GatorBlog

It’s Sunday night in Gatorland, and I’m in the studio working on some old songs.  My wife asked me yesterday why I keep rehashing old ones instead of doing new ones…I guess perception is the reality!  Personally I’d much rather be writing and recording some new tunes (okay, I snuck in a new acoustic instrumental to get a fix).

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Here’s the scoop.  There’s a lot of new songs still in my head, and a fair number that have been born into the world in some form.  I’m working on my songwriting using Taxi as my main guide right now, and as the listings and critiques go, so goes me!  Taxi is certainly not the only way to get your tunes into the marketplace, but Taxi has more opportunities for me than I can handle at this time.  Every 2 weeks I pour through the listings, categorize the listings I’d like to go after, and prioritize them.  Most of them never get a submission, due to time contstraints of the ol’ day job and the ol’ night/weekend job here at Gator-Studios.com.  As time goes on, hopefully my catalog of songs will get bigger and I’ll be able to submit and write more.

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I think back to when I started in this room 3 years ago and the slap echo (when you clap) was unbelievable.  And yet I went ahead believing since I was recording direct through a PODxt at the time acoustics didn’t matter. 

If you can’t truly hear what a GuitarPort patch sounds like, well, then it does matter.  It matters when you choose your tone, it matters when you add other tones, it matters when you add bass, vocals, etc.  If you can’t hear what it is really going in, by the time you get to the mix you’re already in a bit of trouble.  If you mix in the same environment, it will add up even more.  You will make bigger wrong decisions because you have more bad information.  And if you try and master it too…

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Part 5 is where we’re at.  If you want to skip the first 4 parts that’s great, so long as you take what I have to say right now as gospel. 

“I WISH I WISH I WISH SOMEBODY WOULD HAVE INSISTED TO ME THAT I START WITH MONITORS AND PROPER ACOUSTIC TREATMENT ON DAY 1.”

Seriously.  For something like time that I thought was “free” I wasted a ton of it.  Avoiding what I should have started with in the first place. 

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In part 3 I was using sound reducing ceiling tiles to great effect.  I got very busy with projects and they generally did well by me.  I went along happily this way for about a year, but found myself getting tired of all these big tiles laying all over the place.  I’d put them away when I’d get done with a project but it seemed like they were out almost all year!

I talked to somebody I know in a similar situation one day, and he told me he had just moved to Auralex acoustical tiles.  Also he had switched his room around so he was facing the rising ceiling from his mix position.  He didn’t give me much detail other than to say the change was amazing.  At the time I was planning to join Taxi and start down my songwriting road, which compelled me to look at doing this.  So I bought a kit that was way too small to completely do my room right, but enough to get started and see if it made any difference over the other achievements.  First I switched the room around to see what impact that had…not too much though it did appear better.  Then I went to work on the Auralex tile.

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How long can this go on?  Hey, this is 3 years of hard-fought history condensed into a few blogs…relax!

In part 2 I had finally come to grips with acoustic treatment.  I was addicted to the improvement quest now that I was into “business” and wanted to both get better and reduce the time I was taking.  When you’re getting paid a flat fee (as I do), running around to cars, other computers, stereos etc. a bunch of times adds tons of hours…big time. 

Again I looked around for ideas on the cheap.  I came across one that seemed to make some sense, acoustic ceiling tile. At Lowes I found 10 - 2′x4′ sheets of sound reducing ceiling tile could be had for $35, and a big roll of duct tape for about $4.  Including tax I escaped for under $40!

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Part of engineering music requires understanding some level of what is happening with sound.  Sound waves, sound fields, sound spectrums all play into a successful end result.  I have some background in this kind of stuff so it makes sense to me what is happening technically.  All the more reason I was pissed that I was turning out crap.  So I turned back to my old friend the internet to do some research on where I was going wrong.

I read a lot about properly treating rooms, flat monitors, standing waves, etc.  I read up on how commercial studios are constructed.  Man there’s a lot of detail people go into!  It’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff sometimes, but reference monitors seemed to be a good place to start.  I hunted around the web and found some good consensus on KRK RP5’s as a good “rock” monitor.  So I bought a pair.  And was unimpressed.  These things didn’t make my songs sound amazing, they made them sound like crap!  Dull, lifeless, uninspiring.  I was disappointed that I shelled out $300 for much ado about nothing.

As it turns out, that was more like what it really sounded like.  As I worked on my next song, I had to work much harder to get it to sound good.  But when I went ’round the circle of devices (2 cars, theater stereo, “Hello Kitty” boombox, shoqbox, TV, a couple pair of headphones, etc.) things were off, but not nearly as bad.  I still had to go around the circle a few times but I ended up with a better result in a bit less time.

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Heck even the title is long and boring!  It’s something most everybody new to recording flat out ignores.  We will spend lots of money on guitars, recording software, PODs, etc. only to plug them into our computers with their tiny speakers (and maybe a subwoofer) and expect to get great results out of that “premium sound system” that came with the computer.  We have successfully “stuck it to the man” who owns the studio that charges “outrageous” rates for studio time, broken the chains and are free to make music that will change the world!  All it costs now is time, and that is free.

You go out and create the greatest song the world has ever heard, mix it up on those tiny speakers, and post it or send it to the world and….you get a few “hey that’s nice” or even worse, the dreaded silent treatment.  If you are lucky somebody may point out that it sounds a little funny, pumping, too much bass, shrilly doesn’t quite sound right or whatever. 

If you are luckier, before you sent it to the world you brought it on the iPOD into the car to crank it on the way to work and it didn’t sound so good.  You had a chance to go back, made adjustments, got it to sound okay in the car, threw it up on the stereo to rock out only to find something else weird.  At least you saved your chance to give a good first impression, so that’s better, and remember….time to do all this is free supposedly!

You continue to play the engineering equivalent of “whack-a-mole” a bit more, and over time get the mix to where it sounds mostly okay on everything you try.  Satisfied, you wake up the next morning to crank your gem and it sounds messed up again.  It turns out you listened so many times your brain turned what you were hearing into what it wanted it to sound like, and in the morning the ol’ noggin was reset and heard reality again.  But time is free, right?

So you work on it more.  Over about a month.  For one song.  That you had to listen to a million times to get it to “good” and now you’re sick of it.  That killer guitar tone you had on the PC speakers doesn’t have the same fire in the car.  And you wonder what else you could have been doing with all that time?

Okay, this is actually my story but judging by the questions I get probably resonates with a lot of you.  If it does…read on, though it gets into more boring things but these will actually help!

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In record time, I got spammed!  That’s absolutely amazing to me!!! I’m in the big leagues baby, wooooo!

It looks like it’s time to turn on the “must register to post” button.  I don’t expect many posts anyway, but if you feel like it take the 2 seconds to register.

About a year ago, I was sitting in RDU Airport before a flight, thinking about what it would take to make money at music, specifically songwriting.  I could see the boat sailing on the career I was in, and I wondered a bit about the “other” path I could have chosen way back when.

From most accounts, if you have potential it’s gonna take about 5 years to build up enough songs, deals, and placements to start seeing any money.  There I sat, 40 years old thinking “it would be great to actually be getting somewhere when I’m 45″ and so right then and there I pulled out a notebook and started jotting down a business plan of sorts.  The first thing to tackle was all the things holding me back from starting, so I made a list.  It turned out not to have much on it!  Item one, potential…I’d have to go on with it to find out.  Item 2, workflow…how to crank a song out in a lot less than a few months, more like a few weeks, then down to a few days.  Workflow turned out to have lots of interesting twists, of which I’ll leave for another blog.  But I spent 4 months studying it, just to get to t=0 at the beginning of 2008.

Here’s the plan I set out for myself, now for all the world to see:

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Yes, it was to be a grand plan…integrate the blog and forum, it was going so well.  Until my blog posts started coming out from Mickey the Shirtless Moderator.  I couldn’t seem to pen anything under my own name.  So I tried to separate the two entities…and reeely reely bad stuff happened to the forum!

Oh well, it was all bollox-talking anyway, so now we can start fresh, right?

The forums are back up, so slide by and register once again, won’t take but a minute.  Most of the functionality I put in originally is back too, let me know if you find something broken or missing.