The Album Is King Pt. 3

6.8.12


The songs Andrew and I worked on during Tuesday's session, "Kiss Me Again" and "I Feel Old", are now mixed and ready to go!

For anyone not familiar with the term "mixing" it's essentially taking all the recorded sounds and editing them into their final presentation. This encompasses everything from volume, what side of the headphones/speakers a sound appears, what effects you want to add (such as reverb, echo, distortion, compression) and simply making sure that all your recorded tracks are on tempo, key and work together properly. I'll give a brief description of how this works.

The image above is the main work-screen for the GarageBand software I use, this particular image is from another song, "Black Hole Blues", which was completed last week. The long, rectangular grey boxes to the left are the individual tracks. There are several options with how you designate each of these prior to recording. For instance, you can plug a microphone into the Audiobox and record through that (I use this option for all guitars and vocals), you can plug a real instrument directly into the software (Andrew's bass parts have generally been recorded this way) or you can use a MIDI instrument (typically a keyboard or drum machine which is designed to play into software directly).

Once you have your track set up you can choose between mono and stereo recording (I always do mono since I only use one mic) and then customize the track settings at any point in the process (before, during or after recording), there's a great deal of freedom with all this. You may be able to see that some of the tracks have names like "Brandon Vocal", "Acoustic Brandon" and "Parson's Bass". I've played with the sounds on here enough to know what my specific tastes are so I've saved my preferred settings and can easily access them instead of mucking about with the effects every time. Naming the tracks also serves to ensure that you don't delete the wrong track on accident; once you stack up enough of those grey boxes it can get easy to mistake one for another.

After you're ready to start recording it really is as simple as hitting "record" and going for it. Your recorded audio will move across the screen in a red bar while recording and, when you stop, the bar will turn purple to indicate that it's ready for modification. The purple bars you can see in the picture are recorded audio. From this point you can do anything you want with the tracks. Delete them, cut and paste together with another track, add a wild effect, record over...the list goes on forever.

The mixing process is taking all these recorded elements and arranging them to your satisfaction. For myself, I try to make the final production fit the song rather than go all out and add a bunch of unnecessary audio garnish arbitrarily. I've been influenced in a big way by lush, melodic pop (artists like The Beatles, Elliott Smith, Wilco, etc.) so I include similar elements like background harmony vocals and multiple guitar textures. It's not enough to simply record these elements, your intended sound is going to come through mixing, and it's best to experiment with all the separate pieces and see how to best fit them together.

An example of experimenting with mixing would be the aforementioned song "Black Hole Blues". The song opens with a three-part harmony vocal which I placed entirely in the lower left channel, meaning that you can hear all three vocal tracks but they are all mashed together and kept at a distance from all the other sounds. This choice may seem strange without hearing it but, after experimenting with different methods, I found that this aesthetic fit the song best and gave it a sort of unique or memorable quality.

With mixing Andrew's bass parts the route is a little different. I mentioned in the last post that we will generally record 3 bass takes and use the best one. In theory this works but there are almost always little spots, even on the best take, where a note is missed or the tempo is slightly off. The way that I fix these small blemishes is by cutting out the same section of a different take and pasting it over the imperfection on the ideal take. It's just as simple as cutting and pasting in a Word document.

The software is very user-friendly and the more you experiment the more you will learn. Once you have a mix you're comfortable with GarageBand will convert the whole project to an MP3 and route it straight to iTunes. You will notice that the MP3 mix will be slightly different, often the bass will need readjusting, but for the most part it's as you intended. How easy is that?