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A time comparison of component tasks for a home-produced album


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This is in reference to The Flat White Album, my sole 100% self-written, performed and home produced album.

 

I can rarely spend more than an hour in any day doing any single task ... guitar noodling, writing/editing at the kitchen table, playing the piano, sitting at the computer, recording, mixing, or book writing.  '60 minutes' marks the time when I usually get frustrated/bored or my back/bum starts to ache from being seated.  On rare occasions, especially when mixing, I might get up to 2 hours of focused work.   There are lots of days when I don’t do anything musical at all.  So,  I’m approximating 30 minutes per day over 2.5 years (Jan 2016 – Jun 2019):  

½ hr x 365 days x 2.5 years = 456 hours

456 hours / 30  = approx  15 hours per track

 

But I had mistakenly anticipated a constant-effort throughout.  The last stretch was a big ‘gotcha’.  It may be that the impending release date was sharpening my senses, or else my hearing was becoming better trained, but the length of the final technical phase (see the chart below) became both a shock and a nightmare.  With just the few mastering techniques that I was able to understand (and produced a result I could actually hear), many of my mixes suddenly became unbalanced.  Frequency and compression changes were now masking or unmasking sounds I had previously laboured over (probably due to using the wrong techniques during mixing).

 

July-Dec 2019, the last 6 months, required a larger injection of time and effort that I estimate averaged 2 hours per day.  It was not only the DO-ing, but the interminable LISTENING.  There were so many times when I found a particular element had disappeared or was now shrieking, or my in/out points in the bounce were incorrect ... DAWs are SO complicated that it's easy to do something unnoticed just by breathing on the keyboard.  The only final proof is to listen to the bounce.  ALL the way through.  The per-track estimate therefore rose to around 27 hours.

 

So, in general, writing the songs was by far the quickest task. Recording the demos was a similar effort, but done over a shorter period. Re-recording the main elements was remarkably quick as I could simply follow the demos, basically just tidying up what already existed. Mastering and re-mixing was laborious and long and probably equal to all the previous tasks combined ... one change often affects something else in an endless loop that required continuous listening and re-editing.  Playing with ideas is also rabbit hole.  Mastering is a black art that I eventually gave up on trying to ‘master’ and I instead went back to using some default options in the software, e.g. Ozone's "Gentle Acoustic".

 

General preparation and admin had all been continuously in train since the outset and steadily built upon, e.g. website, songsheets, PR blurb.

 

It is just as important to figure when to stop fiddling/twiddling and actually release the beast.  In late November 2019 I started the CD-Baby process to release the album, uploading tracks, artwork and other details and pushed the virtual button, setting the actual release to all platforms for January 1, 2020 (a more memorable date).   What a RELIEF!  I no longer had to worry about problems with me, my health, my eyesight/hearing/, my computer, the software, the files, and network access.  Most importantly, I didn’t have to keep listening to every damn note of every track! 

 

I subsequently discovered, viewing a video tutorial by an industry professional ... https://www.recordingrevolution.com/when-is-my-song-good-enough-to-release/ ... that I had intuitively done at least a few things right:

·         set myself a release deadline (a year in advance),

·         built my skills with many hours of work (both productive and frustrating),

·         listened intently and repeatedly,

·         asked people I trust with good music taste to give gut-feel opinions (on the sound, NOT the music), and

·         trusted myself to move on once a track was no longer causing me frustration.

 

With no record of actual time spend on each task, here's my assessment of relative time and effort.

19916922_ChartofTimevsEffort.thumb.jpg.5bbc7e01cef10bf82d8d1120b282bf21.jpg

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hi Glamm.  That's a good referral.  Thanks.

 

I've followed many an expert on mixing and mastering, and at least become aware of techniques and process. The problem with such videos is that I can rarely HEAR any difference when they A/B the audio after a change.  This is probably due to any or all of three factors:

 

1. YouTube downgrades the audio in all videos (as well as the video bitrate).  An example of my own music videos (which contain the original as-released WAV file when rendered) is that:

  • the local MP4 is 308MB file with 194Kbps audio (already a significant audio reduction). 
  • After processing on Youtube, the downloaded MP4 file is 60MB with 127Kbps audio.

2. Some people are just naturally better at identifying slight changes in sound.

 

3. My hearing is good but not THAT good.  And has got worse with age.  

 

Thus I have accepted that, as a non-professional with a $0 budget, good enough is good enough and I'll stick with presets in iZotope.  

 

Greg

 

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On 6/14/2022 at 12:49 AM, GregB said:

Hi Glamm.  That's a good referral.  Thanks.

 

I've followed many an expert on mixing and mastering, and at least become aware of techniques and process. The problem with such videos is that I can rarely HEAR any difference when they A/B the audio after a change.  This is probably due to any or all of three factors:

 

1. YouTube downgrades the audio in all videos (as well as the video bitrate).  An example of my own music videos (which contain the original as-released WAV file when rendered) is that:

  • the local MP4 is 308MB file with 194Kbps audio (already a significant audio reduction). 
  • After processing on Youtube, the downloaded MP4 file is 60MB with 127Kbps audio.

2. Some people are just naturally better at identifying slight changes in sound.

 

3. My hearing is good but not THAT good.  And has got worse with age.  

 

Thus I have accepted that, as a non-professional with a $0 budget, good enough is good enough and I'll stick with presets in iZotope.  

 

Greg

 

 

I've got Izotope too and was pleased that he used it to fix phase rotation. And it's fast - a few seconds to correct an entire track. And that's not something you need to hear the difference for. It just gives you more headroom for loudness.

 

I'm aware of YouTube's downgrading and I'm often in the camp that engineers can get too wrapped up in technicalities - most are using top end speakers in perfect environments that no listeners have. Mixing with headphones used to be a no-no but I read that around 70% of listeners are now using in-ear or over-ear. I think tips are worth trying to hear the difference in your own material rather than trying to hear the difference in a downgraded video. I tend to do that as I'm watching, because my stuff is probably different to the track they're using, which they might've chosen specifically for that tutorial. I watch a lot of videos that turn out to be irrelevant to me, or the tips are too general and I click away quickly, but occasionally there's a specific tip that's gold.

 

I took my band for a hearing test back in the 90s, specifically to try to get a guitarist to turn down, and we all had some noise damage around 6k (the guitarist was worse right across the spectrum). A 6k dip makes conversation hard to hear over background noise, which many will be familiar with at the end of a night in the pub, when people are shouting in your ear. So being aware of that helps me avoid doing much around 6k, which I might not hear changes around. Knowing it's my left ear means I check mixes by switching channels.

 

As Rickie Lee Jones once said, "You can't break the rules 'till you know how to play the game."

Edited by Glammerocity
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