Practicum; from MIDI to Mixdown

We're overdue for an instructive post. This will be a brief walk-though of the process of recording "Uncharted Worlds."

The original track was composed and arranged by Sam Hulick for the game Mass Effect, and subsequently used for all the games of the original trilogy.

It was recorded, according to Sam, on analog synthesizers for that retro 80's sound.

"Uncharted Worlds" is in the top three most popular compositions of the Mass Effect series, and has been covered multiple times by various fans.

When starting your own arrangement, the first thing to get hold of is a copy of the original track. I always put that into Track One on my Reaper file so I can use it as a reference while I work. The next thing is to figure out the notes. In this case it was easy; sheet music was available from several sources, as well as complete MIDI tracks.

Reaper is a shareware DAW; a Digital Audio Workstation meaning it is a multi-track audio editor with MIDI editing capabilities. It supports plug-ins in several formats including AU and VST and most importantly for this part of the lesson, VSTi; software synthesis instruments. I own several good, cheap, and surprisingly complete third-party libraries, mostly from Garritan, meaning I have available decent approximations of many typical acoustic instruments.

It is trivial to take each MIDI track, fire up a VSTi instance in the SFX chain and assign that MIDI data stream to an appropriate musical instrument. The artistic part is figuring out what instruments will sound good for what parts (I experimented quite a bit on this one, trying out different combinations). And, yes, there's a bit of compromise (no library actually has a U-Bass or a Shetland Gue) and the simulated instruments are often very different from the kind of performance you intend to get out of your own instruments. But it allows you to test if the basic ideas of the arrangement are going to work.

The more technical task is making sure you can actually play that part on the instrument you own. First part is checking the range. Go to the track, find the highest and lowest note, check them against your instrument. In my case, the Sutton Hoo lyre couldn't be tuned that high without snapping the strings. (I transposed the part down a fourth, recorded it that way, then used a pitch shifter plug-in to move it back to where it was supposed to be.)

A similar problem was that the lowest note on the tin whistle part fell below the low Bb whistle I owned. I compromised by playing the parts on recorder but playing in tin whistle style (cuts and strikes, finger tremolo, etc.)

Other than that the parts were technically playable, but I didn't care to rehearse for a month. So I recorded two of the parts at a lower tempo and time-shifted them to fit. Another part I split in two because although I could play it at tempo (and did for the video) I had much cleaner notes doing it the other way.

Which naturally segues to recording. With a DAW like Reaper, you can listen to whatever combination of tracks you like plus the output of the microphone you are recording on. With this capability you set up a custom "headphone mix" for each recording pass. You might mute everything but a metronome track, for instance. Or you might play one or more of the MIDI mock-ups as a guide.

Reaper has a primitive but sufficient notation mode, if you are comfortable sight-reading a part. Having the cursor automatically move down the measures, follow-the-bouncing-ball style, is extremely helpful here. I tend to use the piano roll if anything; it really helps me figure out where to enter.

Most DAWs allow loop recording, where you can select a group of measures and loop through them, creating a new recorded track every time. Keep at it until you think you've got a good one in the can. Then stop, mute the spares, and see how it sounds.

Technical details; for this one, everything was captured on a Shure PG81. It is a cardiod condenser with a fairly flat response, rising a bit at 4K and 10K in a way that is generally friendly to acoustic instruments. I ran that through an FP-10 8-channel firewire interface with phantom power and zero-latency monitoring. No acoustic foam, no studio, just a chair and a mic. At typical distances of under a foot, even the traffic noise from outside wasn't a worry.

As you may have grasped from the above, I'm lazy. I'd prefer to get music done then have bragging rights about being able to play a perfect take. So I'll edit if I have to. On "Uncharted Worlds," for instance, the breath I had to take in the middle of the soprano recorder part was a little long. So I stretched the note before it to tighten up. There was also an out-of-tune note on the tenor recorder note that got a pass through the pitch shifter plug-in.

I am, particularly, a lousy drummer. For drums, I'll zoom in tight and make a bunch of micro-edits, slicing the recorded track in order to drag the drum beats closer to the mark.

After that it's mixology. Make a rough mix first, approximating relative volumes, and don't forget that clashing parts can often be clarified by panning them a little. Then on to the plug-ins. Unlike a traditional mixer, there's no channel EQ. Instead you do that with as many instances of various plug-ins that you find useful, as well as compression, limiting, amp emulation, pitch correction, or whatever else gets you the sound you were after. In the example above, the recorder was mic'd dead-on at about six inches and was far too "airy." So I ducked a lot of the sibilant sound to let the pure tone of the fundamental shine through.

Often, in a mix like this, the task for the EQ is to find the most characteristic sound that will make that particular instrument have an individual identity within the final mix. The classical guitar, for instance, has a boxy body resonance around 400 Hz that is very characteristic (but boost this in moderation!) But in the mix of the day, finger noise might be what helps it stick out and give it character...somewhere upwards of 6K.

For reverb, I usually establish a reverb bus and take an AUX send off each instrumental track so each gets a different amount of reverb but they all feel like they are in the same sonic space. Exception is drums, and some solo instruments; the former often like a smaller "room" algorithm, and the latter often calls for something "special."

Don't underestimate the value of automating parameters, either. The above screen-shot show how the volume of various tracks was manipulated constantly to bring them into greater or lesser prominence through the piece.



And that's basically it. Watch your meters, normalize if necessary after exporting the final mix. (Another hint there; drum parts can have transients that are very spiky but don't add a lot to the perceived volume. It takes a fast look-ahead compressor to tame them; I tend to zoom in up almost to the sample level and knock the transients down that way so I can boost the total volume of that track.)

Next time, I'll dive deeper in part-writing, explaining what to do if you only have partial sheet music, or even none at all.



Just to put all the musician-stuff in one place, the instruments were three ukuleles, two recorders, guitar, home-built lyre and a piece of pipe. To play the top part I tuned five strings of the "Mini-Hoo" lyre to the five melody notes. A fourth down, because the tension was too high otherwise. Incidentally, most processing in Reaper is non-destructive; when I went back to duplicate the track for the video all I had to do is bypass SFX on that track and I had my original pitches back again for reference.

The guitar part is six eighth notes which means it changes relative position between measures -- annoying enough I finally muted everything but the metronome while recording it. It was high on the E string and rather than stretch I used a capo (for the first time ever!)

For the bell note I balanced a small steel pipe on two pieces of scrap foam and struck it with the handle of a paintbrush. Then tuned it to pitch in software. This is actually more acoustically complicated than it sounds. To get a free ring you need to support it at the nodes. The first mode longitudinal has the crossing nodes (the points where the bar isn't moving relative to the support) at about a third in. This didn't sound as good as the second harmonic mode, which has three nodes; one center and two closer to the ends. And so forth. So by picking where I put the supports, I could pick which of the first few modes were least muted and most prominent.

Unless you are using a tuned bar, though, the other vibrational modes won't be in harmony with the longitudinal mode (as they depend on diameter and thickness). So in the software, I EQ'd heavily to focus in on the chosen fundamental. Then re-pitched THAT.

I could play the next part on the lute-backed tenor ukulele. But this is where musical choice comes in again. The desired sound was long sustained notes. There's a pedal on an open string, for instance. Problem is, you play a note low on the B string (I'm tuned to guitar top four) then have to quickly dart up the neck for three high notes on the same string. That means a hard cut-off, and the same happens on the way back down. So I divided the piece into two, recorded two separate tracks, then married them in Reaper. If I was a more skilled musician I could play it in one and make it sound good, but...

The soprano ukulele part was too fast. I could just get through the first measures but then it starts throwing in doubled notes. I thought this might be a mistake in the MIDI transcription (some MIDI processes can't handle long notes and will repeat a shorter note instead). But it didn't sound right. when I deleted them from the reference track. So...Reaper can be dialed up or down in playback tempo. Since the guide tracks are MIDI they still sound at pitch, only slower. And the metronome is still there. So I recorded at 75% playback speed, then changed playback of the resulting recording by 150%. Doing it this way meant I had to pitch correct, and although formant-preserving pitch-change algorithms are good they aren't perfect; it does change the timbre of the sound. So a whole pile of corrective EQ on top of THAT.

Philosophy and Bagpipes

There's this quip in audio circles that goes, "Don't worry, we'll fix it in the mix."

Stock picture from Colourbox

See, mix philosophy is you start with the best performance you can get, captured as cleanly and accurately as you can get. Nothing wrong with audio manipulation for artistic effect; George Harrison was playing all kinds of tricks with tape speeds and overdubs and Abbey Road is one of the great albums of all time. What you don't want to be doing is trying to fix basic mistakes, like a singer who forgot the notes or a broken microphone.

Douglas Morrison Little Theatre

I played piano as a kid. Not very well. (I still play, and I still don't play very well.) Piano is an instrument well suited to solo performance, in a way few others are. There's an incredibly wide frequency and dynamic range and it is of course a chordal instrument. But it is, still, a solo.

When I became ME for a small community theatre I had to learn to mix. And I turned to MIDI -- synthesized instruments -- to produce multi-part songs I could practice mixing on. And nothing wrong with that. TV shows had to get by with largely synthesized music, so did musical theater, so did games. A full symphonic orchestra is expensive. And even when you've got a half dozen real musicians in the pit, the demands of a Broadway score are such that two or three of those musicians will be playing synthesized instruments on a keyboard.

Thing is, there's a human factor about actual, physical instruments. They have more flexibility and can turn in a more nuanced and detailed sound. But more than that, there's a sort of essential honesty that comes through. Even the makers of a software and hardware package designed entirely to substitute for a pit orchestra (OrcExtra) suggests you replace as many of the built-in parts as you can with live players. Even just seating one trumpet beside the keyboard player who is operating the software provides a better experience for the audience.

insaneintherain, YouTube capture

And then there's these people. There's plenty of people, again, who get perfectly good result playing their chosen instrument against canned background tracks. But there's a sort of bragging rights in being able to say you played "All the parts" -- and there's people who do. A surprising number of them, in fact.

Odd thing is, though; often the drums are canned. Drums are expensive and take up a lot of space and are hard to record. So pre-recorded drum loops are not uncommon even among people who can play three or four different families of instrument. Same will sometimes go for strings or even bass. And of course piano; these are almost all legitimate keyboard players, but an actual piano is large and heavy and expensive. So they play a piano sound on a piano-like keyboard.

And that's where that mix philosophy starts to get weird. Someone like Carlos, he's clearly playing through the entire piece for each part he plays. Others, they are just as clearly making take after take until they finally get a useable one.

And from there it's a tiny step to editing out the fumbled note or even slapping a layer of autotune on the whole thing. And that's where it gets weird. See, the sound of an instrument is manipulated all the time. A trumpet in the rehearsal hall sounds a lot like a trumpet on a recording (but even there, expect compression and reverb...there's a reason there's so many buttons and knobs on a mix console). The rock drum kit, on the other hand, sounds very little like that in life. It is arcane application of specialty microphones and a lot of processing that gets that final distinctive sound.

Point being I don't see there being a bright line. And when it comes to recording, being able to say you played the trumpet part on an actual trumpet is really just bragging rights. But what happens if you re-pitch and sonically alter a recorded trumpet in order to get a french horn part out of it? What if you chop up a crumhorn performance in order to fake a bagpipe? Heck, can you even say you played "guitar" on a track if you used a ukulele and processed it a lot? And who cares if you do?

One problem I have is the same one that "fix it in the mix" points to. And that is when you chop and manipulate a take, modify and re-tune a sound, you are taking away from the music instinct and integrity of the moment of performance. There are decisions you make as a player that only happen in that context. They just don't present the same when you are down at the sample level hand-editing a waveform.

Basically, you risk taking the life out of it when you manipulate a recording in certain ways. And worse; if you had to resort to technological trickery to record it in the first place, that life was never there in the first place.

But...is this wrong in other ways? Is there a dishonesty in doing this kind of manipulation? And a dishonesty to what, and whom?

(The other thing I'm finding very odd is after decades of doing live sound and obsessing about mic placement, I'm recording my own stuff with basically any old microphone and....fixing it in the mix.)

Crumhorns

Add penny whistle to this picture:

My cover of Miracle of Sound's "Khajiit Likes to Sneak" is done. I'm not saying it is good. I'm saying I've learned what I can from that piece and it is time to move on.

Reaper started to develop a real stutter as my track count went into the 30's and 40's. I had to dial up the buffers, and that meant latency was too bad to do real-time monitoring whilst I played in new material. I was okay with the leakage I got around the headphones, though.

I'll post the final version. Probably after I cut some sort of video for it.




On the writing front, I scribbled out some trial scenes and the outline seems to work. It gets a little vague half-way through Act II, though, so until I fill in more of it I don't even know if I am looking at one book or three.

The overall planning scheme worked. Well enough. The trick to this one -- possibly to any historical fiction -- is to control the research. Do enough general research to rough out the plot, go into rough draft as soon as possible, and generate specific research questions from that draft. After all, if no-one is going to cook, I really don't need to spend days reading about food preparation in the Hittite Empire.

The "sort of" is because I need more general research before I can finish the outline. At least it is a little more directed. I don't need to look at "everything." My topics of strongest interest are:

The Luwians and Arzawa.
Ugarit and Canaan.
Phoenicia and Bylos.
Miletus, Sparta, Athens, the Peloponnese.

In the longer-term, more towards fleshing out specific settings; Mycenaean weaving (you laugh -- but I've already found a great web page.) Sailing (perhaps even ship-building) in the Aegean. Daily life in dei el Medinah. Pi-Ramses and the Way of Horus. Cretan mountain cults.

And Homer. Writing those sample scenes showed me that I need to find a certain something for the dialog so that it doesn't feel too modern (or too contrived.) I want to read a lot of epic poetry, in translation of course (I'm not crazy), and start to get a feel for a different way of speaking.

Oh, the terrible shawm of it!

The bulk of the work is done on the "Khajiit" piece. This is a mix-down of work to date. I will be tweaking it more. (I may, for instance, remove the shawms).

There's only one variation left to do from the original song; it's a kind of repeated short chorus. I can record those parts in pretty quickly. However, I've been thinking of going off-model after that point and instead of doing 3 more rounds of the verse and chorus (as the original does) instead do an extended Bodhran break. (And had I patience and skills, a proper recorder consort with baroque polyphony...)

Hrm. I wonder if I could do a slow jazz using the crumhorn as a bass...?