Tool Thursday with Jed Hackett.
O.K. , my column will be a little different this week. A sort of interactive Tool Thursday. I think it might be really helpful if all three you who read this column, and that includes my mom, let us know of websites that have been helpful with keeping you up to speed with the industry. They could be tech sites, new music sites, industry business sites, etc. I am always amazed at the seemingly endless array of new sites that pop up each day and I’m sure I don’t know half of them. This may help a lot of us get better plugged in. I’ll start with a few and let you go from there.
The Obvious-
http://duc.digidesign.com/
The Maybe Not So Obvious-
http://www.gearslutz.com/board/
(Need I say more)
http://www.wired.com/
(This site often has industry articles if they have a tech/ web component
http://www.engadget.com/
(for the gadget geek in you)
http://gizmodo.com/
(for the gadget geek in you)
http://www.nashvillemusicpros.com/
(This relatively new site is the most useful to those in the Nashville area, but open to people in the industry world-wide)
O.K., now it’s your turn.
See you next time,
Jed
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Pass on the Music
Tool Thursday w/ Jed Hackett.
Just about every time I contact a prospective client I can sense the fear and hesitation in their voice about editing and tuning. It is usually an up hill battle just to get that first job with them. To tell you the truth I can’t blame them. The underlying problem is a lack of trust in editors, brought about by years of inexperienced, unmusical work. I have had new clients assume that they will have to sit with me while I tune a vocal to tell me when things are sharp or flat based on their past experiences. Others are afraid that if they have a song “tightened” it will come back stiff as a board, with all traces of musicality removed from the performance. A stigma has developed with editing and it is a real shame.
How have we gotten to this point? I think we got here because most engineers would rather have their fingernails pulled out one by one with a pair of pliers, a la Syriana, than sit and tune a vocal or tweak a track. Thus the birth of the “Pro Tools Engineer”. Young engineers figured out that a great way to escape assisting was to learn Pro Tools. The older, more experienced engineers gladly handed off the mind numbing Pro Tools work to the new guys. The problem is that until engineers gain enough musical experience, they tend to edit with their eyes, not their ears.
Now let me stop here and say that I was an inexperienced new guy at one point as well. So don’t be sending me any hate mail because you think I’m looking down my nose at the new guys. What I am trying to say is that even though editing may seem simple and mindless, it takes time and experience for an engineer to develop the musicality needed not to mess things up.
I was really fortunate to work for many years with a great producer/ engineer. When I started editing for him I didn’t know my head from a whole in the ground. I would edit a bass part, send it to him, and he would send it right back and say “ It’s a little too laid back, it needs to stay aggressive. I want it to feel like a band”...or I would tighten a drum kit and he would point out parts that seemed stiff or could push or pull more. And the rules changed as we jumped from genre to genre.
The point is that if we are going to sub out editing work to newer engineers we need to oversee things and guide them in the more musical fine points of editing, just as someone did for me. It took years before I got to the point that I was editing with my ears instead of my eyes. Let’s not forget to pass on the musical knowledge needed to be a great editor as we pass on the workload.
Until next time, take care.
Jed
Just about every time I contact a prospective client I can sense the fear and hesitation in their voice about editing and tuning. It is usually an up hill battle just to get that first job with them. To tell you the truth I can’t blame them. The underlying problem is a lack of trust in editors, brought about by years of inexperienced, unmusical work. I have had new clients assume that they will have to sit with me while I tune a vocal to tell me when things are sharp or flat based on their past experiences. Others are afraid that if they have a song “tightened” it will come back stiff as a board, with all traces of musicality removed from the performance. A stigma has developed with editing and it is a real shame.
How have we gotten to this point? I think we got here because most engineers would rather have their fingernails pulled out one by one with a pair of pliers, a la Syriana, than sit and tune a vocal or tweak a track. Thus the birth of the “Pro Tools Engineer”. Young engineers figured out that a great way to escape assisting was to learn Pro Tools. The older, more experienced engineers gladly handed off the mind numbing Pro Tools work to the new guys. The problem is that until engineers gain enough musical experience, they tend to edit with their eyes, not their ears.
Now let me stop here and say that I was an inexperienced new guy at one point as well. So don’t be sending me any hate mail because you think I’m looking down my nose at the new guys. What I am trying to say is that even though editing may seem simple and mindless, it takes time and experience for an engineer to develop the musicality needed not to mess things up.
I was really fortunate to work for many years with a great producer/ engineer. When I started editing for him I didn’t know my head from a whole in the ground. I would edit a bass part, send it to him, and he would send it right back and say “ It’s a little too laid back, it needs to stay aggressive. I want it to feel like a band”...or I would tighten a drum kit and he would point out parts that seemed stiff or could push or pull more. And the rules changed as we jumped from genre to genre.
The point is that if we are going to sub out editing work to newer engineers we need to oversee things and guide them in the more musical fine points of editing, just as someone did for me. It took years before I got to the point that I was editing with my ears instead of my eyes. Let’s not forget to pass on the musical knowledge needed to be a great editor as we pass on the workload.
Until next time, take care.
Jed
Thursday, April 3, 2008
It Should Have Been Cut Faster
Tool Thursday with Jed Hackett.
Have you ever been in the middle of overdubs and the artist or A&R person says “I don’t know... it just feels slow to me. Can you speed it up?” Fun, isn’t it. To an extent you can varispeed the track but at a certain threshold things just get silly. You can use Pitch n’ Time, which I think is the best of the time stretch tools, but even that seriously degrades the quality of your audio. You could recut but there goes your budget. So what do you do? A friend of mine and I developed a great way to speed up tracks without sacrificing all of that hard work you put in to get great sounds.
Let me first say that this is extremely time consuming but left with no other good option, it works great!
1) Use Pitch ‘n Time on a rough mix to figure out what the new tempo should be. You don’t want to guess wrong and do all of this work for nothing.
2) Make a duplicate copy of your session just in case things go horribly wrong
3) Group all of your tracks together
4) Make a duplicate playlist of all of your tracks including the click
5) Make sure all of your fades are in order and consolidate your tracks, all from the same start position to the end of the song
6) Ungroup all of your tracks and chop the click up at every 16th note (You can do eighth notes if no one is playing anything faster than eighths)
7) Regroup all of your tracks and make sure that the tab feature is set to tab to the edge of every region, not the waveform.
8) Place your cursor at the beginning of the song and tab to the first break in the click. Break all of the audio tracks at that point.
9) Make a new grid, starting from that first click, at your faster tempo
Now comes the tedious part
10) Tab to the next break in the click and break all of the audio
11) Leave your curser at that break, go to grid mode, and shift click to the new grid mark for that beat
12) Go to Shuffle mode and delete the region you just highlighted. This will move everything up to the new grid mark.
13) Repeat steps 10-12 until you are either at the end of the song or the end of your rope! Check how things are sounding after a few bars just to make sure you are on the right path... because it is a very long path.
14) Save another duplicate copy of your session just in case something goes wrong in this next step
15) Ungroup your tracks and start smoothing out all of your edit points. For the most part you can just get rid of the edits on an instrument that occur in the middle of a note. In the case of some longer sustained notes you may have to mess with the end of the notes a bit to get things to sound right. For example, if your drum kit is for the most part an eighth note pattern you can simply get rid of the edits that occur on the 16th notes and crossfade at the beginning of every eighth note. You may however have a guitar note that is held out, and in order for the end of the note to sound natural you may have to crossfade at some point during the note to get a natural ending. This method of speeding things up works even with the occasional triplet fill or lick, just drag the edit points to the beginning of the notes. Every once in a while you may have to nudge a lick here or there depending on how far you are moving the tempo. Vocals can be tricky with this but of the 5 or 6 tracks that I have done this way we only had to recut vocals on one because the phrasing got a little to weird.
16) Consolidate your new tracks when you have all of the edits smoothed out
17) Go to your regions menu and get rid of the thousands of unused regions that you just created. Et Fine!
I used this method for a couple of songs on a country record and 3 or 4 songs on a metal record. On both projects the tracks needed to be sped up anywhere between 5 - 10 bpm. Not an ideal situation to be in but you have to give the artists and labels what they want. It took me about 2 days per track, so it is not a quick fix but in the end the sonic integrity of your recording is maintained and you will be surprised at how natural it sounds. Just put on NPR or some republican talk radio show, depending on your political slant, while your chopping the tracks up and it won’t seem so bad.
Take care,
Jed
Have you ever been in the middle of overdubs and the artist or A&R person says “I don’t know... it just feels slow to me. Can you speed it up?” Fun, isn’t it. To an extent you can varispeed the track but at a certain threshold things just get silly. You can use Pitch n’ Time, which I think is the best of the time stretch tools, but even that seriously degrades the quality of your audio. You could recut but there goes your budget. So what do you do? A friend of mine and I developed a great way to speed up tracks without sacrificing all of that hard work you put in to get great sounds.
Let me first say that this is extremely time consuming but left with no other good option, it works great!
1) Use Pitch ‘n Time on a rough mix to figure out what the new tempo should be. You don’t want to guess wrong and do all of this work for nothing.
2) Make a duplicate copy of your session just in case things go horribly wrong
3) Group all of your tracks together
4) Make a duplicate playlist of all of your tracks including the click
5) Make sure all of your fades are in order and consolidate your tracks, all from the same start position to the end of the song
6) Ungroup all of your tracks and chop the click up at every 16th note (You can do eighth notes if no one is playing anything faster than eighths)
7) Regroup all of your tracks and make sure that the tab feature is set to tab to the edge of every region, not the waveform.
8) Place your cursor at the beginning of the song and tab to the first break in the click. Break all of the audio tracks at that point.
9) Make a new grid, starting from that first click, at your faster tempo
Now comes the tedious part
10) Tab to the next break in the click and break all of the audio
11) Leave your curser at that break, go to grid mode, and shift click to the new grid mark for that beat
12) Go to Shuffle mode and delete the region you just highlighted. This will move everything up to the new grid mark.
13) Repeat steps 10-12 until you are either at the end of the song or the end of your rope! Check how things are sounding after a few bars just to make sure you are on the right path... because it is a very long path.
14) Save another duplicate copy of your session just in case something goes wrong in this next step
15) Ungroup your tracks and start smoothing out all of your edit points. For the most part you can just get rid of the edits on an instrument that occur in the middle of a note. In the case of some longer sustained notes you may have to mess with the end of the notes a bit to get things to sound right. For example, if your drum kit is for the most part an eighth note pattern you can simply get rid of the edits that occur on the 16th notes and crossfade at the beginning of every eighth note. You may however have a guitar note that is held out, and in order for the end of the note to sound natural you may have to crossfade at some point during the note to get a natural ending. This method of speeding things up works even with the occasional triplet fill or lick, just drag the edit points to the beginning of the notes. Every once in a while you may have to nudge a lick here or there depending on how far you are moving the tempo. Vocals can be tricky with this but of the 5 or 6 tracks that I have done this way we only had to recut vocals on one because the phrasing got a little to weird.
16) Consolidate your new tracks when you have all of the edits smoothed out
17) Go to your regions menu and get rid of the thousands of unused regions that you just created. Et Fine!
I used this method for a couple of songs on a country record and 3 or 4 songs on a metal record. On both projects the tracks needed to be sped up anywhere between 5 - 10 bpm. Not an ideal situation to be in but you have to give the artists and labels what they want. It took me about 2 days per track, so it is not a quick fix but in the end the sonic integrity of your recording is maintained and you will be surprised at how natural it sounds. Just put on NPR or some republican talk radio show, depending on your political slant, while your chopping the tracks up and it won’t seem so bad.
Take care,
Jed
Thursday, February 28, 2008
AutoTune RTAS Not TDM
Tool Thursday w/ Jed Hackett.
This may already be common knowledge but just incase you haven’t heard of this, here goes. Use AutoTune in RTAS mode, not TDM. Enough said... see you next week.
O.K. I’ll explain it. AutoTune use to track really well in TDM mode, but right around the release of AutoTune 3 they did something that although sonically gave a better result, it messed with the tracking and all of a sudden AutoTune wouldn’t track worth a darn in TDM mode. I don’t know what they did but it was really frustrating. I found that it was particularly bad with vocals cut at low levels. I nearly gave up on Antares until a friend of mine discovered that AutoTune would track much better in RTAS mode. So I switched to using AutoTune in RTAS mode and it tracks like a charm. I’ve been using it that way ever since.
The only downfall with this is that even with delay compensation On, you still get a 2 to 3 millisecond delay and it will vary roughly 1 millisecond either direction depending on how much processing Autotune is having to do to correct the pitch. I don’t know for sure, but that delay may change depending on how fast your cpu is... and for those of you on LE, the delay will be different as well, so double check the position of the tuned track relative to the original track when you are done. The thing is, to me, I would rather nudge the final tuned track forward 2 milliseconds than deal with poor tracking. And for the most part, there are few singers that couldn’t use a little nudge back in the pocket. The end result with the delay, once you nudge the tuned track forward, is an unbelievably small fluctuation of 0 - 1 milliseconds on the tuned vocal track.
I know I am going to once again spark the Melodyne vs. WavesTune vs. AutoTune debate with this article but so be it, everyone has their own valid opinion. I tune with AutoTune RTAS in graphic mode and get great transparent results. If you use something else and like it then don’t change... but if you’re using AutoTune, I highly recommend you switch to RTAS mode.
‘til next time… take care,
Jed
This may already be common knowledge but just incase you haven’t heard of this, here goes. Use AutoTune in RTAS mode, not TDM. Enough said... see you next week.
O.K. I’ll explain it. AutoTune use to track really well in TDM mode, but right around the release of AutoTune 3 they did something that although sonically gave a better result, it messed with the tracking and all of a sudden AutoTune wouldn’t track worth a darn in TDM mode. I don’t know what they did but it was really frustrating. I found that it was particularly bad with vocals cut at low levels. I nearly gave up on Antares until a friend of mine discovered that AutoTune would track much better in RTAS mode. So I switched to using AutoTune in RTAS mode and it tracks like a charm. I’ve been using it that way ever since.
The only downfall with this is that even with delay compensation On, you still get a 2 to 3 millisecond delay and it will vary roughly 1 millisecond either direction depending on how much processing Autotune is having to do to correct the pitch. I don’t know for sure, but that delay may change depending on how fast your cpu is... and for those of you on LE, the delay will be different as well, so double check the position of the tuned track relative to the original track when you are done. The thing is, to me, I would rather nudge the final tuned track forward 2 milliseconds than deal with poor tracking. And for the most part, there are few singers that couldn’t use a little nudge back in the pocket. The end result with the delay, once you nudge the tuned track forward, is an unbelievably small fluctuation of 0 - 1 milliseconds on the tuned vocal track.
I know I am going to once again spark the Melodyne vs. WavesTune vs. AutoTune debate with this article but so be it, everyone has their own valid opinion. I tune with AutoTune RTAS in graphic mode and get great transparent results. If you use something else and like it then don’t change... but if you’re using AutoTune, I highly recommend you switch to RTAS mode.
‘til next time… take care,
Jed
AutoTune RTAS Not TDM
Tool Thursday w/ Jed Hackett.
This may already be common knowledge but just incase you haven’t heard of this, here goes. Use AutoTune in RTAS mode, not TDM. Enough said... see you next week.
O.K. I’ll explain it. AutoTune use to track really well in TDM mode, but right around the release of AutoTune 3 they did something that although sonically gave a better result, it messed with the tracking and all of a sudden AutoTune wouldn’t track worth a darn in TDM mode. I don’t know what they did but it was really frustrating. I found that it was particularly bad with vocals cut at low levels. I nearly gave up on Antares until a friend of mine discovered that AutoTune would track much better in RTAS mode. So I switched to using AutoTune in RTAS mode and it tracks like a charm. I’ve been using it that way ever since.
The only downfall with this is that even with delay compensation On, you still get a 2 to 3 millisecond delay and it will vary roughly 1 millisecond either direction depending on how much processing Autotune is having to do to correct the pitch. I don’t know for sure, but that delay may change depending on how fast your cpu is... and for those of you on LE, the delay will be different as well, so double check the position of the tuned track relative to the original track when you are done. The thing is, to me, I would rather nudge the final tuned track forward 2 milliseconds than deal with poor tracking. And for the most part, there are few singers that couldn’t use a little nudge back in the pocket. The end result with the delay, once you nudge the tuned track forward, is an unbelievably small fluctuation of 0 - 1 milliseconds on the tuned vocal track.
I know I am going to once again spark the Melodyne vs. WavesTune vs. AutoTune debate with this article but so be it, everyone has their own valid opinion. I tune with AutoTune RTAS in graphic mode and get great transparent results. If you use something else and like it then don’t change... but if you’re using AutoTune, I highly recommend you switch to RTAS mode.
‘til next time… take care,
Jed
This may already be common knowledge but just incase you haven’t heard of this, here goes. Use AutoTune in RTAS mode, not TDM. Enough said... see you next week.
O.K. I’ll explain it. AutoTune use to track really well in TDM mode, but right around the release of AutoTune 3 they did something that although sonically gave a better result, it messed with the tracking and all of a sudden AutoTune wouldn’t track worth a darn in TDM mode. I don’t know what they did but it was really frustrating. I found that it was particularly bad with vocals cut at low levels. I nearly gave up on Antares until a friend of mine discovered that AutoTune would track much better in RTAS mode. So I switched to using AutoTune in RTAS mode and it tracks like a charm. I’ve been using it that way ever since.
The only downfall with this is that even with delay compensation On, you still get a 2 to 3 millisecond delay and it will vary roughly 1 millisecond either direction depending on how much processing Autotune is having to do to correct the pitch. I don’t know for sure, but that delay may change depending on how fast your cpu is... and for those of you on LE, the delay will be different as well, so double check the position of the tuned track relative to the original track when you are done. The thing is, to me, I would rather nudge the final tuned track forward 2 milliseconds than deal with poor tracking. And for the most part, there are few singers that couldn’t use a little nudge back in the pocket. The end result with the delay, once you nudge the tuned track forward, is an unbelievably small fluctuation of 0 - 1 milliseconds on the tuned vocal track.
I know I am going to once again spark the Melodyne vs. WavesTune vs. AutoTune debate with this article but so be it, everyone has their own valid opinion. I tune with AutoTune RTAS in graphic mode and get great transparent results. If you use something else and like it then don’t change... but if you’re using AutoTune, I highly recommend you switch to RTAS mode.
‘til next time… take care,
Jed
Thursday, February 21, 2008
The Grid Ain’t Right!
Tool Thursday w/ Jed Hackett.
I’m often really glad that with the coming of Pro Tools we are now able to see what is going on, not just hear it. The grid is an invaluable tool both with time and pitch. I use to dread flying backgrounds from one chorus to another, either with a sampler or a 1/2” machine. Thank god for Pro Tools and the grid! But the fact that we can now see the grid has brought about it’s overuse.
I get lots of people who tell me I should give beat detective another try. That it is much improved and it could save me a lot of time lining up drums. They know I sit and edit the song manually and they just want to help save me some time. I usually just nod and politely say thanks because the advice is coming from good friends who are also great engineers and I don’t wish to offend them. The problem is, the grid ain’t right.
The classical world calls it rubato, the pop world calls it groove... and it doesn’t live on the grid. There is a reason that the drummer is laying back the high hat in between the kick and snare, or rushing a fill, or pulling a fill back, or laying the snare back within the groove. There is a reason that the drums have pulled back while the guitars push forward in certain heavy grooves. There is a reason the piano is pushing and pulling in a pop ballad. An alto sax just doesn’t sound the same when it isn’t just a bit sharp. Etc. ad nauseum!
There are plenty of times when the performance can be spruced up a bit with some editing and tuning, and that’s how I make my living. However, you have to be careful that you only move those parts of a performance that detract from the whole; that you are correcting mistakes and not vibe. When we go through a song chopping the drums at every note, then quantizing them, we very often lose the groove. Overall the track may settle a bit because it now has consistency, but you’ll notice something is missing. Usually people will just deal with that lose because they just can’t take the mistakes in the original performance. I’d like to give you a few things to think about that may help you keep the musicality in a performance while editing.
1) Before you start to edit, listen to the song as a whole and get a feel for what is going on, the vibe of the track
2) Start with the instrument that is the driving force in the groove. It may not be the drums, it could be the acoustic or the piano. Go through that track first and fix what bothers you. All the while keeping in mind the overall sense for the groove that you first got when you listened to the whole track. Pay close attention with your ears, not your eyes. Use the grid only to help you verify what your ears are hearing. If the snare is right on the grid but it feels rushed, then it is rushed so pull it back. It was an eye opening experience when a producer convinced me of that. He was insisting that the snare was early and I was insisting that it was dead on the grid. I pulled it back for him and darn if he wasn’t right! That was the day I stopped worshiping at the alter of the grid.
3) Once you have that key track tweaked so that it feels really good, then go to the next key element, and so on and so forth. All the while only using the grid to help you verify what you are hearing, not necessarily to place everything on the grid.
4) When you get to the end of things, go back to the original playlists on everything and A/B it with what you did. Make sure what you have done is an improvement. If not, figure out why and make the changes.
Here are some more specific tips that can be useful to you:
1) One really helpful hint is to find a part of the song where things feel really good and zoom in, analyze what is going on and why it feels so good. If you notice a pattern in how a particular instrument was played, mimic that feel in the rest of the song where appropriate. For example, if you find that the drummer is 3 or 6 milliseconds back on the high hat in relation to the rest of the kit and you have figured out that is the reason you like those couple of bars so much, then take that in to consideration when you are tweaking the drum track and where appropriate mimic that feel.
2) Sometimes on a shuffle feel everyone has a different idea as to how far to swing, so I usually find an instrument that has the groove nailed and measure the swing on the upbeats. If I find a consistent pattern, I will use that amount of swing when I find an instrument that just didn’t get the groove and I have to fix it.
3) If you need to tighten a track, you can get away with clamping down more on drums, bass and acoustic. Then if you let the electrics, keys and vocals float more, you’ll get the stability you want in a track yet maintain the raw energy.
4) If in doubt, always tweak less. I always err on the side of less and if at the end I find out I need to go farther, then it is really easy to do so. Once you go there, it is hard to go back. If you over tighten you’ll end up starting over from the original track. And that’s no fun.
Well I think this article is long enough and it’s too nice out today not to go running. Talk to you soon.
Take care,
Jed
I’m often really glad that with the coming of Pro Tools we are now able to see what is going on, not just hear it. The grid is an invaluable tool both with time and pitch. I use to dread flying backgrounds from one chorus to another, either with a sampler or a 1/2” machine. Thank god for Pro Tools and the grid! But the fact that we can now see the grid has brought about it’s overuse.
I get lots of people who tell me I should give beat detective another try. That it is much improved and it could save me a lot of time lining up drums. They know I sit and edit the song manually and they just want to help save me some time. I usually just nod and politely say thanks because the advice is coming from good friends who are also great engineers and I don’t wish to offend them. The problem is, the grid ain’t right.
The classical world calls it rubato, the pop world calls it groove... and it doesn’t live on the grid. There is a reason that the drummer is laying back the high hat in between the kick and snare, or rushing a fill, or pulling a fill back, or laying the snare back within the groove. There is a reason that the drums have pulled back while the guitars push forward in certain heavy grooves. There is a reason the piano is pushing and pulling in a pop ballad. An alto sax just doesn’t sound the same when it isn’t just a bit sharp. Etc. ad nauseum!
There are plenty of times when the performance can be spruced up a bit with some editing and tuning, and that’s how I make my living. However, you have to be careful that you only move those parts of a performance that detract from the whole; that you are correcting mistakes and not vibe. When we go through a song chopping the drums at every note, then quantizing them, we very often lose the groove. Overall the track may settle a bit because it now has consistency, but you’ll notice something is missing. Usually people will just deal with that lose because they just can’t take the mistakes in the original performance. I’d like to give you a few things to think about that may help you keep the musicality in a performance while editing.
1) Before you start to edit, listen to the song as a whole and get a feel for what is going on, the vibe of the track
2) Start with the instrument that is the driving force in the groove. It may not be the drums, it could be the acoustic or the piano. Go through that track first and fix what bothers you. All the while keeping in mind the overall sense for the groove that you first got when you listened to the whole track. Pay close attention with your ears, not your eyes. Use the grid only to help you verify what your ears are hearing. If the snare is right on the grid but it feels rushed, then it is rushed so pull it back. It was an eye opening experience when a producer convinced me of that. He was insisting that the snare was early and I was insisting that it was dead on the grid. I pulled it back for him and darn if he wasn’t right! That was the day I stopped worshiping at the alter of the grid.
3) Once you have that key track tweaked so that it feels really good, then go to the next key element, and so on and so forth. All the while only using the grid to help you verify what you are hearing, not necessarily to place everything on the grid.
4) When you get to the end of things, go back to the original playlists on everything and A/B it with what you did. Make sure what you have done is an improvement. If not, figure out why and make the changes.
Here are some more specific tips that can be useful to you:
1) One really helpful hint is to find a part of the song where things feel really good and zoom in, analyze what is going on and why it feels so good. If you notice a pattern in how a particular instrument was played, mimic that feel in the rest of the song where appropriate. For example, if you find that the drummer is 3 or 6 milliseconds back on the high hat in relation to the rest of the kit and you have figured out that is the reason you like those couple of bars so much, then take that in to consideration when you are tweaking the drum track and where appropriate mimic that feel.
2) Sometimes on a shuffle feel everyone has a different idea as to how far to swing, so I usually find an instrument that has the groove nailed and measure the swing on the upbeats. If I find a consistent pattern, I will use that amount of swing when I find an instrument that just didn’t get the groove and I have to fix it.
3) If you need to tighten a track, you can get away with clamping down more on drums, bass and acoustic. Then if you let the electrics, keys and vocals float more, you’ll get the stability you want in a track yet maintain the raw energy.
4) If in doubt, always tweak less. I always err on the side of less and if at the end I find out I need to go farther, then it is really easy to do so. Once you go there, it is hard to go back. If you over tighten you’ll end up starting over from the original track. And that’s no fun.
Well I think this article is long enough and it’s too nice out today not to go running. Talk to you soon.
Take care,
Jed
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