Nature's Game

Don't give up on vocals. The trick is just not to make it a big deal. The reason I can happily put out tracks with my terrible vocals on it is because it doesn't matter. It's ok to not get it right. For your voice to not be what you want it to be, to not be capable of achieving the performance you want., it shouldn't matter.

a. I'd be deluded if I thought it was going to be heard to begin with, so I'm safe.

b. I'm just going to make another one tomorrow, so it doesn't matter if it sucks because there's always a slim chance one will turn out OK and that will cancel all the bad ones

c. All the time I'm doing, means I'm practicing. So in theory I might be getting better, and it's costing me nothing but a pretty crappy part of my personality which I can afford to lose anyway which is my ego

d. If nothing else I'm learning ways of handling vocals for when I have to deal with a real vocalists stems.

e. It still took me half a year of just doing dailies before I really added vocals, but I could do it at my own pace. Starting with backing sounds, building up to the point I was ready to add in a little bit.
f. Tracks I do without vocals seem to have fewer listens than tracks with, therefore I can conclude that even really bad vocals are better than no vocals in the vast majority of cases (and that might have something to do with the incredible rarity of purely instrumental hits on the chart since the end of Surf in the 60's, even including dance and electronica anthems).
g. Eventually you will find where your voice fits, but first you have to find its limitations. Then you can lean in to your capabilities and those limits.
h. Which leads to - it's OK to make other kinds of music than what you think you want to make. In the end you'll find that the kind of music you think you want to make is most likely just not original at all, but copying someone else' thing who you think is cool at this moment, and you don't just want to be a pale shadow, a copycat do you? Just let whatever it is happen.

Now with regards the glue of the mix. The thing that's to my ears super holding you back here is the drums programing.

Unless you're a genius at programing natural sounding drums, just don't do it. If you're using Superior Drummer (or EZ Drummer) just do this :

A trick that can help is you can play your DAW in the background while you're doing this, so you can record a guitar riff, then loop in the DAW and do Tap 2 Find while it's playing, allowing you to groove in just the kick, or snare or both. Then loop through the results and hear them against your guitar as you go.

Wonderful post Per. Thank you.

Great post Per,

I'll add that you can treat your vocals like any other guitar lol I mean you can do so much from a vocal take , from recording tech to post FX , doubling etc.

I took a few lessons myself , it really helped , but not as much as single regular practice, just to build up possibilities , trial & error ...

Do you want to spend that time working on it?

What’s wrong with them that perhaps you can’t hear is that they sound mechanical and like someone has programmed them in, in a very basic fashion.

So they’re the most prominent feature that’s holding you back both in terms of your tracks sounding more professional (if that’s what you want) and in terms of your time as you’ve mentioned in the past that programming the drums is taking so long it’s what’s holding you back from doing a track per day. So it’s actually hurting all other aspects of your progress to work the way you’re working right now.

So here’s the thing. You have a choice in how you work on drums. If you meticulously program them in then start to end one beat at a time then you have to be the kind of person who hears every beat, knows exactly what they want and how it’s going to sound in their head from the off, for the whole track. It’s a level of focus that few people have, and the results tend to always sound skewed and artificial, even when we used to work with sequencers we’d use samples to help bring in the natural elements even in EDM.

For almost everyone it’s a far better workflow to rough out then refine. That’s the workflow you can get with using tap-2-find and then going in, adjusting parameters, and finally going in to program the one or two problem areas. You’ll right out of the gate have a more professional and natural sounding beat or loop, meaning you’re starting from a better position and have got there a ridiculous order of magnitude faster. You can then hear the overall mix of the track immediately, allowing you to adjust as you see fit and work creatively rather than being held back by the amount of work it would take to e.g. adjust the cymbal pattern, and also allowing you to work on and refine that mix for a larger portion of the creation of the track, which will improve your mixing skills. It’ll also allow you to work on arrangement more, you’ll hear the drums and go “ok I need to redo the guitars here” or “sounds empty, lets add a rhythm guitar, or synth”.

Your energy is the most valuable resource you have. There is no right or wrong way to work, but it also doens’t matter how you got there, there’s no cheating, and there are ways of working that drain you faster or slower. You need to be able to use your energy where it matters, the drums should not be the part that you waste the most time on for the least return.

Now if you want to program drums entirely then you need to start thinking like a producer, don’t shoehorn natural sounding drum samples into rigid sounding patterns unless it’s an affectation that’s going to sound good. You’ll still need to start creating and using presets. Producers tend to build libraries of samples, loop patterns, loop samples that they then use and re-use. The whole point is “the beat”. It’s a specific approach, you need to be someone who’s driven and inspired by patterns and interesting sounds. This may not be what’s important to you right now. You should get comfortable with sequencers, samplers and pattern sequencers. Then you will have to work very hard on that to elevate yourself above 4 to the floor and amen breaks.

Personally if I were you I’d trim the fat from my workflow so I could just get going, focus on the thing I love, and the things I actually want to work on. it sounds like at the moment you’re focused on mixing. So therefore kill the stuff getting in the way of that. Optimize your workflow.

The drum mixes in SD should be good to go, the most I do on that side is reduce the overheads and swap out a drum if I don’t particularly like its resonance.

With regards adjusting velocities and randomizing hits. Again the problem is the starting point. Quality in = quality out. Start with their midi, not with your programmed patterns.

Try this for your next track :

1. Lay down a short guitar riff to a metronome.

2. Set your DAW to loop the riff and hit play.

3. Open SD. Go to Grooves, and Tap 2 Find. Finger tap in a kick and snare that feel right against your riff, then pick find. If you are not super inspired then just use the filter system instead, i.e. select that you want a verse or a chorus, to be in your time signature, that’s shuffled or not etc, each of the columns you click will filter down giving your more original options to try out.

4. Press play next to the top results till you find one that you like

5. Drag that clip into the SD timeline, copy and paste it (or I believe CTRL + drag), hit select all, the repeat till a few times to duplicate out a decent number of loops.

6. Close SD. Don’t open it again till you’re right at the end of your session.

7. Re-record your guitars against the drums.

Now later on once you’ve got the form of a song together, go back in to SD. Right click on the clip in the browser and pick the option to open the folder. Just drag & drop in different parts as needed to the SD timeline. E.g. chorus, fills etc.

Don’t touch the SD mixer. Don’t program any drums or edit the clips. And most important of all don’t change things unless it actively improves the sound or brings it towards your goal, listen to your reference track before making the change, then on your own track listen back at a very quiet volume so you are not deceived by volume and resonance filling out the sound.

The less you do, the better it’ll all sound. The audiophile ideal is to eliminate all processing from all tracks and from the master bus. That means you have perfect quality going in. If you use an effect, it should be for effect rather than for repair, like it’s a part of the instrument.

Once you are used to letting go, then you can start to play more with it. But starting out in a granular way before you’ve fully developed your ear and understand the interplay between all the different parts, how arrangement influences tone and what’s visible in a track is a way to ingrain bad habits.

You can do it! Just have faith and be mindful of perfectionism.

Quote from BayouTexan

Kind of a Southern Rock tune. I had this for a couple of weeks to try vocals on and gave up.. I've been really focusing on my timings and trying to get these new mixes to glue together so not to sound so amateurish.

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BayouTexan Love the guitar parts in the new track, tone is great too.

I see a few comments on drum programing and the time it takes to program drums etc. above and i'm not going to say anything else other than this..........When i sit down to record a track using EZdrummer3, the whole drum track takes me 10 minutes. I DO NOT adjust anything in EZdrummer or in the mix and i tend to use the one kit that i love which is the stock "Bright room reverb" kit. I find a beat using either tap to find or bandmate and then i use the variations in the song editor. This helps me keep pushing on and lets me stay creative rather than spending allot of time programing something. My advice on drums, use tap to find and bandmate to get you 90% there then adjust to suit yourself.