When a singer comes into your studio with maybe not a fantastic voice, but they can sing pretty much in tune and time with everything else, do you get them to record and record and record until you have enough parts to make up a whole vocal from the parts? In the past this was never really possible, yes you could splice tape together which took hours and hours and was an art in itself, but artists from that era trained their voices, or their ability with what ever instrument they played to make sure it wasn’t needed. Why do we not think about this anymore? Where has the performance gone?

When we use a DAW such as ProTools we have the ability to use plug-ins for all sorts of things, EQ, compression, gating, effects, you name it there’s probably a plug-in for it. One such plug-in that has become more and more widely used in recent years is the pitch correction plug-in whether it be Antares Auto-Tune, Celemony Melodyne, or just Logic’s built in pitch correction. These plug-ins are used most often to correct a vocal line to bring it to “perfect pitch”, which is normally done by the engineer during the mixing stage. Why do we as sound engineers feel the need to fix everything? I had a copy of Antares Auto-Tune a while ago and I don’t think I actually used it on a final mix once, why you may ask, well personally as a musician I think it takes the human out of the human. Correcting something to be “perfect” to me takes the character out of the music, and surely that’s what it’s all about, the character, the essence, the performance.

Imagine you had a permanent Auto-Tune or Melodyne built into you with no way to turn it off, would you really be happy walking around day after day talking in perfect pitch, singing in perfect pitch, and even sounding exactly the same as every one else out there? I think not some how, so why oh why is it done so often these days, when back in the 60′s-80′s, even the 90′s to some extent was it ok to be slightly out? I think it’s because it kept the human factor in the music, and that is what has changed about music today, it’s nothing to do with the audience wants to hear that in perfect pitch, or that it’s more pleasing to the ear, in fact it has nothing to do with what the audience want at all I don’t think. I think it’s more to do with what we as listeners have been brain washed into thinking is the right way for something to be heard and personally I think that’s wrong.

As a ProTools engineer, and as a musician with everything I record whether for myself, or for other artists, I never take that human factor out of the music unless they say to me that they want the vocals correcting, or the drum track in perfect time the entire way through, or maybe that guitar didn’t quite come in on the beat so can it be nudged slightly, but with every edit I make I always try to keep as much of the way it was played as I can. That way it keeps that character, that essence, the performance of it being played by a human player and not just a sequencer. Humans make mistakes, machines don’t when it comes to timing, you ask a drummer to keep a 4/4 beat going playing 16ths on the hi-hat, and at one point, they WILL go out of time due to fatigue, they loose track, or because they are just human. Computers can’t do that, they can’t purposely go out, they are designed not to, and yes you can put swing on something, but that’s still programmed, it doesn’t quite sound natural.

Where am I going with this? Well You could see this as a stab at Auto-Tune, or Melodyne, but it’s really not, they are great bits of software, or “tools” don’t get me wrong, but in my opinion they are not used as “tools”, but more of a way it is done and has to be done. Why are rock, jazz, or blues all but dying out? I think it’s because artists are not as good as they used to be in the past, artists rely on these so called “tools” to fix their problems, “Oh it’s ok, that can be fixed later with Auto-Tune” I hear all to often by singers, and I think to myself, well no wait a minute your meant to be able to sing that part, it’s your vocal after all, why can’t you sing it right in the first place? Most of the time, the answer is simple, we have the “tools” to fix it so why bother getting it perfect in the first place.

Music as a true art is dying, and it’s a sad state of affairs we are moving into when artists rely on these “tools” to give them that “perfect performance”. So is the true art of music dying? Well I think so yes. Welcome to the digital era I guess…..

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We have to find and enter a remix competition that actually exists. This means that by entering a contest of our own choosing we are in effect making our own brief to the assignment by using the conditions for the contest as the parameters of the brief. Along with creating the brief from the contest another advantage is that most, if not all of the available contests supply raw audio files, AKA stems, of the original track to work from. These could include the drum parts, guitar parts, vocal tracks, synths, or whatever else the original artist used in that track.

I had already chosen to go down this route of using an existing contest as the vehicle for my remix. Being a big fan of Celldweller (Twitter user name in the title) I have known of FiXT Remix for a while which hosts regular remix competitions for Klayton’s (Celldweller’s) work. I have worked on a remix for “Switchback” in the past which is an earlier Celldweller track, and recently with the release of the “Wish Upon A Blackstar” album chapters new competitions have opened up, one being the “So Long Sentiment” contest which is what I think I will use for my remix.

During the process of doing this remix I plan on making use of SoundCloud to host my remix when it is in a state I’m ready for the world to hear, and will most probably embed the audio into a post on here also. I’m really looking forward to doing this project however I am still debating whether to use ProTools, or Logic Pro 9 as they are both very capable DAW systems however I’m sure once I look into the features I will be using the most it one will win over the other, currently my bets are on Logic Pro 9 which I’m not as familiar with, as it has a much larger selection of instruments out of the box.

I will most likely be making use of my Spectrasonics virtual instruments rather heavily as I’ve been waiting for the opportunity to really get to use them, and possibly actually get around to using the Native Instruments Komplete 6 pack I have had for a while and still not installed. Throw in some weird and whacky effects such as vocoders, time stretching, and whatever else I can think of at the time, and this could turn out to be pretty interesting.

So until next time….

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Megan and I have decided to finally get our act together and make a band, which is just the 2 of us at present, but we are recording stuff in my home studio and coming out with some pretty decent stuff. If you’ve read my previous blog post you would know this and that I was thinking of building a 7-string guitar. I went against that idea in the end and bought a lovely flame maple green, super srtat style 7-string. So far I love this guitar and I’ve actually started to use it more than my 6-stringers.

I have yet to mod the guitar, but that will come when money allows me to do so. I plan to rewire the guitar completely with custom pickup switching including coil taps, and a varitone control. I also plan to replace the existing tone control with a built in distortion circuit, and also to add piezo pickups to get an acoustic sound from the guitar. I will eventually replace the pickups with active pickups, but I’m currently waiting for some reasonably priced units from EMG or Seymour Duncan.

My biggest hurdle when it came to writing songs was writing lyrics, however recently I have been tapping into my feelings, and thoughts on things which has helped me loads in getting some lyrics written. I currently have nearly 3 complete songs in draft all waiting to have the instruments added to them, which I will start doing once I am happy with the lyrics, some of them are venting a little too much at some stuff going on in the world today.

As for the guitar parts, I handle nearly all of the heavy riffs as I’ve always been into writing the kick you in the balls riffs, whereas Megan is awsome at melodic clean riffs, and has come up with some killer intros and verse sections for songs. There is also a plan to write a completely instrumental guitar epic, but this is taking longer than we expected and we are also thinking of bringing in a third guitarist we know to add another level of complexity to that piece.

The recording is all being done in my home project studio which I’m currently running on Mac with a DigiDesign Digi002 Rack which powers ProTools 7.4.2. I also have Logic Pro 8 however I’m not a huge fan of Logic as it’s aimed more at the MIDI composer. We’re using a wide variety of plugins including the entire IK Multimedia AmpliTube series for the guitars, and a massive selection of plugins I’ve collected over the years for EQ, compression, etc. The aim is to get all the songs to the point of mastering in the home studio, then we will take everything to the MultiTrack ProTools mastering studio at Uni and see what we can do there, as they finally have the Waves Bundle installed on the system, which is great for mastering.

Anyway I shall leave you now with pics of the studio and guitars, just because I can really, nothing more.

More to follow as always

Adam

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