Music Tips Q&A

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Focusrite-Scarlett-Audio-Interface-Tools/dp/B01E6T56EA

or whatever model from the range suits - i started with this then upgraded to the 2i4 cos it had MIDI

It’s so hard to do well tho, I saw a band trying to do a Can sort of thing yesterday and jesusfuck they were boring

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Well obviously this is where the talent comes in.

Luckily bammers is absolutely flowing in the stuff.

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ha thanks! I don’t know about that but I do think @Twinkletoes is right, you have to build or at least when you are maintaining a groove/remaining “static” in a track it should feel like there’s purpose to it. Sometimes repetition can seem really meaningful and powerful, other times like andy says, can be boring and meandering.

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live must be even harder because sometimes just things like the mixing/balance in a track can change a boring repetion into something interesting. Must be really hard to achieve that on stage if the sound isn’t great.

exactly - which is why Jon Hopkins last night was AMAZING, as he was at Royal Festival Hall but it was a shit gig in Brixton Academy and probably will be again in the autumn

listen to his music, he really plays around with structures and the mixing is impossibly good

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what mics and preamps are everyone using to record vocals?

I’m specifically interested in analogue stuff rather than things that are primarily designed to plug into computers (maybe those things don’t even exist anyway, dunno)

When singing, a key change is the ideal time to stand up from stool.

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Not done vocals yet but when I do it’ll be a Shure SM58 through the Focusrite Scarlett linked to above.

Obviously I’d rather do them through a super duper Rode or Neumann microphone but I don’t have upwards of £700 to spend on one I’m afraid

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This is an key point and when I think about it I always come back to Eno talking about what they did on Talking Heads’ cover of ’take me to the river’; They apparently couldn’t decide whether to mix it with all the subtlety and dynamics delicately intact - sounding beautiful but lacking a little punch, or whether they should crank up the compression - making it sound beefy but a bit boring & tiring over the course of the whole track. In the end what they did was put the whole mix through a limiter and slowly adjusted the input, threshold and output over the course of the track so that it gets progressively ‘louder’. It’s pretty basic but the overall effect is quite magical and very spiritual with the big gospel ending

Love it

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The trick with vocals is not necessarily anything to do with how expensive the microphone is but rather more to do with its character and the vocal characteristics of whoever is singing.
For instance, a mic with very airy and transparent high frequencies might flatter a lot of dull voices but will also make singers with brittle, bright or glassy tones sound too harsh and vice versa. Basically it’s good to have a range of choices tonewise and a/b test with your singer as to what brings out the most distinctive character of their vocal tone

Preamps on the other hand …if you put a shitty mic into a great preamp then it can still sound amazing, not so much the other way around

All very wise. It’s difficult to A/B test mics if you’re just doing home stuff on your own - I’ve got a mate who’s a sound engineer though so might so about seeing if I can swing into his studio and test some out see what works best with my voice and all that.

Oh yeah, one thing that can make a big difference when doing computer home/project recording is to try and make the vocal signal as good as possible before it hits the hard drive as zeroes and ones. I mean, you can get all kinds of brilliant results with plugins but ideally you want to have it going
Mic—>preamp—>EQ—>(fader)—>compressor—>DAW/tape

The fader stage being an extra little trick so you can control manually just how hard the vocal hits the compressor because the more compression you have on a vocal the smaller it sounds. Plus you’re likely to compress/limit again in the mix and compression is not linear ie a 4:1 compression ratio on the voice plus 4:1 compression on the mix is not 8x compression but 16x and can make the parts of a vocal that ought to sound biggest and loudest actually sound squashed & tiny

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Simplest way is to plug 2/3 mics in, do a test verse where you sing a line into each & then listen back

Oh sure - it’s just getting the mics in the first place that’s the problem!

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Here’s a kind of vague question for when I (theoretically) attempt to start writing again: how do you guys handle using common chord progressions?

When I first started writing songs a decade ago I knew nothing about even basic music theory or chord progressions and listened to a lot less music than I do now. I basically just blindly futzed around until something sounded good - sometimes it ended up being random, other times it ended up being a pretty typical progression.

Now that I’ve begun to recognize common progressions (for example, the ones for Disarm, Mr. November, The House that Heaven Built, Antennas to Heaven, etc. show up everywhere), I’m finding I have two problems that are sort of at odds with each other:

  • feeling locked into these progressions as a starting point
  • feeling like using any common progression is cheating and off limits

Do you guys keep or throw out ideas based on common progressions? How do you break free from them / is there a trick to forgetting what you’re “supposed” to play? I wish I could get back to that mindset of freely and ignorantly stabbing at the guitar, it was the best music I’d ever written.

this definitely used to bother me a lot more than it does now. Maybe I’m just getting lazy in my old age but sometimes basic chord progressions are good because there’s a powerfully defined sense of melody in them.

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The strange thing about it too is that before I knew they were common progressions, I was able to use them much more effectively and in a way that felt more hidden. Maybe the trick is to just use them in short bursts (kind of like Priests did last year with JJ) and/or make sure there’s a really standout melody over them.

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Drums were my main instrument but for songwriting I taught myself very, very basic guitar (I was just functional enough on drums and complete shit at guitar, and having tried both for the first time in years the other day I can proudly announce I’m now useless at both). That’s a good idea about piano, maybe I should take up keyboards since I’ve never really touched one before and I think with guitar the self-taught bad habits are too ingrained at this point.

Tips for general bands / musicians…

The WaterBear Youtube also regularly run competitions etc for supporting big artists and festival slots etc so worth checking out.