Mixing, Editing, Mastering.....

I just received the final mixed and mastered product of the single that my band just made, would just like to draw attention to the art of mixing, editing, and mastering a recording. In comparison to the original version, which was by no means bad or anything, but it was very dry acoustically, kind of spotty vocally, and the timings were not one hundred percent on every part. However with the doubling of the lead vocals, a little editing of parts together, and the addition of some reverb effects, we sound like a completely different band! This (audio engineering) is truly just as much of an art form as playing the instruments themselves, as it does require the engineer themselves have some sort of performance experience themselves for optimal results.

Better Audio Converters

Here is an update on free Audio converters! this one does an excellent job of converting MIDI to Mp3 format and its free and comes with a ton of other stuff like options for converting old Vinyl LPs to mp3s and extracting streaming audio! Its called the "Switch Sound File Converter", and I think that it is better than Audio Converter pro, as the sound is much better, although there are a few glitches here and there. I just typed in "midi to mp3 converter" in a Google search, and it was the first thing that came up. Check it out!

Clive Davis Recording

Yesterday, I was recording with my own band in the Tisch School's Clive Davis recording studios on Mercer Street. I really had no idea that as NYU students we have access to such great facilities! Similar to my last post, there we multi-tracked everything (But this time we all actually know each other and are in the same vicinity!) . I believe that a total of 12 hours was spent recording in the studio (midnight to 3 a.m. and noon to 9 p.m.) and there will be up to another 6 hours mixing the recording. All this work for a 4 minute song!!!!!! I would hate to imagine how long it would take to record a Mahler symphony. A future blog entry is set to come in the very near future that will describe the art of mixing a recording of a band.

The Portable Studio

About a week and a half ago, I played with this fabulous rock band from Los Angeles called Powdered Monster. In addition to playing a show in New York City, they were also in the process of recording a full length CD simultaneously as they traveled across the country from New York back to their home in L.A. They brought a portable mixing device, and a Macintosh computer with a program similar to pro tools, and also had a couple of mikes. Within fifteen minutes, they were able to set up a makeshift studio in a Steinhardt practice room and begin recording my violin overdubs. They had already recorded themselves on guitar and drums (Two man band). After being kicked out of the practice room prematurely, we decided to finish the recording in my partment early the next morning. I overslept a little bit, so when they arrived, I literally climbed out of bed, let them in, and again within 10 or 15 minutes began recording mulitiple violin tracks (I was harmonizing with myself over several tracks) literally in my pajamas. I find this a radical development music technology; by the time they are finished with their CD, they will have various musicians from New York, Chicago, and even Denver all playing on the same songs on an album, and they have never even met each other!

Multiple Browsers

I just had a first hand experience on why having more than 1 browser is really necessary. For some reason ,on Firefox, my normal browser the AOL web page was not working. I sent some music to myself and really needed to get it off of my email, but every time I attempted to use the site my computer froze and I got one of those annoying "Program is Not Responding" deals. After about 7 times of repeating this process, I finally got the idea that maybe Firefox, while usually an excellent browser, was having trouble with AOL, which just updated its look. So, I used the Internet explorer that comes with every Windows computer, and I was able to access the site and retrieve my music perfectly fine.

Audio Converters

A nifty little find, that I recently found.... When doing my latest Tech Trends homework assignment, I needed to convert between different types of sound files, however, I could not do it on itunes. So, I just typed in "mp3 AIF converter" into a google search, and I found a nice program called Audio Converter Pro, that converts all types of audio files. For the full program, you must pay, but there is a free demo that lets you convert very short files (I believe there is a 2 minute limit) so it was perfect for homework assignments that needed converting, to and from mp3, mp4, AIF, WAV and maybe a couple others. I am exploring converting midi to mp3 form so that I can send out compositions that I have written on Finale for my Rock Band over the internet before practices so that everyone can get a feel beforehand. To do this I imported midi into Audacity then imported that into the converter after exporting as an mp3, and I can manipulate it better in Audacity as an AIF file.

Audacity

When leaving my first session, I was given a CD of it and was asked "Is it cool if I make this an AIF file?" To which I enthusiastically said yes to, and was very excited that I knew what that was because of tech trends class. Even though I plan on doing the actual editing in my engineers studio, I thought it would be fun and interesting to explore the capabilities of Audacity that we downloaded for class with recordings of myself. The first thing I did was utilize the hard limiter function, which took out some of the abrasiveness picked up by the mikes. I then experimented with equalization to try and get an even better volume from all parts of the instrument. I felt that the reverb (or GVerb) was a little complicated and also produced kind of an unrealistic reverb effect that, while it sounded very cool, it distorted the actual sound way to much (even with just a little bit added) to send into a competition. But it did make me sound very good, so I will definitely utilize it at some point when making recordings not for review!