Prometheus

Yeah, it's an old one that... Late 1990's, maybe 2000.

I made this before I learned audio engineering, using a four-track, a ten quid microphone from Tandy and a DI'd guitar with distortion and a sweeping phaser added with CoolEditPro. The bass was DI'd as well and the drums were provided by Fruity Loops. I then sent the backing track away to Paris where the brilliant Amélie Lenoir put the vocals on it. I then added backing vox by a girl called Katrine whom I used to work with, still using the ten quid mic. The piano is one of those little botempi keyboards for kids. You could say that it's rebellion against the good produced sound... And let's be honest, Amélie looks absolutely stunning in the photos.

I guess it was always going to happen sooner or later. It caused me a fair amount of heartache and pecuniary liability moving everything across to 64 bit, but there's no doubt that it pays for itself in the end.

Reaper is fully compatible with VST plugins. As far as RTAS plugins go, I'm fully into letting closed architectures die.

I don't think the problem is the songwriters. The problem is that the industry has stopped being product driven and become sales and marketing driven instead. What I mean by that is that the product in music hasn't changed since the 1960's. Back then the product was a two track stereo mixdown of a song. In 2016 it is still a two track stereo mixdown of a song. Since the product hasn't fundamentally changed in decades and is the same from one distribution company to another, the drivers behind a company's success become sales and marketing orientated. This means that the people who are promoted and rise to the top of the company are the sales and marketing people and not the craftsmen who create the product. What happens is that you have people running the industry who frankly are not of an artistic bent and know nothing about songwriting or music and who often don't feel particularly passionate about music. The product (the songs and music) then becomes something that is not considered of great importance. The only thing that matters is marketing it. That is why mainstream music is now banal shit and the only stuff being created that's any good is underground music that is being created by people who have no sales and marketing teams behind them and therefore never will become widely heard. It took Pink Floyd eight years to go from releasing their first records to creating Dark Side of The Moon, a complex album that deals with complex questions of the politics and ethics of "us and them". The Sales and Marketing guys who run the industry now are not going to wait years for a band to mature. The end result of a monopoly run mainstream industry that has lost sight of product development is music that is sold by people with no taste to people with no taste.

I agree with Tom, more information is needed. If you're using electronic drum beats, bounce each drum onto a separate track so you can still mix them individually in the DAW. That gives far more flexibility and a better sound in the end. Compressing beats with a release time between 50 and 100 milliseconds is a good idea, particularly on kick drums.

I concur. There were certainly things I could do with a couple of mouse clicks in Cubase that require a philadelphia lawyer to navigate in Reaper, so I take your point on that. I would certainly take on board that a lot of music producers would rather focus on the music than the intricacies of digital software designed by geeks for geeks, after all, there's nothing digital about us. Anyway, you are right. In matters of personal taste there's no argument.

That's the answer... ^^ You don't have to be a demigod to do your own masters, you have to educate yourself, practice and make well thought out pragmatic decisions. I would say this to anyone who is thinking of handing over exorbitant sums of money to a mastering engineer. Recording an album takes weeks. Mixing it takes days. Mastering it takes hours. Anyone who already knows how to mix to a professional standard already has the necessary attributes to do the mastering if they just do some homework. Re-mastering an old reel of tape with oxide shed from the binder is very hard, sometimes impossible. Mastering a broadcast quality product that was mixed by a professional engineer is not hard.

I think that might be me you're referring to. I served my time on Cubase and Pro Tools. I've also used Logic, Cakewalk Sonar, FL Studio, Cool Edit Pro and Reason among others. I don't use Reaper because I'm a miser. I can say with honesty but hopefully without arrogance that I could go straight out and buy a Mercedes Benz if I sold off the audio equipment I have in this house. I would defy anyone on Earth to tell the difference between what I've produced in Reaper and what I've produced in Cubase or Pro Tools. Much as I loved my old Cubase setup, I don't want to download the latest Nuendo from Pirate Bay and I don't want to pay hundreds of dollars for something that will do the same job as what I can get for $60. Either of those aforementioned approaches seem to me inconsistent with reason. Reaper is a geek's paradise of configuration possibilities. I love it. Even if I were a multimillionaire I would keep using it. It has immense functionality for those who can be bothered learning to use it, and I can be bothered.

After a two or three year haitus from music I've suddenly started taking on new projects again and had to go through the painful process of updating most of my software to stuff that will run on a 64bit PC. I thought I was going to have to fork out two or three hundred dollars for a DAW. I used Cubase and Pro Tools before, which are very expensive to obtain legally. I decided to try Reaper 4.7 just out of curiosity and found that not only did it have the functionality of my old Cubase and Pro Tools systems but in fact it was considerably more advanced than them in some areas with them being old. And it was only forty quid, which includes updates till the end of version 5. For anyone looking for a DAW it's well worth checking out. It's not a cheap compromise, it's an excellent piece of kit.

That's not actually true. You can program tempo and signature changes into the click track in any modern mutlitrack software.

It's an absolute rip off. I'd want an entire suite of tools for that kind of money. You could actually buy an outboard EQ, Limiter and Compressor for $250.00 if you shop around.

Indeed, and I appreciate you taking the time to clear that up. It's good to actually hear someone putting the counter point to my views in a lucid and intelligent way. I have a feeling I could have been rightly accused of being one of those types in my youth, but sadly, to call myself a youth now would be a bit of stretch... I have met the type you are referring to here. I've gotten to the point now where I just say "Yeah, go for it." and look forward to hearing what they think of how the music business will never dent their artistic integrity after they've been in it for a couple of years. I can't disagree with you there at all. As a matter of fact, twenty years ago I'd probably have signed a contract before I even read it. Nowadays I'd be far more careful.

I don't think I've ever considered myself above a label contract as an "uber artiste", nor have I ever considered the idea of mass distribution of my work "crass" but I have worked with a few label insiders in my time and I wouldn't let most of them near me with a rolled up news paper, let alone a legally binding contract. I'm not being egotistical in pointing out that dealing with record labels can be a dodgy game. I'm being pragmatic. To be fair, that is not the point I made. What I said was that fiscal remuneration isn't the only metric for success, not that penury was beneficial to success or in any way, shape or form desirable. Obviously if someone offers one a lucrative contract without any dodgy clauses in it, one would be a fool not to pursue it. That said, if one is not offered a contract that they feel they wish sign up to, that does not necessarily reflect on the quality of their work or achievements. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just to clarify, Blake was not a down and out, he was a successful calligrapher. I'd imagine like many old men his eyesight probably went downhill, his general health and energy levels probably dropped off and his hands may have become less dexterous. I'm all for having an understanding state pension system that stops retired rock stars, painters, poets and anyone else for that matter, from ending up destitute when they become too aged to work. I'm not saying this to be a braggart, but because I want my position to be clearly understood. Back in the day I spent the thousands and thousands of dollars on my studio. It took me two years to build it. I also spent the two decades learning to play musical instruments, studying musicology, psycho-acoustics and acoustic engineering at University, serving my time as a live sound engineer and serving my time as a studio engineer doing recording, mixing and mastering. I'm good at what I do and by f*ck I take pride in what I do. I have industry experience, I've seen it from the inside. I've worked with promoters, label owners, one or two fairly well known personalities whom certainly most of the people on the forum from the UK would have heard of. I'm not saying this stuff because I'm some silly kid who thinks he's going to be the next Andrew Eldritch. I had the chance to get in and I didn't want it. Every time I dealt with an industry insider, I felt a little piece of my soul turn black, so after ten years doing work in the industry I walked away from it. Now, I'm happy driving a forklift and flying a PAT Tester for money, and saving the music and other artistic endeavours as something I love. Maybe one day I'll strike it rich, maybe I never will. As long as I get to keep producing what I want to produce, I'm fine with that.

Other people may need audio interfaces.

While, to use your phrase, I don't vociferously disagree with what you're saying Rob, my post was reactive and written in a moment of consternation. All I really intended to say was that there's a counterpoint (no pun intended) to the view that the only metric of success in musical composition is how much cash you make out of it. William Blake, for example, died in poverty and earned the fear and contempt of the establishment of his day. It would be an utter philistine who claimed his songs were unsuccessful.

I know this isn't a mastering recommendation, but I find it impossible to let this go uncontested. If all you want is to make money, then this is correct, you have to court industry insiders, you have to kiss their asses and you have to kiss them hard. If you're trying to create music for reasons other than making money, say, for the love of music or to try to advance music as an art form, then labels will be of absolutely no use to you. “The best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend on it for their daily bread and the highest form of literature, Poetry, brings no wealth to the singer,†-- Oscar Wilde Labels are a reducing valve into a narrow pipeline that compresses (no pun intended) creativity into the most bland, safe, dull and one dimensional conformist crap imaginable. The only way to ever do anything that's worth listening to is to do it out of love, not for money. The minute you tailor your work to making money, all you're going to do is release shit that you don't even like yourself. You'd be as well just forming a wedding band, if money's your thing, and be guaranteed an income of several grand a month if you're any good at doing what other people tell you. Everyone complains about how crap musicians and song writers are today compared with the sixties or seventies. They aren't. They just have more shackles put on them and are so poorly treated and discouraged that most of them have to fall back on less impecunious careers for their daily bread as they struggle away never really getting their message out to a wider audience. In the old days, labels used to send scouts out to look for talented bands. Now you have to supplicate yourself to them to have them listen to a demo for thirty seconds. Vincenzo Galilee couldn't have analyzed a piece of music in thirty seconds. It's a complete nonsense. A myth propagated by grey suited hacks, many of whom couldn't even tune a guitar let alone write a song, because they're so stuffed with conceit and wrapped up in their own perceived importance that they can't see past the inside of the door to their own office. I don't hate record labels, I deplore them. Let the artists create the art and let the grey suits count the money, and have the two separated like Church and State in the USA. Then we'll hear visceral and raw emotion in mainstream music again. What does it mean to be on top? Is it making money or is it producing something that actually says something to people? I don't accept that money is the only measure of success.

Fingers with the acoustic and a pick with the SG35. I can't play the electric with my fingers. It sounds weedy and muddy when I do.

Fantastic voice... I love it...

Try Coral Video Pro V3.0 It's cheap, and it's excellent.

I want to start producing songs again, but I only seem to be able to write good ones when I'm either in love or miserable. I need to make some changes and become inspired again. The songs I have written were given a bit of airplay and developed a small following. I was very happy with that. I'm not much interested in money. The royalties I made in 2008 - 2010 added up to about enough money for a bottle of wine.

There's no reason why you can't use the Fostex unit to set up a gain structure for recording into the soundcard on the computer. I have an eight track Fostex unit that I use for location recordings and the preamps on it are perfectly acceptable. It's a very helpful unit. The Fostex I have does supply phantom power though, which is a must if you want to use capacitor microphones (also called condenser mics) as they require a 48V supply.

I thought it was funny.

There are several excellent paths to ending up old and bitter through the music industry. I'm not sure which one is my favourite. I often ponder whether I took the right path while I'm driving the forklift...

There were two clever chaps called Harry Nyquist and Claude Shannon who came up with a lot of very interesting theories about digital sampling. While some of the mathematics is very sticky for a non specialist, for any competent mathematician or computer that was built within the last fifteen years it's Micky Mouse stuff. The linchpin of Nyquist and Shannon's predictions is that If a function x(t) contains no frequencies higher than B hertz, it is completely determined by giving its ordinates at a series of points spaced 1/(2B) seconds apart. Nyquist's Theorem leads to a formula for reconstructing the original function from these samples using a mathematical device called a fourier transform, provided that the sample rate is greater than twice the highest frequency in the spectral bandwidth of the sampled function. Since the highest frequency a human can hear is 20KHz, and that's a kind estimate, in a 16 bit sample at 44.1 KHz, the aliasing errors are beyond the range of human hearing. Now, Quantization errors are another matter. Quantization errors are inevitable when you dither from 32 or 24 bit to 16 bit. The dynamic range of a sixteen bit system is 96 decibels. Decibels are logarithmic, so a six decibel change is a factor of a million. My mental arithmetic is very rusty, but as you can imagine from this, 96dB is an enormous range. Unless you are recording a piece of music with huge dynamic variations, you don't need to worry about dithering it at all as the errors are too small to be disturbing. Even if you are dealing with huge dynamic range variances, any DAW produced in the last few years will have dithering and noise shaping algorithms that have the problems of quantization errors in 16 bit resolution well in hand. This is nothing new. In short, in this day and age, you're not going to get a DAW that can't handle dithering to CD quality. It's just absolutely not going to happen. I suspect that dithering isn't what you're actually talking about. What you mean is converting to a lossy format to compress filesize? This can be done using the LAME algorithm, which is free of charge. On the default settings the quality isn't very good, but if you set it to CBR (constant bit rate) above 192Kbps and the quality to "highest but slowest" you'll get good results.