Whenever I finish some task, it always takes me some time to decide what I should do next, then a few more days to be involved in it totally. I finished the “So many days” single, then felt it was a good idea to work on a 6 songs EP, including a cover song… Something a little bit crazy i’d love to do…
But first of all I really have to write new songs. I plan to write one, simple guitar and voice, each week until mid-june. The goal is to get enough material to record the EP, then an album later, after summer…
So songwriting… For the moment I already wrote 6 songs, including “So many days”… Here are the titles of these other songs : “Invisible birds”, “A useless tale”, “Ghostly women faces”, “The river”, “Untimely tales”.
As I said before, I recorded a lot of guitar stuff, so I don’t worry that much about finding new ideas… My main work will probably be focused on writing lyrics, but I spent some time on writing as well, and don’t really start with a blank page…
Why mid-june ? Because I dealed a 7 months vacation period with my company, starting june 15, ending mid-january. No more boring day job, every day dedicated to music ! So two months writing songs, then I’ll start new recordings…
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When I finished the “So many days” track mix, I thought it was a good idea to send the file to a studio for some decent mastering… Far decent that what i’m able to do, actually. It was also cool to let somebody else working on it with fresh ears.
Thanks to the internet, I contacted two studios, one in France, one in Germany, for a test mastering. This first choice was mainly based on the fact that I could discuss the details in french. I had to discuss in engish with the german one, but it did’nt actually matter that much.
The first master I got back, from the french studio, was awful. The guy made some standard mastering… too loud… no dynamic at all… too much bass…anyway… I sent it back, received a better version but not that much satisfying…
The second test was better, but not that much too, so I considered it was a good idea to find and try another studio.
At the same time, I was discussing about a mixing tip with Brian Hazard, who runs a promo website, but is also an electro musician who goes by the name of Color Theory, and an experienced mastering studio owner and engineer, Resonance Mastering, in Los Angeles.
So I sent the file and Brian asked me to work again on the mix, giving me precious advice as well. I did it again, and with those advices, it sounded far better… then he made the mastering and it was perfect. Even if I still had problems on some mixing details, he fixed them and the result was really amazing. He really got the song.
One of the most important point is we discussed a lot before, unlike with the other studios. Now I know exactly to who I’m going to send tracks next time for a bigger project…
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So I sent the “So many days” track to several mastering studios. I had a big discussion with one of them, so I had to work again on the mix, with different options. I think I’m close to a far better version. And the engineer told me he was surprised I didn’t use any compression on the vocals.
I spent a lot of time trying to find a decent vocal chain. I first experimented an Audio Technica condenser microphone… Very bright sound, excellent for acoustic guitars for example, but the main problem was the voice had no body. Worse, because I’m currently recording at home, it was also perfect for birds and neighbour recordings… Not that fine for a good mix.
I then considered using Shure dynamic microphones, in order to reject background noise. Well, that kind of microphone is normally dedicated to live perfomance, and I didn’t find something fine either, even if I got some good results with the really good preamp I own, the Chandler Limited Germanium.
I finally chose a ribbon microphone, the Sontronics Sigma. It’s got a soft sound, a little bit bassy, a lot of density so almost no compression is needed. It allows to keep a really good dynamic, and it’s got far more air than dynamic models. And it needs phantom power, whereas most ribbon microphones don’t need any but most of them have a low gain so you have to choose really carefully a dedicated preamp.
When I sing into it, I can feel that old jazzy special color, those guys put some really good red wine into a microphone.
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