Before the process of making my RPM 2012 album becomes a distant memory, I wanted to get down some notes on the album as a whole, and on each track. This post is about the album as a whole; I’ll follow up with separate posts about each track shortly.
The whole album was definitely a rush, and there are plenty of things that could be improved, but overall I’m really happy with how it ended up. Even if it hadn’t produced useful results, the project would’ve been worthwhile in itself — I learned to get things down more quickly, and learned more about what does and doesn’t really matter when working on tracks. Perhaps most importantly, though, I feel inspired to start working on more new material.
I’m also pleased that many of the tracks sound more musical than my earlier work; there’s more of an emphasis on melodies and chord progressions rather than just rhythm and sound. Some of the musical styles forced me to use more melodies (the chiptune tracks in particular), but I think the time constraint helped force me down a more musical path, by limiting the time I could spend on sound design and effects.
General production notes, workflow changes
Though it’s still in beta, I used Ardour 3 for all of the tracks; one used samples, but the other nine were entirely MIDI. I expected a few bugs and crashes, but I didn’t hit any major problems, and didn’t lose any work — the worst problems were with some notes not starting/stopping properly at region boundaries. Over the next week or two I’ll update my Ardour build and try to reproduce those issues so I can report them properly.
The time constraints caused a few modifications of my workflow in the name of simplicity and brevity:
- I relied much more on synth plugins than usual — in fact, several tracks used only plugins. Being able to whip up a quick synth sound in TAL NoiseMaker, and then apply effects without having to route or bounce anything, was a huge time saver. I still used Hydrogen on some tracks, and my Blofeld of course, but much more sparingly than usual.
- Mixing work was kept to an absolute minimum — for the most part I just set some reasonable levels and left it at that. I did apply level automation to some tracks, but I didn’t add any compression or EQ, apart from the odd plugin used for creative effect.
- Keeping the mixing simple let me skip an entire part of my usual workflow: bouncing. In the past I’ve always recorded MIDI parts to audio before mixing, and taken effort to ensure that things like drumkits have separate tracks for their various parts, to give me maximum flexibility during mixing. With the minimal mixing on this project, I didn’t see the need to bounce anything.
To my surprise, the result doesn’t sound terribly under-mixed, at least to my ears. It’s easy to get carried away with minor tweaks while mixing, so it was refreshing to hear how effective a simpler approach can be. This will definitely influence my future work — I can imagine getting a few tracks in to this sort of state and then mixing them all at once, or simply skipping mixing entirely if I don’t think a track is good enough.
Track notes
I want to go in to a bit of detail on each track, so I’ll be adding a separate post about each track, outlining the tools I used and the process I followed to create them. I’ll try to get one of these posts out each day, but with the release of Mass Effect 3 tomorrow I may be a little distracted!
