[linux-audio-user] More Homemade Music --

[tim hall]

Last Monday 04 July 2005 09:02, james at dis-dot-dat.net was like:
> On Sun, 03 Jul, 2005 at 10:49AM +0100, tim hall spake thus:
> > Last Saturday 02 July 2005 16:41, Thorsten Wilms was like:
> > > Personaly, I don't see the choice of patches/sounds as part of
> > > the production ... or rather it's inbetween composition/generation
> > > and production.
> >
> > I believe it's called 'arrangement'.
>
> I've never been able to work like that.  I know that's the way it
> should be done, with steps and definable phases, but I just have to do
> everything at once.

Defining phases of writing, arrangement, production, recording, mixing, 
mastering doesn't tie us to a way of working as mostly solo artists working 
on our own, it's easy to blur these distinctions. I think it is useful to 
ground the meanings of these terms for the purposes of analysing our results 
and suggesting improvements.

> I can't just drop something in and then work on it later - everything
> about the drums, say, has to be done as I'm doing it.  So, that
> includes selecting drums, getting them into the rhythm I want,
> compressing them, getting any effects I want on them all or individual
> drums and eq'ing it all.  Often I do this at the same time I do the
> bass, with all of the twiddling needed there, too.
>
> It might just be because I have a bad memory - I'd forget what the
> hell I wanted to do with things if I left it for later.  That, and I
> can't separate making music and producing music.  To me, "over
> produced" is like saying "over musical".  Which is nonsense.

I have to disagree with that last statement. To me over-produced is 
over-processed. It doesn't sound like you suffer from this problem. I am all 
too familiar with watching a song die in the studio due to it having been 
rehearsed to death before we began, then the writer decides to change an 
important part of the arrangement five minutes before the red light goes on. 
Then the engineer decides to compress the life out of the bass, drums and 
vocals. By the time the keyboard player has done the 43rd Hammond take, the 
band has lost interest. All the vocals go down flat because the producer is 
obsessive about matching vowel sounds and timing, using extreme editing and 
pitch correction, where none was needed. This style of arranging/production 
frequently fails to come up with a final mix as there is always something to 
fix or add, basically because you didn't get it right the first time.

Oops, does my stuff look big in this?

tim hall
http://glastonburymusic.org.uk