Making of Crazy 14 – Wikiloops adventure
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Dan came up with this 8 minute blues riff ( #299965 ) asking me if I`d add some keys. As I hoped that others would join, I just added some laid back background keys instead of plastering over every available space as is my usual practice. Pretty soon we ran into the max 6 musicians bottleneck as more and more brilliant solos were added. Even though Ernie consolidated some solos to make room for others to join, the track quickly branched out into 3 separate streams with some amazing playing.
So here`s little old me thinking … what if I pulled this together into a single track? Quick back and forth with Dan and out went the request for the HDs and amazingly everyone responded.
Then the fun bit started. How on earth was I going to fit 5 minutes of solos and 7 minutes of vocals into an 8 minute template? And then there were the two different bass tracks…
First thing was to create a longer baseline of guitar, drums and keys. A bit of cut and paste led to a 13 minute playing field. (With hindsight I should have gone for more and let the track fade out earlier if necessary.)
That gave me the room to let Ernie and Bassman share to low-end part across the whole track. Took a bit of work to eq both bass tracks (one was mono the other stereo) so that they come through equally in the mix.
With that I felt I had the table ready to start moving the various pieces of the jigsaw puzzle around. And that`s where I took liberties and made changes to some of the adds. Centerpiece was always going to be Gary`s vocal part but I didn`t want a strict solo-vocals-solo structure but rather try to use the different solos and solo instruments to support the story. So I cut the vocal HD into several parts and spread them around the track.
Next came the solos. Some HDs came as 8 minute versions, others were just 40 second snippets. So I spent an evening cutting, aligning and doing some fade-ins and -outs on the HDs before placing them on the grid as a first draft. I think I went through 10 separate mixes (13 minutes each) before I knew in which sequence the solos should appear. I also cut Brad`s EVI solo into 3 parts as I felt that that would create a bit more variety. That in turn allowed me to play around with some panning, especially where I had solo parts that directly followed each other.
Finally the really difficult part, the cringe test. I let the final mix run in the background for several hours until I had a list of all things I didn`t like. Honest to deity of your choice, I did try to correct most of them. – mostly out of fear that 14 disappointed musicians might turn nasty on me.
Lessons learned:
** Rearranging long tracks with multiple inputs ain`t that easy. There`s the tunnel vision I need when concentrating on the single HDs and then trying to make it all work in context. The two don`t go together seamlessly.
** Over the past 2 years I`ve developed different mixing templates for my DAW with different settings and effects for stems and buses. If I hadn`t already had a template that I thought could come close to what I needed in this instance, I`d have probably called it quits very early on. If I ever attempt something like this again I`ll make sure that I have a basic template ready even before I add the first file.
** One thing I`d only experimented with in the past but which turned out to be very useful here were the VCA buses to ensure that the gain settings for the different guitar HDs stayed relative to each other regardless of the overall volume settings.
** Must plan for more time in future to handle HDs. Getting similar gain levels, dealing with individual count-ins, working with full-length containers that only hold 40 seconds of audio content vs diced and spliced HDs, using EQ, compressors and limiters on tracks that may or may not have been pre-treated….no complaints but it does take time.
** Panning: Note to self: Liberal panning settings from full right to full left works differently depending on whether you use headphones or monitor speakers. What sounded great on headphones (placing some solos beyond the L/R 60 mark) just sounded really bad on monitors. While some track separation with panning is helpful, extreme settings are counterproductive. Similar with stereo panning tools. I usually use the Wider tool to push background tracks slightly away from the center of the mix and to create space for bass and drums. That setting should be made early on and then locked as it affects gain settings and can also lead to phase issues.
** The limiter loop: I usually apply a limiter and a final compression setting to the final mix bus (which then goes into the main bus). But moving bits and pieces around, especially when you create an overlap between different HDs can lead to all sorts of unwanted results. After the first listen to what I thought might be the final version of the mix – which sounded fine as a mix – I decided to move one solo to overlap with another with the result that musically it was better but sonically much worse as the rather extreme limiter settings I had had before (Brickwall) now made it sound wobbly and uneven. So back to the drawing board, take the two HDs and put them on a separate bus with a different limiter and run that bus next to the final mix bus into the main bus.
Reads like a lot of work when you only want to jam? Yep, but tons of fun and at the end of the day I`ve now got a track with many great solos that sonically doesn`t make me cringe every single second which I tend to do with every single track I`ve put my hands on.
Is it a great mix? No, doesn`t even come close. But it`s as good as it gets at this moment in time. Remind me to remix the track in 5 years time and hopefully it`ll be better.
Final thought: Song titles can be important even during track creation. Nick had thought about doing an additional vocal add during the final mixing phase somehow using parts of the track title. When I suggested `13 Minutes of Titz` he understandably declined. Entirely my loss.
Update: Due to a slight error on my part one HD was placed 2 seconds before where it should have been. Been asked to remove it.
So here`s little old me thinking … what if I pulled this together into a single track? Quick back and forth with Dan and out went the request for the HDs and amazingly everyone responded.
Then the fun bit started. How on earth was I going to fit 5 minutes of solos and 7 minutes of vocals into an 8 minute template? And then there were the two different bass tracks…
First thing was to create a longer baseline of guitar, drums and keys. A bit of cut and paste led to a 13 minute playing field. (With hindsight I should have gone for more and let the track fade out earlier if necessary.)
That gave me the room to let Ernie and Bassman share to low-end part across the whole track. Took a bit of work to eq both bass tracks (one was mono the other stereo) so that they come through equally in the mix.
With that I felt I had the table ready to start moving the various pieces of the jigsaw puzzle around. And that`s where I took liberties and made changes to some of the adds. Centerpiece was always going to be Gary`s vocal part but I didn`t want a strict solo-vocals-solo structure but rather try to use the different solos and solo instruments to support the story. So I cut the vocal HD into several parts and spread them around the track.
Next came the solos. Some HDs came as 8 minute versions, others were just 40 second snippets. So I spent an evening cutting, aligning and doing some fade-ins and -outs on the HDs before placing them on the grid as a first draft. I think I went through 10 separate mixes (13 minutes each) before I knew in which sequence the solos should appear. I also cut Brad`s EVI solo into 3 parts as I felt that that would create a bit more variety. That in turn allowed me to play around with some panning, especially where I had solo parts that directly followed each other.
Finally the really difficult part, the cringe test. I let the final mix run in the background for several hours until I had a list of all things I didn`t like. Honest to deity of your choice, I did try to correct most of them. – mostly out of fear that 14 disappointed musicians might turn nasty on me.
Lessons learned:
** Rearranging long tracks with multiple inputs ain`t that easy. There`s the tunnel vision I need when concentrating on the single HDs and then trying to make it all work in context. The two don`t go together seamlessly.
** Over the past 2 years I`ve developed different mixing templates for my DAW with different settings and effects for stems and buses. If I hadn`t already had a template that I thought could come close to what I needed in this instance, I`d have probably called it quits very early on. If I ever attempt something like this again I`ll make sure that I have a basic template ready even before I add the first file.
** One thing I`d only experimented with in the past but which turned out to be very useful here were the VCA buses to ensure that the gain settings for the different guitar HDs stayed relative to each other regardless of the overall volume settings.
** Must plan for more time in future to handle HDs. Getting similar gain levels, dealing with individual count-ins, working with full-length containers that only hold 40 seconds of audio content vs diced and spliced HDs, using EQ, compressors and limiters on tracks that may or may not have been pre-treated….no complaints but it does take time.
** Panning: Note to self: Liberal panning settings from full right to full left works differently depending on whether you use headphones or monitor speakers. What sounded great on headphones (placing some solos beyond the L/R 60 mark) just sounded really bad on monitors. While some track separation with panning is helpful, extreme settings are counterproductive. Similar with stereo panning tools. I usually use the Wider tool to push background tracks slightly away from the center of the mix and to create space for bass and drums. That setting should be made early on and then locked as it affects gain settings and can also lead to phase issues.
** The limiter loop: I usually apply a limiter and a final compression setting to the final mix bus (which then goes into the main bus). But moving bits and pieces around, especially when you create an overlap between different HDs can lead to all sorts of unwanted results. After the first listen to what I thought might be the final version of the mix – which sounded fine as a mix – I decided to move one solo to overlap with another with the result that musically it was better but sonically much worse as the rather extreme limiter settings I had had before (Brickwall) now made it sound wobbly and uneven. So back to the drawing board, take the two HDs and put them on a separate bus with a different limiter and run that bus next to the final mix bus into the main bus.
Reads like a lot of work when you only want to jam? Yep, but tons of fun and at the end of the day I`ve now got a track with many great solos that sonically doesn`t make me cringe every single second which I tend to do with every single track I`ve put my hands on.
Is it a great mix? No, doesn`t even come close. But it`s as good as it gets at this moment in time. Remind me to remix the track in 5 years time and hopefully it`ll be better.
Final thought: Song titles can be important even during track creation. Nick had thought about doing an additional vocal add during the final mixing phase somehow using parts of the track title. When I suggested `13 Minutes of Titz` he understandably declined. Entirely my loss.
Update: Due to a slight error on my part one HD was placed 2 seconds before where it should have been. Been asked to remove it.
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That was a fascinating read! Thanks for sharing, it was a real insight into the process. On a footnote though, I really can't comprehend why you are all snickering at that poor girl's name.
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bassMonkey wrote:
That was a fascinating read! Thanks for sharing, it was a real insight into the process. On a footnote though, I really can't comprehend why you are all snickering at that poor girl's name.
That was a fascinating read! Thanks for sharing, it was a real insight into the process. On a footnote though, I really can't comprehend why you are all snickering at that poor girl's name.
I just picked up the rumour. Personally I cherish my ignorance on why there seem to be so many redfaced loopers around.
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Fun read. A challenge indeed for mixing with so many different inputs. Did something of this scale push your DAW / Workstation to some long export times?
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rootshell wrote:
Fun read. A challenge indeed for mixing with so many different inputs. Did something of this scale push your DAW / Workstation to some long export times?
Fun read. A challenge indeed for mixing with so many different inputs. Did something of this scale push your DAW / Workstation to some long export times?
Not really. The only potential bottleneck I sometimes have is when I need too many plug-ins and effects on the individual channels. Hence the template with the mixbuses. Having (in most cases) only one instance of a limiter on the bus covering several channels instead of several instances on the channels themselves does wonders to reduce CPU load. If it does become too much I tend to prepare individual channels on their own before loading them into the mix project.
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redfaced loopers? lol yes I know what you mean. Like when you tell someone ahead of time not to place a track out of sync (which they agree to) then they move your trk intentionally out of sync (not an error) and post it without running it by you first. That's not an error. Then you ask them if they could fix it and they say "that's the last time I will ever do anything like this again?" hmmm seems some info is being left out of the story line. If you just let things lay we wouldn't be here now...the little indirect innuendos of yours will require a response every time...
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Major 3rd wrote:
redfaced loopers? lol yes I know what you mean. Like when you tell someone ahead of time not to place a track out of sync (which they agree to) then they move your trk intentionally out of sync (not an error) and post it without running it by you first. That's not an error. Then you ask them if they could fix it and they say "that's the last time I will ever do anything like this again?" hmmm seems some info is being left out of the story line. If you just let things lay we wouldn't be here now...the little indirect innuendos of yours will require a response every time...
redfaced loopers? lol yes I know what you mean. Like when you tell someone ahead of time not to place a track out of sync (which they agree to) then they move your trk intentionally out of sync (not an error) and post it without running it by you first. That's not an error. Then you ask them if they could fix it and they say "that's the last time I will ever do anything like this again?" hmmm seems some info is being left out of the story line. If you just let things lay we wouldn't be here now...the little indirect innuendos of yours will require a response every time...
I fail to understand why you keep on going on about this publicly in particular when my post here relates to a track you`re not even involved with (check the link!).
Not only did I take your add out of the mix, I also edited the credit comments as well as the initial post in this forum to take your name out so that no one would associate you with the ill-timed solo. And what do you do? You try to turn this into a public court. That is not "letting things lay" and just for the record, sending me 11 messages inside of 10 minutes incl. "take it down!!!" is not "asking" for a fix.
To anyone else wondering what this is all about: In the first mix the solo Craig supplied was a little bit off. Not intentionally (as implied by Craig, but then again he never even asked why) but because I chose the wrong start point of the drop-in - one of the other HDs had a count-in that started slightly earlier than the others and I had mistakingly aligned Craig`s track to that.
Mistake? Yes. Intentional? No. Could I have noticed it before uploading? Yep. Though shit.
Does Craig`s public reaction to something that was corrected on the quiet inside 10 minutes plus the attitude that apparently the bar is not to give it your best shot but to work to order take the fun out of Wikiloops? You bet.
Social behaviour and good manners used to be an important feature, nearly as important as musical quality.
That`s my last and only response to this incident.
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lol Thomas's promises....unfortunately they don't amount to much.
IT was INTENTIONAL in that you agreed to not move the track (error or not) and then did not contact me till after you posted..*That is intentional*. period...An intentional decision to over ride the agreement and make an executive decision....Then I asked if you could take it down and fix it and you got flippant saying "This is the last time I will every do anything like this..." It was at that point I told you to just take me out...so play the saint Thomas routine if you want but the fact of the matter is you should not have posted KNOWING it was not what we agreed to.....That's not an error that is simply disregard for others and for your word in an agreement....
Then you put little innuendos on the track aimed at me and then post in the forum making more innuendos and back n forth banter with others who made snide remarks. Not too mention the childish gossip...I would never have said anything if not for all the innuendos. I'm not going to let you paint a false picture...again honesty..I think you have a problem with that.
You knew exactly what you were doing when you posted it. That is not an error...like i said then...When i agree to something I take it seriously...If it had been reversed I would have messaged and said here check this out do you think this is okay? we did have a band room. The whole purpose of a band room is so that people can review things and work on them together. Trustworthiness is important....That's what this is all about...It's not about an error in the timeline...It's about honesty and then misrepresenting the entire event.
Thomas's promises....
A mans word is important.
IT was INTENTIONAL in that you agreed to not move the track (error or not) and then did not contact me till after you posted..*That is intentional*. period...An intentional decision to over ride the agreement and make an executive decision....Then I asked if you could take it down and fix it and you got flippant saying "This is the last time I will every do anything like this..." It was at that point I told you to just take me out...so play the saint Thomas routine if you want but the fact of the matter is you should not have posted KNOWING it was not what we agreed to.....That's not an error that is simply disregard for others and for your word in an agreement....
Then you put little innuendos on the track aimed at me and then post in the forum making more innuendos and back n forth banter with others who made snide remarks. Not too mention the childish gossip...I would never have said anything if not for all the innuendos. I'm not going to let you paint a false picture...again honesty..I think you have a problem with that.
You knew exactly what you were doing when you posted it. That is not an error...like i said then...When i agree to something I take it seriously...If it had been reversed I would have messaged and said here check this out do you think this is okay? we did have a band room. The whole purpose of a band room is so that people can review things and work on them together. Trustworthiness is important....That's what this is all about...It's not about an error in the timeline...It's about honesty and then misrepresenting the entire event.
Thomas's promises....
A mans word is important.
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