This week me and Ben took a listen through all of the lead vocals that I had comped and tuned as well as all of the blog posts I’d added since last week. We spent most of the tutorial listening through all of the tracks and then discussed some possible backing vocal ideas that could help fill all of the tracks out.
With regards to my blog, as the majority of my posts are still in draft form, Ben recommended that I begin publishing them for next week, even if they do need editing, so we can begin to see how my blog will look when all of the posts are in it. Doing this will mean that it will be easier to see how I can improve my blog.
He also recommended that I try and write as many blogs posts as possible and to record all of the backing vocals ready for next week.
Now that I have numerous takes of all the lead vocal tracks, I can now begin selecting the best parts and get rid of all of the unwanted parts.
I began by going through each vocal line of each track and chose the best take which then went onto a separate playlist. Doing this provided a much more consistent vocal track and was already more pleasing to the ear. This is a technique i’ve witnessed first hand from Neil Haynes at The Parlour Recording Studio when my own band band worked with him and is something i’ve applied to my own work ever since. Chris Lord-Alge also emphasises this point and suggests that its crucial for keeping your session organised and manageable. I then ran the comped vocal track through melodyne to fix some tuning issues which were missed in the comping stage. Running the vocals through melodyne at this stage helped them sound more natural when being tuned as the notes were already closer to the desired pitch. I’ve previously found that the more out of tune the vocals are, the more artificial they sound when correcting them.
Once I was happy with the melodye that I had applied, I then recorded the audio out to a new track so that I could hide the original track track and make it inactive. I did this because i didn’t want melodyne to constantly be using unnecessary power from my computer and to ensure my session was more organised. Doing it this way also means that i’ve also got the original files if I did ever need to revisit them for some reason.
Doing all of the editing, comping and tuning at this stage will save a lot of time and effort as appose to doing so just before the mix stage and is something that Mike Senior highly recommends doing as part of the mix preparation.
Todays lecture was conducted by Helen McCarron who is a Careers and Employability Advisor and Claire Butler who is the Student Enterprise Co-ordinator. The lecture was an introduction into freelance and Self Employment Working.
This lecture was extremely useful to me as I’ll probably be working freelance for a while after University in order to build up my client list and creative portfolio. Both Helen and Claire provided some very useful information about registering as a sole trader with the HMRC, book keeping and tax, what you should be charging, business expenses, accountants, invoicing and VAT. They also recommended that it could be a good idea to look into getting a business account at the bank and it’s probably to wise to work with a media accountant as they have a better understand of how to claim your business expenses.
They then went on to list some of the Pros and Cons of working as self employed. These were as follows:
Pros
Freedom to work around requirements.
Cost of commuting.
Variety of projects – portfolio working.
Being your own boss.
Flexible for the creative industries – high % of freelance workers.
Cons
Initial start up costs.
Security – e.g. maternity/ paternity, sickness, paid holiday etc.
Switch off time from work.
To finish up the lecture, they then provided some great info and links which we can use when setting up our business. They mentioned that Student enterprise can offer a £2,500 start up grant, 30 hours of support via workshops and mentoring, virtual office and tenancy spaces, information resources and UoL enterprise networks. They also showed us the free lance toolkit as well as the creative toolkit.
Although i’m still in the tracking/production stage of my project, I wanted to start looking at some research to help give me a better understanding of how to prepare for the mastering stage. Ben Selway actually pointed this video out to me and it provides some great information with regards to headroom, input and output levels, gain structure and how to get the best out of your plugins, especially the analogue modelled ones.
James Wiltshire suggests that these days a lot of producers and mixers seem to think that the best way to mix a record is to make it as loud as possible and get to 0 on the digital full scale as quickly as possible. However, this can cause mixes to sound cluttered very quickly and can prevent them from sounding clear and solid, mainly because the plugins aren’t working to their maximum potential and there is a risk of digital clipping. For example, James tested out the Waves plugins and found that they work best at -20. The analogue modelled plugins will also run similar to this as their hardware predecessors will have required the correct amount of input volume for them to function correctly.
With K-Meter, it allows you to work towards a temporary 0 at either K-20, K-14 or K-12. Working to these levels will prevent you from running your plugins far too hot, prevent premature digital clipping and provide you with a good end level which can then be turned up as much as you’d like during the mastering process, especially if you are mastering yourself. If you are using a mastering engineer for your tracks it also allows you to send them a good level which they can comfortably worth with.
As I will be mastering the project myself, this is vital piece of information to understand so that I can master all of the final mixes as efficiently as possible.
Since my last tutorial, I had planned to meet with Dave so we could sort through all of the vocal takes together. However, due to various reasons we ended up not being able to meet up which meant I hadn’t got as much done this week as I’d liked. However, I was able to convince Dave to let me do all of the comping and tuning myself so we didn’t get behind schedule and I had something to show Ben for my following tutorial.
Ben recommended that the best course of action to take between now and next week was to work on my blog as much as possible and to complete of all the vocal comping and tuning. Doing this will also mean that we can benchmark where my work is at and have a clearer understanding of the areas that I need to work on.
Ben also gave me some great tips and mixing techniques with regards to setting the gain structure into plugins and showed me some great software called K-Meter as well as a great research source by James Wiltshire. This will be a great resource to take into consideration for my mastering learning outcome.
