Old School Rock, Indie, Americana & Blues
Music Production, Engineering & Development in Los Angeles

For The Kings up on CDBaby and iTunes

The album is up on CDBaby and iTunes at last. Grab your hard copies or your digital ones!

CD Baby:

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/FortheKings

iTunes Store Link:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/a-collection-songs-for-kings/id385220391?uo=4

The CD is officially out.

The For The Kings CD release show went insanely well last night. CD will be up for sale on CD Baby/iTunes soon. Stay posted.

Making the most of the color palette

One of the features of Pro Tools that I find engineers use the least is the color palette. For me, it’s once of the features I love the best. I am all about keeping sessions organized and easy to use and I can’t imagine doing that without the use of color coding.

The Basics

There are three basic places that you can really dig in with custom colors: The track color, the region color and the marker color. The important thing here is to not use my colors, but to have colors that you know and can easily remember. The color scheme I stick to was one I learned from the great Mark Wessel:
Drums — Black
Percussion — Brown
Bass — Purple
Guitars — Green
Keyboards — Blue
Vocals — Orange
Effects/Auxes — Red

I keep my preferences set to the following:

Track Colors:

Thanks to this color scheme, I can open up any of my sessions, and know what I’m working with, without ever even looking at a track label. For example, here I can see that I haven’t overdubbed any keyboards yet. Pro Tools can let you customize a few things about track color via the color palette, mainly through Brightness and Saturation. Saturation controls how much of the color is shown throughout the track, and brightness controls.…well…the brightness of the color.

Region Colors:
This same color scheme can easily be applied to regions as well.

This offers the same advantages as in the mix window. It comes especially in handy when you’re dealing with high track counts, and your sessions gets a little chaotic.

Marker Colors:
You can also make the most of colors with your section markers as well. I have to admit, I don’t fully customize these, and usually leave them at random, but I always keep markers colors enabled. It basically allows you to easily see what section is coming up. If you wanted to though, you could develop colors for specific sections of songs, like blue for verses, purple choruses etc. To customize these, just click on the dropdown menu in the color palette and choose “Markers”:

Then, click on a section marker and customize to your heart’s content.

Conclusion:
These may seem like tiny, trvial things, but trust me, they can really speed up work flow. Play around with your own color combinations and try to develop your own standards. You can even translate these colors into the analog console world by using sharpies/highlighters across your console tape:

Her goddess eyes remind me of pagan times

We’re inching closer and closer to being done with the Josh and Neal (now known as For the Kings) record. We finished up two mixes on Tuesday: “Stoned and Blue” and “Don’t Ya Take Your Love Away.” Lot’s of good stuff. Can’t wait to show you guys. Here are some shots from the studio.

Oh. And here’s what happens when I’m bored in the studio with Martin’s FlipCam:

Session Naming/Organization

Believe it or not, this is one of the most important windows in Pro Tools. Session management is an essential part of recording music, and I thought I’d share a little of how Halftone usually manages some of the basics. I work with a lot of engineers/producers on the side and I’m constantly amazed at how disorganized major label, platinum selling sessions are. It can be a major headache, and waste massive amounts of time and money.

The General Idea

One of the most important pieces of advice I can give is to save your session as a new session EVERY time you open it. The session file that you end up mixing from should not be the same session file that you tracked drums to. This is a powerful lesson I learned a while ago and it has saved me a tremendous amount of frustration. It’s really powerful to be able to pull up old sessions and reference edits, mixes, etc as they were originally heard. Imagine you’re in a mix and your singer says “Hey remember 6 months ago you had that weird effect on the vocals? Let’s use that same setting.” Unfortunately for you you’ve been using the same “Mysong.ptf” for the last 6 months. Figuring out that setting is now impossible.

Initial Setup

I’ve used a lot of session naming conventions over the years, but I’m really happy with what we use these days. The formula is NUMBER.SONGNAME.DESCRIPTION, OR 03.MYSONG.VOXTRACKING. For a while I added a date here, but I soon realized that it was worthless, since you can always reference a creation date. Why the number? Two reasons: 1) It gives you an easy way to sort by name (01, 02, etc). 2) It shows you the order that things were done in. It’s really great to be able to open a session folder and see this:

It’s incredibly easy to see what has been done on this, when it was done, what’s left to do, etc. Now I know what you might be thinking: That could grow to be a TON of sessions sitting there. That’s where the “Session History” folder comes in handy. You can put all of the currently out-of-use sessions in a folder within your session folder, and leave the last used session file in the root folder.

Auto Backup

Let’s face it. Computers crash, the power goes out, things happen. Most DAWs have an auto-backup system in place, and it has certainly saved my ass more than a few times. In order for the autobackup to work though, you need to save. I recommend saving as soon as you create a session file, even if it’s an empty blank session. That way the autobackup will at least start kicking in. You can tweak this in Pro Tools in the “Operation” tab of preferences.

I like to set it up for 5 minute backups and a maximum of 10 backups per sessions. Now because we are organized about renaming sessions every time we open them, that means there are 10 backups for 07.MYSONG.VOXEDITS and 10 backups for 10.MYSONG.MIX1. That’s pretty cool.

Wrapup

Basically what I want to express is how important organization should be with recording sessions. The more organized you are, the more time (and ultimately money) you save. I highly encourage you to take a look at the recommendations of the Producers and Engineer’s Wing of NARAS. While I don’t fully agree with everything they recommend, I think they have a lot of great points.

The end is in sight

We’re starting to wrap up the album with Josh and Neal. It’s always a bittersweet feeling.

Martin was able to bust out a mix on one of the heavier tracks, “For The Kings.”

We’re also wrapping up the remaining vocals at home, and thanks to an extra iSight we have a sweet vocal booth cam. This thing is sure to be fun.

We’re looking at a release date of July 17^th right now. Time to plow forward.

Grab a bottle and drink it slowly

Neal and I worked on a few more songs this weekend: Drink It Slowly, Stranger and Don’t Take Your Love Away.  We got some killer tones again this week, and for one of the songs ended up running my Turbo Tube Screamer through his Tube Screamer, then a volume pedal. We got some really great feedbacky reverb swells.

Josh ended up coming by to check it out.

I drank a shitload of water.

Exciting eh?

I’m in the shithouse

Hey internets. Nothing too crazy to report today. Just did some electric guitar overdubs at home with Neal. I was actually pretty suprised at the sounds we were ableto get in my living room. Neal has a beautfiful old Fender Twin that we mic’d up. We blasted out the guitars on “Shithouse” and “Carney.”

Keys time

Blasted through some B3 and piano today for Josh and Neal’s album. Our good friend John Gilbertson was able to swing by and help out.

We got to use Henson’s great Yamaha grand and B3. A few of the songs we wanted to do more of an upright piano sound on, so Martin ended up doing some really close miking right above the pads and closed the lid. After some Fairchild love it was pretty damn convincing.

When you’re in the studio, you need to touch your chin at some point in the day.

King of Percussion

Today we blasted through all of percussion on the Josh and Neal stuff. Martin is the king of percussion. He did a lot of orchestral percussion work back in his Texas days so he knows all of the crazy techniques. I think my personal favorite is one I’ve dubbed “ride the snake” which is basically making your arm look like a snake and shaking it all around…with a tamborine in your hand.

We also got some good gang claps done on the song “Shithouse.”