He's been producing and engineering in NYC for over 25 years and has earned 14 Gold/Platinum Records working with Madonna, Will Smith, Santana, Missy Elliot, Public Enemy, Alicia Keys and many more. Producer Arty Skye offers his advice on how to make your recordings sound like a million bucks with this informative (and honest) new music production article. See if you agree with him...

A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing! I've experienced this many times in my life and my mom’s recent explanation of her computer problems echoed the sentiment once again.  She figured out that her Microsoft Excite was eating her Java. Hmmm, so I guess that explains why her Yahoo Id# wasn't working as her Ebay password?  LOL! Her solution to solving those problems is too scary to relate here.

This same reasoning is apparently practiced when I see a "one size fits all" solution for making music. I've produced thousands of songs through the years, and while I have certain habits and ways of organizing my work, every single song gives birth to it's own path of evolution. While technology marches on and the advanced features in music software offer some great starting points in terms of templates and channel strip settings, they should rarely be used as is.

THERE AND BACK
Last year we produced a few songs for a young rock band and helped them establish a unique sound and identity.  We focused on the strong points that set them apart from the crowd and avoided the areas where they were weak.  The result was a powerful set of songs which helped them land a record deal with a big independent label, which I'll avoid mentioning here.  This record label had their own in house recording studios, so they brought the boys in to record the album. The group wasn't crazy about the music producer they were assigned to, but in an effort not to make waves and go with the flow, they went with it.

After a few weeks, we were told that the record label loved the production that SkyeLab had done on the previous songs and were going to use those existing productions for the album.  Naturally we were pleased and offered to help in any way we could. The group had already begun recording the remaining six songs for the album.  But apparently, the recording process and the production quality wasn't up to SkyeLab standards and veered too far from the sound we created on the first set of songs.

So the group came back and asked us to finish the music production on the songs they recorded with the independent label. The label and recording studio was very cooperative (as we all should be) and provided us with Logic files for all the songs. But that being said, the tracks were a nightmare!
The timing was off all over the place, the drums sounded like they had a blanket over them and a good deal of the vocals needed to be redone. How did they even let the stuff out of the recording studio like that?

Well I certainly had my work cut out for me here.  The first thing I had to do was to figure out the timing issues.  I had worked with the singer before so I knew that there was no way that he sang that out of time.  As I investigated, I discovered that some of the vocals and guitars were copied and pasted from other parts of the track, but they were pasted a few ticks off beat. Also, on some of the tracks, the engineer had used multiple plug-ins that caused delays because of the processing time or the settings on the plug-ins. The drums were gated heavily, but not properly, so the gates were inadvertently opening and closing at all the wrong times, which was wreaking havoc on the groove!

GET ON THE BUS!
As I began systematically correcting these issues, I also noticed something else that was very disturbing to my sense of creativity and common sense.  There were an enormous amount of plug-ins on everything!  It seems that the engineer just pulled up stock templates of channel strip settings for whatever the instrument was that he was using. While in some circumstances these may be good starting points, they MUST be customized for your specific sound. Volume, equalization and effects are all relative within the context of the song's specific direction and are different for every song.  One size certainly does NOT fit all when it comes to music production and/or engineering. And by the engineer not utilizing a bus/aux structure, the enormous amount of processing power he was using just bogged down the computer and caused it to operate very sluggishly. 

Which brings me back to my point. This limited knowledge and inexperience of the label's engineer/producer led him to believe that the programmers at Logic Audio already did all the work for him. All he needed to do for a great vocal sound, was to call up the "Ambient Vocals" channel strip settings on all 10 vocal tracks and he'd have the perfect vocal sound! Wrong!

While this isn't the forum to go into a detailed article about engineering, I will offer these guidelines which I hope will improve the overall sound quality of your recordings.

4 GUIDELINES TO IMPROVING YOUR MUSIC PRODUCTIONS

1. Listen first!  One more time, LISTEN FIRST!
This may sound self evident, but you'd be amazed by how many engineers and musicians don't follow this rule. Don't start adding plug-ins until you know what needs to be done. Putting a compressor on a vocal because you always do it, or it's one of the channel strip plug-ins for "Unbelievable Vocal Sound" is like pulling out a hammer to fix a leaky faucet. Suppose the vocal was over compressed while it was being recorded?  Your solution is now to compress more?  I can give you 20 more examples, but the point is "LISTEN FIRST!"

2. Busses and Aux sends are your friend
Carried over from the old days of analog recording, we used Aux sends (often labeled as "busses" now in the music programs) to add reverb, delay and chorusing to various tracks in the mix.  Rarely would we ever patch a reverb unit across a channel because we wanted a little reverb on the guitar. And if we operated like that, we'd need about 10 reverb units just for the drums! So learn to assign a lot of your common effects to Aux sends. It will save processing power, make it easier to control the mix and allow the instruments to "live in the same room" (when you want them to).

3. Copy and Paste correctly for Pete's Sake!
Too common a problem here. If you're cutting and pasting graphically, set your grid to "Bar" mode so that the material doesn't get pasted a few ticks off beat. If you're entering the time in bars, beats and ticks, make sure to stay on point.  Do whatever you have to but make sure it's in time!

4. Don't rely on stock settings
I'm sure that a number of you reading this article will rush to your computer and say "wow, I didn't know I had all these stock channel strip settings. Let's start using them!".  Sometimes they are wonderful and can give you nice effects, like a ping-pong, phased delay with a distorted telephone voice. But even when that works, always refer back to "Rule#1. Listen First!" Can the high pass filter be adjusted to add more body? Is the feedback on the delay too long? Is the distortion too severe and making the voice un-intelligible? Listen, decide what must be done and then make your moves!

These are just some very basic guidelines but I suggest that everyone with a home studio, looking to make a more professional sounding recording go a little deeper than just scratching the surface.  As for my mom, I was told that her Java now needs some more Flash and then her Google can start checking for colds and viruses again. Can't wait to see how she does it!

This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it  Website Back	Arty Skye
	Arty Skye has been producing and engineering in New York City for over 25 years and has worked on over 1,000 records & with major stars such as Madonna, Will Smith, Brandy, Santana, 98 Degrees, Missy Eliot, Queen Latifah, Sisqo, Public Enemy, Alicia Keys and many more. Skye has earned 14 Gold/Platinum Records, 6 #1 Billboard Hits and a 3M Visionary Award. Arty is also a former writer and monthly columnist for Home Recording Magazine.
	List all articles by Arty Skye

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Comments (2)

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I am a Rapper/Beatmaker and I have been making beats and recording my own songs for about 3 years now. I currently use garageband and Reason 4 for everything and it gets me pretty close to radio quality after some work. My question is, is it possible to have a truely will mixed song with out using hardware(besides the mic) and just software. I havent been able to dip into that side of the pool yet and I was wondering if im behind the power curve or is software good enough.

Zyon , July 12, 2010

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CAN YOU PRODUCE ME AND MY CUZ

dashaun , January 24, 2010

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