In this article, I’m going to talk about one of the most common problems that musicians have when creating their music if they’re doing everything themselves. If you’re able to break yourself away from this, you will give yourself the best chance of coming up with the best possible production that you can come up with.
When we are on our own in the world of music making, we don’t really think about this, but we wear many hats. If I took you through the entire process from start to finish, you would indeed see how true this is. In fact, I’m going to do just that right now so you can see the process clearly laid out and hopefully identify which part of the process is tripping you up and why.
At the beginning, we have the actual song creation. Now there are different ways of writing a song. I’m not going to get into them all. But you can start writing by picking up a guitar and playing some chords. Maybe you sit down with a pen and paper and scribble some lyrics. Maybe you actually go through the painstaking process of creating boxes for your song’s “story.”
Bottom line: You use some kind of process, that can change from song to song even, to create your song that will soon be ready for recording.
Now, while you’re doing this process, you’re not thinking about anything else. At least you shouldn’t be. You should only be concentrating on writing the best song possible. There should be no thoughts about how you’re going to sing it or what kind of reverb you’re going to put on the vocals or anything else other than how the song is going to flow from beginning to end. Will it have prosody? Will it be satisfactory on its own?
After you’ve completed writing the whole song, next comes the performance part. Here is where you have to concentrate on making sure that every thing that gets recorded is as perfect as can be. How good the actual song material is doesn’t matter here. You’re only concerned about performance. Where people get tripped up is not thinking it terms of what performance will best serve as a vehicle for the song. They figure the song is good (after all they wrote it) so however I sing it will be fine. This is not true. Each song lends itself to be performed a certain way in order to get the most out of that song. And the only way to do this is to put on your performance hat. Your thoughts should be on only one thing. What is the best way to perform this song, even if that particular performance style is not a personal favorite. Be objective. We’ll soon see where this becomes harder and harder.
Okay, so the performance is done and out of the way. You’ve worked very hard on each part. Now it’s time to process the individual tracks. Do the vocals need reverb? Does the piano need EQ and compression? What about the drums? Should each piece of the drum kit go on its own channel so you can compress the kick and snare but only EQ the high hat? You want every instrument to sound as good as it can. This has nothing to do with how good or bad the song is. Lots of people, when they’re not satisfied with the quality of the writing itself say “The heck with it” and just rush through the processing part because they don’t really think it will matter. Or, they may think the music is so wonderful that the song doesn’t need any processing. You need to objectively look at the recording and say to yourself “How do I best bring out each part?” When you’ve done that, you can then go about adding whatever processing is needed to achieve your end goal.
Next we have the mixing part. This is getting the levels of each instrument just right in the mix. Now think about what’s gone on before this stage since we’re doing everything ourselves. We love the song. We love the way we sang the song. We love the drums and the way we did that little 16th note slice on the high hat. We love the way we processed that pad. We want every little instrument to shine in the mix because we worked so hard on everything.
Guess what? Not every instrument is going to shine. That 16th note high hat slice is probably going to be far back in the mix if not buried completely. Some instruments will have to take a back seat. If you’re doing a vocal recording, your vocals are probably the most important part. Don’t like the way you sing? Too bad. You can’t bury the vocals just because you don’t like your voice. You should have gotten somebody else to sing but you didn’t. You can’t let your feelings cloud your professional judgment. Those vocals have to be up front. Period. Those drums can’t be booming over everything else. The synth pad has to be in the background. That guitar is going to be somewhat back in the mix until the lead kicks in. That’s when it can shine.
Mixing a track, especially when we’ve played every single track ourselves, is the hardest thing to do because we’re so in love, or so hate, everything we’ve done before that. We let our personal feelings cloud our judgment. And when we do that, the mix suffers.
Finally, we have the mastering stage when we have our two tracks and we need to make sure they sound as good as possible. So we’ll do our final EQ, compression and limiting here and whatever else our “professional” opinion thinks needs to be done. Again, we can’t let our love for our previous work cloud what we do here. We may love the mix to this point. But can we do better? If it’s a dance mix, are the vocals too up front with everything else too far back? Do we need to compress things a lot more because of the genre and maybe have the vocals not as pronounced? If we love our vocal performance, this may be hard for us to do. But for the good of the track as a whole, we have to do it.
This is why wearing all these hats is so difficult and, quite honestly, not ideal. But sometimes we have no choice. I can’t afford vocalists and pianists. I can’t afford a mix engineer. I can’t afford a mastering specialist. I have to do all this myself. And sometimes it’s not easy to be objective about things. But to get the best recording of your song, you have to make sure you wear the proper musical hat during each part of the process.
For The Love Of Music,
Steven “Wags” Wagenheim