audio recording Archives - Aaron J. Trumm

Listen Different

This article first appeared in Recording Magazine. I reprint it here with permission, and I encourage you to subscribe to that publication, as they are a stand up bunch of folk!

There’s nothing in the world like a great pair of…monitor speakers. It’s true. Whether you’re into Adam, Genelec, K-Rok, Events or Mackie, even if you’re old school and can’t get by without your trusty NS-10s, whether sub or no sub, there’s nothing like a beautiful set of monitors (in a properly treated room!) with an incredibly clean, accurate sound to not only get you in the mood, but make that mood shine through when other people hear your brilliant opus. You need that accuracy, and you need to be used to your go-to monitors. You need to know their ins and outs, their strengths and weaknesses, and what tends to happen to a mix when you use them. You need to be loyal enough for long enough so that you really feel comfortable and master your monitors.

But comfort can be a dangerous thing, and no one, not even your mom, will ever listen to your mixes on your monitors in your room. Maybe not even your client. So your loyalty, while strong, should flex. You may need, as they say, to have an open relationship with your monitors. In fact, in order to really get your mix right, you might need to be rather promiscuous with your listening. Of course that includes the obvious: if you’re in a big studio, you’ll have loud speakers, mid fields, near fields and great headphones to check mixes against. But don’t stop there. If possible, how about another set of nearfields, maybe an alternate pair of mid fields?

Of course, that kind of buying power is rare, and in reality, you might have to settle for one set of really great, perfect-for-you monitors. That’s ok, because there’s more to do anyway. Check the mix on your go to headphones. Check on it $10 computer speakers. Check on the laptop speakers. Download an mp3 to your phone and listen with earbuds, then listen without. Does it still sound like a record? Listen on a boom box – a crappy one. A famous studio/label who shall remain nameless is said to have had a small broadcast station, which they would tune in to while sitting in an old truck in the front. Listen in mono. Get a cheap “pillow” speaker and try that out. DEFINITELY listen in your car. Listen a LOT in a LOT of cars. Make a CD and take it to every boom box in every department store in town.

When you’re not in the studio, make a lot of notes. When you are, make small tweaks. Return to your favorite monitors and check to see that your adjustment didn’t throw things out of whack there. Usually you can find a balance between disparate systems with small tweaks, but be careful of chasing your tail. Just check and check and check, and at some point, stop.

This advice is especially for those self-mixed musicians, producers and dreamers who don’t have access to the Bob Clearmountains and Chris Lord-Alges of the world (or their gear). Your lack of the absolute BEST resources need not stop you from achieving great and translatable mixes, and where that begins is with multiple listening environments.

While you’re at it, go ahead and get multiple ears on the mix too. E-Mail an mp3 link to some people who will listen differently than you. If you can stand it, bring somebody into the studio who is NOT an expert. Yes, bring the lay people in on it! Let your kids, your mom, your dog and your neighbor’s best friend’s plumber in on the fun. Don’t try to get technical terms out of them, just listen for their reactions. They won’t say “the vocal is a bit muddy, can you trim 100 HZ a bit?” They’ll say something like “what’d she say?”

That’s not to say you should leave your expert friends out. Don’t be afraid to send the mix all around, including to feedback groups you trust out in the social media world. Just make sure you make small tweaks, and remember that you may not be able to please EVERYBODY. But try. And listen, listen, listen.

Oh, and that means listening to other music. That’s obvious, right? Certainly you tune your ears a bit with known tracks before starting a mix session. But have you been listening to those tracks on those other systems too, learning what the mixes you like do in those situations? That can be quite enlightening and pretty encouraging too, because no, the great mixers’ stuff doesn’t necessarily sound that great on a pillow speaker! If it sounds better than yours though, think about why. What do you hear, and how can you get it?

This kind of critical listening is just that – critical – and you will be glad you upped the ante on perspective. There is a limit, and at some point you need to go ahead and finish and move on, but there’s great value in listening around, as it were. Try it, you’ll like it!

I’m a producer, vocalist, pianist and listen differenter. Look for me on Twitter or Facebook at @AaronJTrumm.

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Studio Deliverables

August 5, 2019 by Aaron

Audio Instruction, Instructional Stuff, Published Work, Recording Magazine

aaron j. trumm, aaron trumm, audio recording, deliverables, recording, recording magazine, recording studio

Come away from the studio with more for your money

This article first appeared Recording Magazine. I reprint it here with permission, and I encourage you to subscribe to that publication, as they are a stand up bunch of folk!

When people talk about making money with music, they talk about two sources: Gigging and CD/Download sales. If you have a great live act and you’re very popular, gig money can be significant, but it’s no secret the sales side is hardly ever big, and much has been made of its imminent demise. That part’s debatable, but it’s a fact that record sales have never been the main revenue stream for major labels or the companies that own them. Not to mention, few of us are rock stars, and believe it or not, some people don’t want to be! In short, the rock star business model is non-viable, and even labels know this. Thankfully, there are many other ways to generate revenue from music.

Alternative music income is talked about a lot, but what can musicians DO to maximize income? In this piece, I’ll focus on the first part, the part without which nothing else can happen: the product. Specifically, what do you need to leave the studio with in order to maximize earning potential? Or, what are the studio’s “deliverables”?

When I think about all the hopeful bands that have come and gone in studios I worked at, who went away with only stereo mixes, I cringe. They’d leave the studio with a brand new set of 10 songs, mixed to perfection, hoping to make it rich. Not only is that not enough, that’s the ONLY part of the recording that probably isn’t valuable financially!

So if beautiful amazing songs sung with passion and purpose, mixed by the best mixer in town aren’t what you want to leave the studio with, what is? First off, of course you need those main mixes. You might refer to these as album or straight mixes. These are the songs that go on your CD, go out to iTunes, go your website and go on the radio…right? Not quite.

Radio mixes

Your album mixes aren’t necessarily the ones that go on the radio. So your first new deliverable is radio mixes. Obviously, you need mixes with no cuss words. With a DAW, it’s no problem to do a “save as” and save a radio mix, where the engineer cuts words from the vocal, or reverses them, or does some other magic to “censor” your song. Even better, write a version of the song with no cussing, and when you’re overdubbing vocals, record the “clean” version with the same mic setup, same vocal style, etc. This is the method Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg used to make palatable versions of otherwise un-airable songs, which also didn’t sound edited or censored. The benefit was multiplied when anyone who bought the album heard a new, harder-core version of the lyrics.

Lyrics are not the only thing at play though. While not universally true if you include avant-garde shows, you might as well tell yourself that no one will ever air a song over 3 minutes. That doesn’t mean the 4:20 album version needs to be cut. That’s another opportunity to give a fan something more. But whenever possible, do yourself a favor: do another “save as”, and edit a version with less intro, a shorter guitar solo, whatever it takes to get in the 3:00-3:10 sweet spot. Just like with lyrics, it may help to perform this ahead of time.

Next up…

Alternative mixes

One of the biggest possible revenue streams requiring the least amount of fame, as well as one of the best ways to develop great industry connection, is licensing. This is another hot topic lately, and for good reason, but all you have to do is watch TV for an hour, and you will realize that however clean you made that previously raunchy lyric, you probably won’t hear it behind a movie or TV scene. You may want to write instrumentals, but first do another “save as” and print your mix without vocals. You can do one with the backing vocals in, but make sure you’ve got one that has zero words whatsoever. Great lyricists may resist this, but a song WITHOUT words is usually more valuable to a video production. Why? Two reasons: one, movies and TV shows have dialog, and lyrics clash; and two, your lyrics tell a story, and that story probably doesn’t fit. Without words, though, your track might go great with the story.

As an added bonus, if you’re a vocalist with no band, you can use instrumentals as performance mixes for live shows. If you’re very detailed, you might print an instrumental with less reverb on the instruments, for venues where the room is already pretty live. Don’t forget that DJs like to have acapella versions they can pair with alternative beats, so print a vocal only mix.

That’s not the end of alternative mixes. Remember when you edited the length of your radio mixes? You’ll want to do that again for licensing libraries. Start with 30, 60 and 90 second versions. While you’re at that, you probably want some 30-45 second promo clips for your website. Make both vocal and non-vocal versions of these.

That’s not all. Let’s say a big movie needs a song about being crazy, and your song is actually CALLED “I’m Crazy”? It’s perfect, but it has a horn solo, and the movie wants a bridge, no solo. No problem, if you’ve done another edit or performed a version that has a bridge and no solo.

You may also want an acoustic version, or, my favorite, a bunch of ready-made breakdowns. Do just the drums and bass, just the drums, a drumless mix…use your imagination. Remember to pay attention when you’re editing breakdowns to keep things sensical. A fade in may have worked in the full mix but not now. Maybe there’s a four bar drum solo which will turn into inexplicable silence in a drumless mix. Track wisely in anticipation of this. If your drums bleed into your vocals, you can’t use that track for your drum-free mix. You might have to TRACK multiple versions to have multiple versions available later. (For more flexibility and responsiveness, see the sidebar where I talk about separations.)

When it comes to alternative mixes and breakdowns, the point is to leave the studio with a lot of material in hand, so you can respond to industry needs quickly. You don’t want to be stuck waiting for studio time to reprint an instrumental if you’re asked for it. Not only is that inefficient, it’s not as cost effective as leaving the session with what you need.

The point is to maximize the amount of valuable material that comes out of what you were doing anyway. To that end, there are a couple of other things to consider; things you may not need to spend costly studio time on, but could prove valuable.

Lead sheets, tabs and sheet music

It took me a long time to see any value in having written music as part of the package of material that goes with a release, but they can be crucial. If you’re a solo artist who needs musicians for live settings, lead sheets or sheet music are critical for efficient learning. Tabs and sheet music are also publishable, giving you a possible new revenue stream, and if you’re submitting demos to publishing companies, they often require lead sheets and lyric sheets. It’s very valuable to have proper musical documentation. For natural improvisers, this can be tedious, but I highly recommend putting in the effort.

Video and photos

Behind the scenes footage or footage of performances in the studio may not always be directly monetizable, but it’s well known by now that YouTube is a critical part of a musician’s promotional arsenal, and there is SOME possibility of revenue from YouTube advertising. Not to mention that pictures and video clips are a huge value-add for websites and other promotional material. Heck, you might as well shoot your next 8×10 glossy with a cool mix desk background while you wait for the engineer to set up mics.

Surround

I’d be remiss not to mention surround sound. It would be false to claim that surround mixes are a necessary part of a production’s deliverables, because for the most part they’re not asked for, and there’s virtually no consumer market, but if you happen to be in a studio that has the capability, doing another “save as” and creating a 5.1 version of a mix could be a cool addition to what you offer. I highly recommend starting with the finished stereo mix and enhancing from there (although one could argue other methods), since you want to create the same basic musical experience. Especially if you’re going after movies, 5.1 versions could be valuable. But do consider your potential cost/benefit ratio before doing surround.

Documentation and project files

Last but not least, never leave the studio without copies of ALL your project files, raw tracks and any notes or documentation. Copy the folder the DAW project is in, and make notes of the software version, hardware, and especially the plugins used. You need this material in your hands, not just stored at the studio. You never know if the studio will lose your stuff, or if you may be halfway around the world needing to fix something at the last minute. Unless it’s owned by a label (in which case this advice is for them), you put yourself in a much better place by keeping your material on hand.

Hopefully now you can see how much more value you can pull from your studio time. If you’re efficient, it won’t cost much more to get everything you need. Then your living needn’t be tied to your fame, and that, in my humble opinion, is a huge relief! Happy monetizing!

SIDEBAR: Separations

Since I work in various DAWs, I’m a huge fan of separations. I leave the studio with full separations of a mix, so I can call it up and deliver breakdowns or alternate edits at will in any software, without going to the studio. I also sometimes send full separations to the mastering engineer, so he has better control.

Full separations means every track is separated; kick, snare, guitar, vocal, etc. These tracks can import into a DAW, set at zero with no processing, and the mix sounds exactly like the finished stereo mix. It’s easy to mute a few tracks and create a breakdown, or edit an new version. You can also take the separations to a totally different studio to do surround versions later.

With separations, even if you don’t have the same rig as the studio, you can do breakdowns and re-edits to your heart’s content without having to go back. This is a great way to be able to quickly deliver what’s needed to a client without having to own a full-fledged studio yourself.

Exporting full separations, however, can be a long process. Some software (and tape) can only mix-down in real-time, which means you have to mute all but one track and mix-down over and over to achieve full separations. 24 tracks equals 24 passes, which for a 3 minute song is 72 minutes – over an hour of studio time. Also, if you’ve got processing like EQ or compression on the final stereo buss, running just one track through that processing will hit differently than the whole mix, so your final set of separations may not be what you thought. Some software like Sonar allow you to export all busses at once, so strategic buss assignment can speed things up, but you still need to be careful about overall processing.

So, proceed with caution, but consider the value of getting separations, or the alternative: get your own copy of the software and plugins in your favorite studio, so you can call up projects as is and deliver new edits. You don’t need the whole studio to do this, only the same software.

audio-recording

Listen Different

Studio Deliverables

Come away from the studio with more for your money