I consider myself quite privileged to have had the opportunity to study audio engineering, something I wanted to pursue since the age of 21. Learning and applying the science of sound on real world projects was the perfect kind of exposure a producer could ask for. It provided me numerous occasions to practice not only my audio engineering and productions skills but also develop essential people and project management skills.
One such project I took on during the course was producing a record album which required recording musicians or bands in the studio. I was supposed to source a musician or a band with songs to record and are willing to be guineapigs for the duration of the project.
I was fortunate enough to meet the talented London based funk rock group Cherimoya, for whom I had the opportunity and pleasure to record and mix six of their songs at SAE’s Bankstock Studios. It was all due to the help of the guys at Cherimoya who were kind enough to trust me with their creative vision and valuable time. All the time I spent on this project helped me to tune my ears to know what to and what not to look out for in each phase of an album’s production, be it recording, editing, mixing or even mastering.
This project being a Uni assignment allowed me to invest ample time diving into researching and experimenting industry standard recording and mixing techniques applied back in the day and in the modern day where there is no limit to overproduction with things like high quality seamless editing, DSP options and more.
All the research done in the project made me realise that certain things had to be done in the recording itself and not be left to mixing stage like using good preamps for certain sounds to give them a warmer tone like for some drum elements and guitars. We also tried multi-microphone setups for each instrument to capture a good ratio between the room or reverberant sound achieved from the actual studio live rooms and the direct source or dry instrument sound. Lot of our recording experiments to process and capture the audio in a certain were planned in the pre-production phase itself. ALl recording sessions were cumulative as we captured each instrument isolated and then did overdubs to capture everthing well. THis project taught me to try everything in the studio and not leave anything to the mix. If you think something doesn;t sound as good in the studio, its not going to sound better during mixing. If something has the potential to excite you in the studio then it will defintely excite you once its mixed. All I do is that I sit and notice these little details when the band is playing. If I find an issue I keep doing takes until everyone is satisfied and then I let editing to work its miracles.
I got to experience both sides of a record production process – unpolished and polished – first by producing the music without editing which sounded pretty decent but to match the industries’ it had to be edited. This meant creating composite tracks using the best takes, aligning mulitracks recordings to avoid unnecessary phase cancellations or comb filtering and lastly editing to quantize all instruments to a new tempo grid, created for a consistent rhythm and flow.
I used Beat detective to edit all instruments to be in time with each other and to conform to a specific tempo grid which was mapped by beatmapping the drums. This was extremely necessary for times when we didn’t track with a click because of tempo changes in certain songs. Beat detective helped in stitching all edits seamlessly very quickly.
Editing was a long and tedious process as every transient has to be audible and in harmony with each other. Especially, in the kick and bass. Lot of both had to manually edited to ensure perfect phase correlation. Also, all my editing work had to be reviewed and corrected multiple times in order to not overlook any small editing mistake. (See an example of the amount of edits in above image of the Pro Tools session of their song Sunshine. The channels with Pink and Blue next to the names are drums while the ones in green are bass.) The cleaner and tidier the edits, the smoother everything sounds and, the easier it becomes to mix.
In all honesty I don’t just prefer unedited records but speaking as a true audiophile, recordings to me are like a good painting or a photograph to an art connoisseur, since it captures a moment in time that could go on to becoming timeless. It is that moment during their best performance which is lucky enough to be captured on the recording day that I feel so blessed to be a part of it. The feeling we engineers get when we hear the best takes being recorded is nothing short of a burst of euphoria and destroying that piece feel like injustice at the time but I cannot deny that I also do enjoy a lot of heavily edited music, which are occasionally hit records as well. Maybe its the editing that doesn’t let it go unnoticed due to attaching it significance to a symbol of perfection. I can’t blame Cherimoya to also want that similar kind of perfection in realising their musical ideas just the way they imagined.
In terms of mixing, we all were of the mindset of an underpolished record without too many effects on any instruments but still wanted the record to sound like we were in the studio and not a live record. This record therefore focused a lot more on the editing to be perfect in order for the mix to reach its true potential which was extremely crucial to this record.
Another matter of concern to me is applying compression on what and how much?
In my opinion from personal experience, compression can do wonders to a mix if everything is played perfectly on time which is not entirely possible as we are human. Therfore, editing can help. According to me, compression definitely works better and more consistently on quantized music since it allows the music to breath at a constant timing with the song which lets the transients to punch out more evenly and rhythmically but if overdone can make things sound mechanical. It is only possible to get the best out compression without automating compression, with quantized music as the compressor is able to do its job more efficienltly and consitently when good edits make a song conform to a specific tempo.
If I have learnt anything, it is that its extremely important to take much care during each phase of the production while being fully aware of possible downfalls of the implementation of different creative directions and processes. The time I invested into this project has helped me build my own process for producing any kind of album, belonging to any genre, covering all end-to-end tasks associated with each phase of an album’s production – pre-production, recording, editing, mixing and mastering.
Each kind of music production has its own challenges and specifications which are unique for each genre. But as each piece of music being produced or engineered involves using the same tools as compressors, EQs, audio effects etc. Therefore, having your own process helps in building an efficient workflow which not only stems from the production experience but a lot of hit and trial and mimicking of recording and mixing techniques while simultaneously tracking and observing the outcome of applied techniques to know what exactly works for a particular situation and most importantly why it worked.
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