Overdubbing
With one track recorded, you’re ready to dig into one of the most invigorating parts of the multitracking process: overdubbing. Overdubbing is the process of adding new tracks to your existing ones. This feature allows you to be the one-man band or to bring in other musicians to spice up your music. Overdubbing is easily done with digital multitrack recorders. To get you going quickly, I cover the details in Chapter 10.
Making Sense of Mixing
For most recordists, the process of mixing is what turns their mishmash of musical tracks into a song. Mixing involves the following steps:
Cleaning up your tracks by removing unwanted noise and performance glitches
Equalizing each track so that it blends well with all the others
Adding signal processing to enhance each track
Blending your tracks to tell the story you want to tell with your song
Embellishing your tracks with special effects or unique sounds
The following sections offer an overview of these steps.
Cleaning up tracks using editing
When you record, you want the best possible sound and performance for each instrument that you can get, but try as you might, sometimes you run into problems. These can include picking up unwanted sounds, such as chair squeaks, coughs, or other instruments, and can include (and often does) mistakes a musician makes that need to be cut out. In the olden days of tape recording, this editing process, which involved physically cutting out the bad parts of the tape with a razor blade, took time and skill. Today, you can do the necessary editing by using the editing functions in digital systems. This is nice, but it can also tempt you into editing your tracks more than is necessary and, as a result, can suck the life out of them. To help you understand what you can do with digital recording systems and to help keep you on track with your editing, check out Chapter 15.
Equalizing your tracks
When you start mixing a bunch of instruments, you often need to adjust the frequencies present in each instrument so that they all blend without creating mush (a highly technical term). By adjusting the frequencies of each instrument in the mix, you can make sure that each can be heard. This process is simple, but it can be time consuming. To make it easier for you, I cover equalization (EQ) in detail in Chapter 17.
Processing your signal
In the world of multitracking in small, acoustically untreated recording rooms (most home recordists use a spare bedroom or basement to record in and don’t have a ton of money to make the room sound great), it’s almost essential to process the sound with effects or dynamics processors. Doing so is usually intended to add the feel of a live concert to the recording, although many people also use signal processing to create interesting effects. Because the possibilities for processing your track using a digital system are almost limitless, this is an area where most beginners overdo it. The ability to alter your tracks can be used and abused — I cover the basics of processing in Chapter 19 to help you keep the abuse to a minimum.
Blending your tracks
This is also a process in which most new recordists run into problems. Properly mixing your tracks means keeping levels from getting out of hand, placing things where you want them in the sound field (left to right and front to back), adjusting EQ to blend all your instruments in a pleasing way, and using signal processors, such as compression and reverb, to make the most of each track. This process is a circular one and takes skill and patience to get right. Cutting corners always results in an end product that falls short of its potential. To help you make this process easier, I cover mixing in detail in Chapters 20 and 21.
Adding the Final Touches
After your songs are recorded and mixed, all that’s left to do is add the finishing touches. These include mastering your songs, putting them all on CD, and getting them out into the world through promotion.
Mastering your mixes
Mastering is an often-misunderstood (and even unknown to many) part of the music production process that can make or break a CD (well, not literally). Mastering consists of several important steps that are intended to polish your songs so that they make up a complete collection on a CD, commonly referred to as an album. Here are the steps for mastering your songs:
1 Optimize the dynamics.The goal here is to get the dynamic levels within and between each song to their best. It also means making your music smooth (no sharp edge to the music) or punchy (a pronounced attack) — or something in between. Unfortunately, most people are concerned only with getting their CDs as loud as possible when performing this part of mastering. This isn’t a good idea, as you find out in Chapter 22.
2 Adjust the overall tonal balance.The point of this part of the mastering process is to create tonal continuity among all the songs on your CD. Because you probably recorded and mixed all your tunes over a period of months, each song may have slightly different tonal characteristics. This part of mastering is where you make all your songs consistent so that they sound like part of an album and not a bunch of disjointed tunes thrown together haphazardly.
3 Match the song-to-song volume.When your listeners play your CD, you don’t want them to have to adjust the volume of each song as it plays (unless they absolutely love a particular tune and want to turn it up, of course). The goal with this part of mastering is to get the volume of all the songs on a CD at pretty much the same level. This keeps one song from barely being heard while another threatens to blow the speakers.
4 Set the song sequence.How your songs are arranged on your CD helps tell your story. Think about how the order of each song on your album can make the most compelling musical statement. This part of the mastering process involves not only deciding what order everything should be in but also the steps you take to make it happen.
Putting your music out into the world
Formatting your finished and mastered songs for distribution and sales is one of the most exciting parts of the recording process. At last, you have a product, a complete musical statement that you can share with (or sell to) others. Like a lot of audio recording and production, the act of making distributable and saleable music is more involved than simply clicking the Burn button in your CD-recording program (at least if you want to make more than one copy) or uploading your music to a website.
In today’s largely digital world you have two basic distribution methods: streaming/downloadable music and physical CDs. As a throwback, more and more people are releasing music on vinyl records today.
Dealing with digital distribution