In the next couple weeks the songs of melodic DIRT will be published. The music production has been ninety something odd complete for the past month or so but there have been some minor tweaks here or there that to me anyway makes a difference.
So I just recently re-copyrighted the music for Melodic Dirt since its original copyrighting in FEB 2014. Apparently the relentless final push needed 4 more months of diligent trial and error with regards to the vocal work. Long story short… it rocks. All the extra time and effort is worth it. My mentality has been (and also seems quite common sensical) that once it’s released there’s no going back. I want no regrets. I am not perfect, my music is not perfect (nor do I want it to be) but I have to make sure that I get it right. At the age of 40 I can definitely say this will be my best work yet and will be difficult for me to produce above and beyond it but I am already developing that inner creative spark to pick up the guitar again and have at it.
Anyway, I was so caught up in finalizing the vocals that I never had the time up until now to work with the overall sound with regards to EQ and Compression the way I knew it needed to be. Basically for me the no brainer was to compare it on itunes radio… on my built in computer speakers (I have an iMac). For the past year I haven’t been listening to much music other than my own. And I’ve only been listening to it either on my studio headphones or on my ipod Nano (Melodic Dirt is the only album I have on it so not much a/b’ing going on there either).
Even though most of the past year has been developing the vocals, I have been tweaking things with EQ and Compression along the way. And when you aren’t comparing your music to other well produced music along the way the results are somewhat in their own isolated world. Meaning that while it might sound good in it’s own right, when taking a step back, comparatively speaking, it’s off the mark somewhat.
With my overall mix I found that it was very bottom heavy with the lower mids being very dominate. The overall sound was muddy but I didn’t want it to sound like Melodic Mud, I wanted it to sound like Melodic Dirt. The fix there was easy, boost the mid-to-higher-mids while cutting out some of the lower-to-middle-mids.
I also discovered that I had too much Compression and EQ on the drums making them sound weak, flat, and wimpy. so I removed all the additive tweakings (Compressions and EQ) off the drum track sending the raw drum tracks over to the Master Track which has plenty of EQ and Compression. To have the Master Track pretty much handle all of the drums Compression and EQ’ing was something kind of daring for me to do. Don’t know about you, but for me, that idea just seemed kind of crazy… but… it works. Of course using BFD for quality recorded drum samples didn’t hurt.
I think the moral of the story is that when it comes time to work with EQ and Compression levels within the individual tracks and Master track, is to a/b it, take a step back and compare it to other well produced recordings. I think it’s also important to not just listen to it outside of your normal production environment, but to compare it (a/b it) outside of your normal production environment. On the flipside of that… to also compare your music to other professionally produced music within your recording environment (studio headphones or monitors) is equally important. Bottom line… compare it within and outside of your recording environment.
I think it’s also important to point out that to be a unique, distinct music artist extends beyond just what and how you play or sing. You need to stay true to yourself when it comes to your overall sound as well. When you’re a/b’ing your music to your role models, bands and artists that have inspired you, you need to acknowledge that they are produced and sound different from one another as well. I think it’s important to a/b to make sure you know where exactly you stand in relation to what’s already out there sounding pretty good, then to make your unique mark from there. I believe that normal non industry professionals will appreciate your efforts and not just the highly skilled professionals. Though I do believe it is subconscious as to why they (the average listener) like it or inspires them, they just may not have the industry jargon to articulate it.
What I have been doing over the past several months (almost a year at this point) has been to allow the ever evolving song order to help develop the tonal center and harmonic character of the vocals. It seems that new tonal harmonic directions that develop within one song can bleed over into the next if you allow it to. Understanding the synergistics of letting the quality and energy of the last song heard determine how you want the next song to sound has been an integral part of developing the overall sound of Melodic Dirt. I truly believe this churning of song order and development of vocals has been extremely important.
When you function within this strategy and couple it with letting your mind congeal and ferment (take a step back for maybe a day or two) then come back to your previous efforts with a fresh mind and built up energy, the results are exponentially rewarding. The key to this of course is to be recording and saving your progress along the way. I guess being a recording artist it’s easy to forget that many bands do not develop their sound in the recording studio. I know what that is like but nowadays there are so many inexpensive handheld size digital recorders that everyone should be developing their sound and songs by recording then building upon their previous efforts. What I do not recall from previous bands that I was in was the importance of song order and churning the order over and over again to help develop parts.
I’ve been working with 7 songs for the past several months and have utilized this strategy to it’s fullest extent. The best ideas are inspired from other ‘successful’ ideas that we may have accomplished in another song. Not ‘successful’ in terms of social acceptance or financial gains but in terms of ones own standards of quality and expectations. I guess we are our own worst critics for the most part (especially as artists because by nature we want to rebel to a certain extent and don’t really care what other ‘critics’ have to say anyway, right?)
I mean it’s easy to hear differences of strength and weakness when you have a well put together song followed by one that maybe you’re less sure of and felt less confident while recording it. The goal I suppose would be to establish your best, most confident song as the starting cornerstone then indulge in the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ to making the weak link better. Duh, right? Well, sometimes your strongest most confident put together ideas can turn into your weakest links if you keep on developing your ideas based on a tonal harmonic character developed through the evolving churning of song order. I’ve experienced this many times at this point and every time is no less of an epiphany type of feeling than the last. It’s night and day and feels like you’ve been eating stale cardboard tasting cracks for the past few weeks when you then get to indulge in a 5 star 5 course meal or whatever. It makes all the trials and tribulations worth the fight, worth the struggle and worth the sacrifice.
See you on the flip side soon. I’m hoping to be finished by the end of April but ultimately it will be finished when it is finished. And yes I will be re-copyrighting what needs to be.
So I just finished up copyrighting the music of Melodic Dirt. By the time you’ve read this post I’ll have registered both the pdf’s of the notated music with lyrics AND mp3 sound recordings to eco.copyright.gov. Supposedly there’s debate regarding whether you need to go through all of this or not.If you’re like me and you’ve recorded your tracks in Pro Tools or any other professional music recording computer software, then copyrighting the melodies of the individual tracks is fun and easy. All you have to do is grab a midi keyboard and play along with your guitar tracks, bass tracks, vocal tracks etc… to create midi tracks for everything. If you recorded any piano or synth tracks via midi then those are already ready to go.
Pro Tools comes bundled with free notation software now so all you have to do is open the Score Editor. This will take the keyboard midi tracks and convert them to notated music. From there you just print the Scores to pdfs. You can pay big bucks to upgrade the bundled Score Editing Software to be able to type in the lyrics onto the scores but why do that when you can do the same thing with a simple pdf editor. My iMac came bundled with pdf editing capabilities but you can buy a super cheap one for Windows.
