Category Archives: music

Mixing Air Balloon

Began mixing the first song of the Before the Harvest project called Air Balloon, today. With audio work, especially with recording at least, mixing is kind of like bringing a lot of different instruments together into one overall product. I think mixing can also make it easier to listen to a song. It reminds me a little of how an orchestra works: there is a conductor who is leading the music to some extent and the audience can pick out different instruments playing at different physical locations in the orchestra. The instruments in the orchestra are not all in the same exact place, which makes it easier to physically hear individual groups of instruments to some extent. In mixing, the person mixing is kind of like the conductor and the listener is like the audience. The person mixing can also get some separation between instruments and “tracks” in a composition by moving the instruments and tracks to different sides (e.g. left, center, right) of the listening space. Tracks are individual recorded parts that can make up a recorded song (for example, an electric guitar might be a track). This separation that can happen when mixing helps prevent the listener from getting overwhelmed by all of the instruments seeming to come from the same exact location in the listening space. Mixing can help the various tracks mesh well together.

Been working on separating the instruments out in the mix and adding things like EQ and reverb to certain parts of the mix. Trying to get the vocals to be somewhat easy to listen to from an audio standpoint. It’s been a while since I’ve mixed anything, though, so I’ve looked back into some mixing tips. In some ways, I like how this song is turning out… but the perfectionism is telling me that it could still be different/better.

In spite of wanting to have a perfect product, I want to aim for “better” this time, and not “perfect”. This is a common theme that I want to remember during this project, though, because it is easy for me to forget this.

Ear Overload

Finished up some recent fixes or adjustments on the Before the Harvest project, today. After that, listened through the songs in order as they are meant to appear on the album. There are still areas that I wish I could fix, and there may still be time to fix some of that before being “done” with this project… but sometimes this just gets into the problem of trying for perfection. I want to do the best possible job on a project like this, but I also realize that this is not a commercial project. Getting closer to a point where I can focus on mixing the songs, though, but having that moment of ear overload when listening through the whole album at once. It can be hard to discern what still needs to be changed on a project when a lot of it sounds “bad” once reaching that point of overload.

Adding to the Test

Had the opportunity to work on adding drums, bass guitar and some electric guitar to a song called “Test Me with Fire” during part of today. For the drums, I use a program called Addictive Drums that plays drum sample sounds when a certain MIDI note is played on the music program I use for that. It works out well and is nice because I don’t play drums very well. Been putting to use an older drum/percussion set of pads for adding specific drum parts as well, and that is fun.

Had the opportunity to change the bass strings earlier this month and they have been working out well so far. Currently using D’Addarío Nickel Wound XL (EXL22OTP) (from an earlier post on a friend’s Facebook wall) for the strings.

Fun to add the electric guitar parts in general, but I’m learning that it’s easy to add too much electric guitar too quickly. A little electric guitar seems to go a long way. Been working on keeping rhythm when recording electric guitar as well, and this song from today is one of the faster songs on the related album. Fun to play the faster songs!

Picking Up Where

… things were left off on an old music album project from 2008, this week. It is something I put off for too much time and there has been so much time given to me recently that it seemed evident it was time to work on something constructive.

This album is called “Before the Harvest” and has some fall-related songs and some regular songs, but I’m not sure how soon it will be done if at all. Things have been going well, though, with adding drums, bass guitar, and some electric guitar to the 2008-recorded guitar and vocals. It is strange to work on something with such a long gap in the actual recording… but it has been interesting.

So thankful to God for the time to work on this project once again. Also thankful to Andrew Nagatori who spent a lot of time listening to me try to get a better recording over many takes when he did a lot of the early recording for this project.

One song on this project is called “Air Balloon”. It’s a simple song, but here is a glimpse at what it might sound like (pre-mixing, etc.) in the future if you have time to listen.

kanjoto collection

Summer provided some time to begin working on the initial Android implementation of kanjoto. The following entries are a step-by-step look at how this implementation was created and where this implementation is headed.

  1. Wireframes Drawn
  2. Framework Created
  3. Code Reviewed
  4. kanjoto Logic Added
  5. Project Demoed and Presented

Generating MIDI on Android

Went back to a previously-found project that helps with generating MIDI on Android: android-midi-lib. This is a really easy-to-use library (albeit with code-only documentation) that makes it easy to generate MIDI on Android.

I ended up trying out one of the examples included with the android-midi-lib project in a new Android application called Generate. This application then generated a simple MIDI file that could then be read by my earlier-created prototype of a MIDI playback application.

Initial Research

Found a way to play back MIDI files by using MediaPlayer class based off of this tutorial:

A simple exercise to play MIDI audio using MediaPlayer

And that tutorial was found via the breadcrumbs from this Stack Overflow post:

How to play changing midi on Android – jetPlayer

where a user named @dorien was previously asking about similar MIDI playback functionality (and evidently went on to create an Android application that generates counterpoint-focused music.) The paper on this app creation process can be found here:

So at this point I am able to play back pre-generated MIDI files in a basic Android app, and have created a prototype Android application named Playback.

Calling of Simon

After many attempts, I’ve settled on version 9.x for the Calling of Simon mix. The goal of this mix was to create more separation between the various instruments and tracks. That goal continues to elude me… but my ears want to tell me I’m getting closer.

The biggest change in this final version (as compared to the almost-final-version that was posted originally on FB,) is the piano track. I wish I could keep the crisp, original track as it was recorded for the final version of this song’s mix… but for whatever reason (frequency fights, velocity problems, etc.) I found myself getting tired of hearing the harsh, repetitive pinging of notes from a sampled instrument. In an effort to avoid these problems, I ended up reshaping the piano tone into something different… and from what I can tell, the change in tone has helped to better separate the piano from the rest of the tracks. But there is still more that could be done!

The song (and lyrics) can be found on the Music Scrapbook… or on SoundCloud (for the time being.)

Calling of Simon Mixing Notes

With the mixing of Calling of Simon, I’ve been trying to branch out into different mixing techniques (“different” as in: not trying to hide the mix in a glossy, mid-range mess…)

These techniques have involved:

  • using delay and reverb for vocals (rather than relying on a channel strip preset)
  • cutting out low end frequencies from the reverb-saturated piano
  • cutting out boomy low end frequencies from the bass
  • breaking up the drum group track into individual drum tracks

But I’ve faced problems with:

  • finding mysterious frequencies that hurt my ears (and these might be caused by unnecessarily-boosted mid-range EQ frequencies… but still trying to locate the source)
    • helped: by using a compressor/gate on the master aux to act as a “catch-all” for any harsh frequencies missed in the individual tracks
  • flattening the vocals… how do the pros do this?
    • helped: by using a compressor/gate to help with smoothing out the vocals
    • helped: by panning the vocals to hard left and hard right to take away the “in-your-face” aspect of the vocals and allow the vocals to sit better in the mix
    • still need to add more automation for the loud parts of this song, though… and find a way to cut out the light distortion happening from the mid-range vocals eq… (might try out different attack settings with the compressor, too.)
  • taming the high-end EQ of the drums without making the drums sound like they are being played in a bit-crushed cave