This week I’ve mostly been mixing.

Clearly these aren’t final mixes but I needed to do this to get the tracks a bit more streamlined, bouncing MIDI virtual instrument parts down to real audio, all in preparation for moving the logic project files over to the portable hard drive.

This is so that I can easily move between the studio iMac and the Macbook Pro (which now is fully ‘Logiced-Up’ ) for the big drum recording session which is tomorrow. Yay!

Along the way, I’ve taken the time to do some editing and mixing following the last two sessions with Andy and Adam, and I am really happy with the Acoustic parts in Together and A Day by the Sea, and the new bass parts in ADBTS have really lifted the feel, particularly in the 6/8 instrumental.

Also coming under scrutiny were the big multi-tracked vocal harmonies in Children of a Forgotten Sun, Don’t Give Up on Love and ADBTS . I have created vocal groups in each case and used Logic’s Focusrite compressor model in each case.  This has helped to blend the vocals together in a really lovely way.

So the tracks are now all on the portable firewire drive, the MacBook has had the Alesis mixer drivers installed. I have all the mics ready and cabling up together.  So hopefully my next entry will be all about drums.

Well, Fantasy Bridge Land has been rather quiet of late. I felt I was a bit too close to all the tunes to retain any objectivity, so I decided to leave it all alone for a week or two.  Pretty much all the keyboard parts, and the vocals are done now, only one track is awaiting bass, and we’re still trying to organise the drum tracking sessions, so I just found myself tinkering, and I didn’t want to fall into that old artist’s trap of not knowing when to stop, and potentially overworking things.

So I just put things on hold for a while. To get some space from the songs, listen to some other music, and hopefully regain some perspective.

And I think, it might have worked.  I had a listen through the latest mixes in the car the other night and immediately  decided that the chorus in Together on the Shores of Time needed a high harmony part.  So last night I put on my best falsetto voice, and went for it.  I’m really happy with the results.

In other news, I have been unhappy with the studio layout for a while now, with the sofa down the side wall opposite the keyboards.  I mentioned this to Sue and she confessed similar feelings about her study.  We worked out if we swapped around some of the furniture between us I could get the sofa at the back of the room, and lay things out a bit more ergonomically.  That agreed, I went off for a week travelling in Paris and London.  And the brilliant thing was, while I was a away Adam came around and helped Sue move everything.  I came home to a completely tidy and re-arranged studio.

And it’s brilliant.  I’ll try to put some pics up so you can all see.

I’m also thinking about filming some of the studio sessions, so you can see the working process first hand.

So, watch this space!

And Special Effects Fun

Last night, I did all the vocals for the new “Autumn Rain” track, and I guess that given the results, I have finally decided that it is a keeper for the album.  So now, the track count is up to 10.  This is the END OF THE FEATURE CREEP.  I promise.

For Autumn Rain, I wanted a fairly understated performance, and listening back to the initial take, it sounded all a bit thin and weedy. So I went for double tracking the vocal.  For the uninitiated, This is a technique often used in the studio to thicken up a vocal, where you sing the same thing again, and the natural phasing between your voice singing the same notes provides a warmth and thickness to the performance.

Having soloed the takes I did notice some intonation problems, so I punched in some replacement phrases where I had badly missed the pitch. (In Logic punching in is non-destructive, it adds a second take which it comps in with the original take)

Once I was reasonably happy with that I flattened the takes to a new audio file for each vocal double track, and then imported them into the dreaded pitch corrector.  In my case that is Melodyne which is capable of the most amazingly transparent vocal trickery, you can almost transparently shift vocal pitch and timing by several whole tones.  But I didn’t want to go that far, I just wanted to check my vocal tuning was accurate, and where I was out by a tiny bit, or where the odd note had a bit of wavering pitch, I wanted to smooth that out.  Is this cheating? Undoubtedly, yes.  Is it wrong? No, not really.  Firstly, I am, I confess, not the worlds greatest singer,, and secondly there is so much trickery, slight of hand tweaking etc that goes into recording a song these days, that this is just another tool in the engineers toolbox that helps turn that song in your head into reality.

On to the bridge.  After the first two verses there is a two-line bridge which I wanted to be replete with 4 part vocal harmony.  I duly worked out the harmonies and recorded them.  It was kind of what I wanted, but I wanted something more etherial to go with the lines  starting: Tears we Shed for long lost dreams. So I created a new aux bus and sent the vocal to that.  In the aux bus I loaded up an echo, and a flanger.  This gave a dreamy strange effect, but of course on it’s own was almost unintelligible. But mixed in alongside the harmony vocals it sounds gorgeous. (Even with my singing!)

So, the song that came out of nowhere is pretty much in the can.  I might see if Adam wants to add bass, but otherwise, it’s there.