September Winding Down
Saturday, September 27th, 2025 01:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snoozefestaudio |
85F and sunny out there today. It hovered right around 80F all week, but of course, jumped up five degrees today, for my session in Studio C!
Let's see... I comped, Miss Fortune Last weekend, but didn't have time to prep anything new to record harmonies for in today's upcoming session.
So in my, TestFlax folder, I now finally have vocals on all 13 songs, which is a breakthrough, but the re-sings and patches have not been comped yet. Thus, today I'll just be adding more harmony takes to the three songs I was working on last week.
This coming week I have Friday off, so... between this weekend, and next Friday, I should be able to comp a couple new songs and a patch or two, to have ready for next Saturday.
So, let's see here... for re-sings, I have to comp; Archeology, Reavis 309, and Never Rains.
For patches, I have to comp; Magic Monday, Tuesday Siren, and Live it Fast.
Of those, the following have harmonies; Reavis, Monday, Tuesday, and Fast.
Thus I must comp, Reavis this weekend, Monday on Friday, and Tuesday next Saturday, and Fast maybe, next Sat/Sun.
So, next Saturday, I can do harmonies for, Reavis, and Monday.
The week after that, SAT OCT 11, I can do harmonies for Tuesday and Fast... and comp, Archeology.
And then that still leaves me, SAT OCT 18, and SAT OCT 27, to do whatever patching and comping there happens to be, before Halloween vacation begins in earnest!
In other news, October begins on Wednesday, which means they'll be taking the AC out of my window this week, and I'll get my view back, and a lot more fresh air in here.
Over my 3-day weekend, next week, I'll put up my halloween decorations as well.
And, if the weather cools down, then after next weekend it's an easy three-week October grind before the big week off!
I also looked ahead in the calendar, and if I take three well-placed PTO days, I can make an 8-day weekend out of Christmas/New Year!
So!.. mixing begins one month from today, and then probably goes on well into February or March, depending on how complicated it gets.
The first step, later this month, is to add amp & cabinet simulators to the raw guitar tracks, to make them sound like real electric guitars. And I have to go through all the drums and other insturments and tweak or layer them to stand out in the mix.
I've already layered two sounds for my snare, which has really improved it. So, I have to do that with the kick drum too, and then I have to dampen down the sustain of the toms to keep them from muddying things up.
And there will be tweaking of the bass and the other instruments... I may put a cab simulation on the bass.
The next phase, after that, is to get the parametric EQ involved and start relegating different instruments to different bandwidths.
There will be testing on different open-air speaker setups... car, bluetooth brick, phone, PC, to find the right balance for everything.
And then I'll work on the vocals... compressing them, EQing them, doubling, etc.
Once I'm in the vocal stage of the mix, it's all being done in Audacity, and I may find that it's easier to separate my FL music into stems.
That means, rather than just having a perfect stereo WAV export of the entire music mix, it might make more sense to isolate, say the drums (without cymbals) and export just that as a WAV to be it's own track in Audacity... and the same for the cymbals, the guitar, the bass, and then one stem with all the orchestral instruments together... or maybe two orchestral stems; one for higher pitched, and one for lower pitched.
The general order of things is to strive at every step, to have the mix sound perfect, in that step.
So, for example, when I start tweaking and adding cabinet simulators, I will try to get that mix to sound as perfect as possible before even involving the parametric EQ.
Then the EQ stage should be more subtractive than additive... just cutting off the lows for most things, to make room for the bass and kick... and perhaps cutting out mids or highs for other things to give each their space.
And then if I do separate the music into stems for Audacity, the only tweaks there should be minor adjustments to help balance the music with the vocals.
It's going to be it's own, four to five month oddyssey to get the final mix!
At the start of this year, I was hoping to release this album for Halloween!.. but the failure to find a suitable apartment in which to record vocals, really slowed the process down.
If I could've recorded vocals at home, then I would've been able to practice my voice during the week, spend a lot more that two hours recording, and record on both Saturday and Sunday.
So, if I'd started in March, I'd have been done with vocals by the start of July, and right now, I'd be in the final stages of mixing and mastering for that Halloween release.
As things stand, it's still possible for a Valentine's Day release... but if not then... St. Patrick's Day?
Well, not the most productive session today, but some progress was made.
I started with, Bed in the Suburbs, which only had two harmony takes on it from the last session, and I added three more.
I also developed a new little technique where I move the main vocal track down to sit directly above the currently recording harmony track, so that I can watch the wave form of the main vocal as I sing my back-up.
This helps enormously to get the harmony in perfect synch with the main vocals.
Some takes in last weeks session had been suffering from being a bit out of step with the main vocals.
So that was a bit of a breakthrough, and my voice was doing fine for, Suburbs.
After a quick smoke break, I moved on to, Other Friends, adding two more takes of harms, but by the third take, it was clear my voice was done with that song for today.
I moved on to, Clue Phone, with equally stratospheric harmonies, and was able to get two more takes on that too, before my voice was just like, Dude! Enough!
The only other song I had ready for harmonies was, Closer To You, which only requires some very sparing harmonies at the end. So I did a take of them, but they were so easy it seemed stupid to do more than one take.
With nothing left to do, I took my time packing up, and left with about 15 minutes left on the clock.
So... not a super productive session?.. but this was because of a comping bottleneck.
The long weekend with Kevin, Colleen & Celina was busier than I imagined, and thus I had no time to comp anything over those four days.
The following weekend (last week) I was still catching up with comping the final main vocal... a song with no harmonies... giving me no new material for today.
But by next Saturday, I should be back on track with new comps to add harmonies too, and then if there's spare time in the session, I just throw another take onto either, Other Friends, or, Clue Phone, my two problematic, stratospheric songs.
With those two, it's not just the highs, but in both, the back-up singers (my brother's Tim & Brian, repspectively, and originally) do a bit of trailing flourish here and there in critical passages.
The kind of trailing flourish that's easy for a teen or 20-something who does nothing but sing all damn day every day, and thus has a ton of control.
Since I can't practice, to navigate these flourishes I'm having to; 1) simplify them, 2) pray, and 3) hope that one or two takes per week over several weeks will eventually yield a well executed flourish in the end... or at least two that can be stitched together into one?
I must say, however, if I haven't already said it, that both Tim and Brian were far more capable singers than I gave them credit for, back in the day.
There I was at 19 and 20 writing songs that, for me, were in the upper part of my range, and there they were, in, Other Friends, and, Clue Phone, kinda effortlessly throwing in crazily high back-ups, while playing guitar at the same time!
Okay, time to get busy comping, Reavis 309.
I'll see you in October.
°¦}
