So, the lyrics are up on our website, the songs are now available there too, and one by one they’ll appear on our myspace site as well. So, there’s only one more job to do and this album is ready to roll.
That job is to make alternative mixes to keep the songs fresh for radio. For
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Album title chosen
OK, the big revelation is …we’re going to call the album Banging The Rocks.
If you know the Hitch-Hikers Guide To The Galaxy, you’ll realise that at the restaurant at the end of the universe the host says a big hello to all sentient beings out there and advises everyone else to
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Lyrics on website, artwork under prep
So, it’s the first set of adjustments made, a cooling-off period and then a second set of adjustments. Very close to the finished article now that will be ready for mixing.
My wife has got to the state where, having heard these songs repeatedly for four months while I’ve been
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Time to phone a friend
OK, I’ve made those adjustments. It’s time, as in all the best game shows, to phone a friend. Or in this case, e-mail one.
Fortunately my friend is Fran Ashcroft, an experienced record producer with a great ear. And I’m very lucky that he is prepared to review my mixes before they
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Time to take stock
So, all the mixes are done and it’s time for the final checks and adjustments. I’ve played the tracks on every type of system I can find, from the car stereo to the hi-fi via the computer and the studio monitors. I can now classify the material into three groups.
The first group
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Mixing under pressure
I’m working on the final mix now, for Season Of The Rose. It’s a song we’ve played live for over a year, so I know it well, and the trick here is to keep it fresh for the record. So, I’m using lots of movement, lots of instrument changes in the deep structure of the song and not
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Anthem and sad song
It’s full steam ahead on the next two songs now. Sound of Rock is a track that I want to make sound like a real anthem – I’m toying with a whistled intro (a little personal homage to the Scorpions there) and need to make four vocal parts sound like a full choir.
To do this I’ll be
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Frequencies, monitoring and percussion party
And it’s back to problem central. This time is a treble frequency, not a bass one – namely a clicking sound on an organ keyboard on the song I Will Decide. OK, same problem, same solution – well no actually, this time a bit of gain riding to drop the volume of the very front of the
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Problemsville UK
Just when you think it’s all going smoothly, you hit problemsville UK!
Not so much on the big ballad Girls Don’t Look. That was fine to mix; in fact I had too many parts available to choose from and in the end found that a less is more approach worked well. I’m very happy now with
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A steady voice
Two new mixes to tell you about today. My Revolution builds on the acoustic guitar approach of Nothing Is More and goes from quiet to loud over the space of four minutes. It’s also the only track so far that lends itself to that old favourite of the producer, the fade out. Despite my
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Influences on mixes
Two more mixes to tell you about today. The first is Question of Love, which is a fairly standard rock idea, so I’ve decided to apply some Mutt Lange works with AC/DC tricks to it. The foremost of this is to leave the bass part out altogether in the intro and first verse so that when
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Mixing with automix
So, what do I do with those other two effects loops (keep your answers clean, please!)? Well, one tends to get used for backing vocals, with just a hint of room reverb and an extreme left/right panning placement. It’s surprising how much width and depth you can add to your bv’s this
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Dead centre, then loop the loop!
I’ve been told that it should take about as long to mix a record as it does to get the material down on the hard drive so I’ve budgeted for that in this process. If you think about it, all what goes in has to come out, so a 50:50 time split seems logical.
The first thing I like to
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Backing vocals that make a difference
Here we are in 2009 and I said I was going to talk about backing vocals, so here goes.
It can be awkward at times if you’ve only one singer in a band to make enough variety in the vocals to make them sit with the lead line. Fortunately I seem to be able to work out where backing
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Making the vocals work for the song
Hi,
I promised some more on making vocals work to show a lyric off to its best advantage.
Last time I talked about having a plan, and this is the basis of my delivery. However, unlike the performance of the music, where the plan is like a route map, the vocal plan can be
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Planning to record vocals
One of the great things about being a record producer is that you get to do things other guys cannot imagine with girls they can only dream about! That’s been the case recently, as my side project with a female singer has developed. We originally set out to do a few demos with a view
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Keyboards to the front
As I said before, it’s been my turn to be busy over the past couple of weeks.
Keyboard parts first. Mostly nothing fancy, although I do try and avoid the blindingly obvious block synth wash wherever possible. I see the keys as pretty much a colour instrument behind the guitars in
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Never the same pattern twice
OK, I promised to talk about techniques for putting core tracks down, so here goes.
I guess the first advantage is we know pretty much what the melody line is from the guide tracks, so we have an idea about how the orchestration of the song is going to work – in other words, where
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Rhythm guitar and bass parts
Well, here we are back at my place recording rhythm guitars and bass parts.
Why the two together, I hear you asking. The answer is inversions. Being a guitar based band with a songwriter who also plays keyboards can lead to some tricky situations. I might write something that
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Getting the drums down
At last the talking is over and the recording has begun!
And don’t you just love drummers? They may be the butt of an easy joke (they always turn up on time but never in time etc) but I’m always in awe of how they remember exactly what fill they put in the song at point X last
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Making the new Sharp Practise album
I’m pretty keen on getting the right flow to the new album. We’ll kick it off with Hook In My Heart – it’s a song we’ve played live, already made a video for and has some success with in that it’s reached number 37 on the UK's original weekly unsigned chart.
Next up will be
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