Production Update July 19, 2010

As you may have noticed, I have not been writing in the blog recently. The reason? I’ve been very busy in the studio. I’m currently going through the album song by song and am doing a variety of clean up. What do I mean by clean up? Well, for one, I am editing some of the drum, bass, and guitar audio we tracked on June 18th at Dark Horse Recording in Nashville. I usually go about editing in “layers.” This first layer of editing includes simple copying and pasting of parts. For example, if there is a wrong guitar note in one of the choruses, I will simply grab the right note from another chorus and paste it in where the wrong note was. This editing “layer” also includes some swapping of drum fills and bass licks. Occasionally, there may be a drum fill or bass lick that I’m not happy with, and I’ll grab a drum fill or bass note from another section of the song and paste it in where needed. All of this editing is being done in Pro Tools. Along with this process, I am also creating rough mixes of the live instruments for each of the songs. Once I am happy with the rough mix and the rough edits (editing layer 1, which I’ve been calling it), I will export a stereo mix (or bounce) of the drums, bass, and guitar and will import this mix of live instruments back into Logic (where the songs were originally created). I next delete all of the fake MIDI drums, bass, and guitars in the Logic session and replace them with the live instrument mix.

After this, I begin cleaning up all the programmed MIDI parts (in Logic). These programmed parts include piano (which will be replaced with real piano in the Fall), synthesizer, organ, electronic drum programming and effects. From time to time, there may be a wrong note, or I also may find that I need to either simplify or embellish some MIDI parts to now compliment the live instruments. I also go through a process of labeling every channel and instrument set up so I can easily rebuild the session down the road if need be. After the MIDI parts have been tweaked, I will begin exporting each individual instrument as an audio file. All of these audio files will later be imported into Pro Tools, as the album will ultimately be mixed in Pro Tools (not Logic).

In the coming months, I will be recording more acoustic guitar parts for the album with Matt Meyer (at 10x12 Productions). I will also begin layer 2 of the editing process, which incorporates a program called Beat Detective – I am still saving up to buy this. More about this later…