Sunday, October 20, 2013

Mixing is hard work

I am entering another mix competition because, well, I ain't got anything else to mix :-) Writing the book is also lots of fun but it can get really tedious and I thought I'd try my newfound techniques at some poor unsuspecting song.

I regularly listen to the Home Recording Show podcast; on episode 223 (I think), one of the regular guests presented his venture called CrowdAudio. You guessed it: he's proposing a platform to crowd source mixing and mastering to musicians who have better things to do than learn all that stuff (that *will* be easier one my book comes out, promised :-P). The process is simple: a band posts their sound files, describes the project, puts a prize money tag on the project and off it goes.

The current competition is for a hip-hop rap song called "Gone Away". For those who know me, well, you know it's not my style at all :-) but I decided to try and mix it anyway - I mean, if I can do prog rock, I can do hip-hop, right?

Ahem.

First of all, this is a real project. By real I mean "Holy sh*t how many files does this have??". It's been well recorded, apart from the acoustic guitar player who sucks ass; yeah, he's worse than me; luckily, the song doesn't have much acoustic guitar in it. But man oh man, with all the aux busses and groups and everything, this project has 70+ tracks! For a hip-hop song!!

Second, hip-hop and rap have a lot to do with vocals. And by a lot I mean over 30 tracks of vocals. Thank God for groups!

Third, it's been a lot of fun. Really. The song is well written, well arranged, and there are a lot of different elements to take into consideration.

What I did learn during these past couple of days is this: keep your sessions tidy: label your tracks, cut out unnecessary tracks, make your groups, prepare your aux busses; this is a huge time saver when you're working with so many tracks.

I'll post my song and some comments when the competition is over. Not that I'm gonna win it :-)

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