Studio Tweaks

[snoozefestaudio]

73F and sunny on this Friday morning.

I've made it through two five-day weeks, as of tonight, and now only one more to go.

The week after next will only be a three-day week.

That four-day weekend's still a way off, but it's within sight.

I made a bit of a breakthrough last night with the snare sound, in FL Studio.

There are only a limited number of stock snare sounds in the app, and since the start of recording I've been using the only one I liked, which has a nice snap to it... but it's not very loud, and tends to get lost in the mix.

I figured I'd have to go out there and hunt down a free snare sample online, which could've taken days, but then I realized I could layer a second snare sound with the first, if there was an acceptable sample already stock.

Going through the options, I found one with a nice punchy ring to it.

By itself, RD_snare_10 would be aweful.

But layered with RD_snare_04, they sound great!

It requires adding the second snare into the channel rack of every single song, and then going through all the drump patterns, one by one, and doubling up the new snare with the old one... then adjusting the velocities to match what the main snare's doing.

But none of that's too difficult or time consuming, and the result is worth it.

I did it for, Never Rains, and, Bed in the Suburbs last night.

The result is a snare with a nice snap, but also some punch and a ring to it, that brings it out over the mix, and also sounds more realistic!

--<>--

I also learned a little more about FL's limitations on the Optiplex 7050.

After I strummed out those guitar strings last winter, many of the songs now kinda seize, or glitch a bit during playback at certain moments, where there's a bit too much going on for the processor to handle.

I didn't realize there was a little panel in the upper right that shows not only processor usage in real time, but the number of total voices being processed at any given moment.

It glitches once the number of voices gets close to 80.

But there never should be 80 voices going simultaneously!

The reason that there is, occasionally, is because as I've piano-rolled these different instruments, especially the guitars, I've tended to go a bit overboard, in places, with the number of notes in a chord... often having superfluously high, or low octaves of the chord's main notes thrown in to add a bit of depth, which then just gets lost in the mix anyway.

So, all it takes is a bit of pruning in different places to prevent the glitches from happening.

--<>--

I'm going to have to get more efficient about everything when it gets to the mastering phase, as I'll likely be employing different effects, such as parametric EQ and compression, which will up the total CPU load for the songs.

Pruning superfluous notes is one way to do that, but there are other tricks, like tweaking the buffer settings in the app, and in windows.

--<>--

Lastly, I noticed that the main project folder is now about 21G in size, which is nearing the capacity of my 25G thumb drives.

So last night I ordered some new 64G thumb drives.

And from now on, I'm going to have a dedicated thumb drive to backup that folder every week.

That way, if the worst were to happen, and the Optiplex crapped out, I'd still have everything.

--<>--

Okay, time to get ready for work!

°¦}




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