Production Problems?

[john]

 

What’s your biggest issues with music production?

[Glammerocity]

I think click tracks were a double-edged sword.

 

Pro: It saved tape tracks, because you could sync digital keyboards without having to put them to tape.

 

Con: When you listen to music your heart tries to match the tempo, so when the band gets excited on a rock-out ending and speeds up, your heart feels that change. Click tracks remove that. As a masher, I appreciate when a song stays in time, because it makes it easier to sync with another song, but I've cut up pre-MIDI songs into sections and bars to time-stretch them separately.

 

Pro: Digital beats have their own hypnotic appeal, as do loops.

 

Con: Musicians spent extra programming time trying to eliminate MIDI quantisation to sound more natural.

 

Pro: Some drummers are just too sloppy.

 

Con: Playing along with a click track takes a bit of getting used to for newbies and it's a distraction in your headphones, which you're concentrating on instead of just playing the song.

 

I made an album for a band without clicks and all the keyboards were played live into the sequencer, which ran independently of the tape machine. All we needed was the start point of tape and sequencer synced. To get more tracks than the 16 we had I did some rough mixes, put them on two tracks, multitracked the backing vocals, then sampled them and had them running in the song without any timing issues. It took a little extra work to program the trigger notes in Cubase but hitting a key at the right time helped and it was worth it. The music breathed, which was what we wanted. It was clear with one song where they wanted me to sample them and use loops, It stood out for being different to the rest of the album and more "modern."

[Clay Anderson Johnson]

On 6/30/2021 at 6:07 AM, john said:

What’s your biggest issues with music production?

 

My biggest issue is when the music becomes engineer driven rather than music driven.

 

There are thousands of startup bands which need direction in the studio. There are also thousands of songs where the drummer sounds like a metronome rather than a person because of click tracks.

 

Both have their place. There should be more judgement calls rather than fixed rules.

 

Some of the best drummers keep time while following the song. Keith Moon followed Peter Townsend. Charlie Watts followed Keith Richards.

 

Sheila E is never seen without an earpiece for a click track.

 

There is no one size fits all approach although many attempt it.

[Steve Mueske]

On 7/15/2021 at 7:11 PM, VoiceEx said:

That picture with all the wires and cables encapsulates what annoys me the most 😵 Plugging in and calibrating stuff bugs the hell outta me. I`m also not a big fan of mastering and polishing songs, and all the other mandatory crap like mixing and fine tuning plug ins. I also dislike it when I am forced to use that rancid MIDI poll for certain arpeggios, sequences, fine arrangements, effects and soundscapes. Not to mention programing drums, which I despise, much like all other various related tweaks and tune ups, which have to be done manually.

 

These things are huge time savers, yes. They are effective and they produce the desired results. Especially when your working on dead lines, and your required to pass around files, notes and bullet points. But... honestly? if I had it my way, man, I wish I could just plug and play on the spot, old-school style, without having to deal with all this technical stuff.

 

Ha ha ha! We're opposites in that regard. Although, you can encounter weird bugs with shit when you start poking deeper. In one of my pieces, I had in mind to do a pseudo-polyrhythmic thing and had frozen a track to save CPU. Meanwhile, I'd added some time signature changes. When I unfroze the track and attempted to change the beats per measure for the drums (to make them conform to the time signatures), the plugin got confused by the time signature changes (in the DAW) and skipped 119 measures. Rather than f*ck with the bug, I decided to trigger the sequencer through the DAW rather than use the plugin's onboard sequencer. Shit like that bugs the crap out of me, but every time I have to search for workarounds I learn something. I'm sure you've discovered situations like this a thousand times.

 

I actually love the minutae of automating by hand, mixing, etc. But then I don't have deadlines (or an income from music that matters). When I listen to music back I am in love with just how much voodoo is involved with sound. I spent about three hours two or three nights ago automating reverb and saturation parameters on a four bar section of music. I'm a little nutty that way, but it's the part of the process I love most.

Edited November 9, 2021 by Steve Mueske

[Steve Mueske]

My biggest issue with production, because of the way I work, is controlling and optimizing latency. I continually have to go into the DAW settings and adjust for what I'm doing. In fact, one thing I'd wish for is a latency panel right next to the transport panel where I could create quick profile settings that are task-based and all I'd have to do is press a profile button or some such. It's not like it's difficult to change this in settings, but it would save several steps. Just a small panel with four buttons would be awesome.

Edited November 9, 2021 by Steve Mueske

[oudeweg]

On 11/9/2021 at 10:00 PM, Steve Mueske said:

My biggest issue with production, because of the way I work, is controlling and optimizing latency. I continually have to go into the DAW settings and adjust for what I'm doing. In fact, one thing I'd wish for is a latency panel right next to the transport panel where I could create quick profile settings that are task-based and all I'd have to do is press a profile button or some such. It's not like it's difficult to change this in settings, but it would save several steps. Just a small panel with four buttons would be awesome.

 

I have these problems too with Ableton Live. I have Roland V-drums and trying to keep overall latency under 10ms without  getting distortions and artifacts on my mac mini. Its a bit of a problem, maybe 8G isnt enough. Not everybody can afford a Mac Studio. The best thing to do is too close all other programs before recording.

 

oudeweg

--

https://www.praestabilis.nl

 

[Glammerocity]

On 11/9/2021 at 8:05 PM, Clay Anderson Johnson said:

 

My biggest issue is when the music becomes engineer driven rather than music driven.

 

They understandably (because it's their job) get caught up in technicalities, the trees instead of the wood. I despair at some comment sections on YT tutorials full of tech talk, when technically our ears adapt to audio quality really quickly. Listen to an old Ella Fitzgerald record and you notice the scratches on the vinyl for a short while, then you're just listening to a great singer singing a great song. Turn the treble up on a stereo amp - do they stll have bass and treble knobs - and the music sounds too trebly, until your ear adjusts, then when you turn the treble back to where it was it sounds muddy.

 

The studio I worked in had a new guy take a session with a techno crew. They wanted a hi-hat part to be played in one section by a cymbal but the engineer refused, because it's just not done. He didn't get hired again.

 

Musicians I know, including myself, would use different demo studios, because nobody's ever happy with the results. I noticed we had people coming back to ours, so I asked why. They said it was because they had fun. I put that partly down to giving them a quick lesson in how a desk works, so they could get involved in the mixing, which engineers can be quite protective about as their territory. An engineer did that for me in my early 20s. The bands invariably needed me to step in as they tried to make everything louder than everything else but I put that down to my experience rather than any deep tech knowledge I didn't have.

Edited February 16, 2023 by Glammerocity

[MisterB]

Doing everything myself (writing, sequencing, mixing, mastering) means there is no objective, or isolated opinions. I'm the only person critiquing my own work, and that's hard. Who knows whether its good, okay or the worst thing people have ever (not) heard?

 

 

 

[john]

4 hours ago, MisterB said:

Doing everything myself (writing, sequencing, mixing, mastering) means there is no objective, or isolated opinions. I'm the only person critiquing my own work, and that's hard. Who knows whether its good, okay or the worst thing people have ever (not) heard?

 

 

 

 

That is exactly why we have critique forums!  There are other available options. For example you could create a club just for your music and invite select members to be members. I only recommend this once you have built a relationship with those members and the community at large. You can also use the members only are to stop rough versions being seen by anyone interested.

 

It is worth remembering that you post the content, you own the copyright, but posts on Songstuff give you 3rd party evidence to the creation of a song, and it being your idea. Posts are all time stamped.