Quote:
Originally Posted by insub
Did you keep/mind sharing some time stats?
How many hours recording (avg per song or even total)?
Hours mixing?
Hours mastering?
|
Don't mind at all... Two full days to track drums, six songs per day. I spent about a week or two doing drum edits after that a few hours per day on and off. Much of that time was having to listen to all drums on all songs all the way through to find things that really needed to be fixed - that took the most time because with only drum tracks and no quantizing I had to be extremely careful about what 'mistakes' I edited.
Tracking, was about 4 weeks give or take. That was mostly in the evenings after work so couple hours per night with a few runs on the weekends that were longer. Keep in mind it was all in spare time so this was not 4 weeks of hard work but 4 weeks of the time we could get in between work/family. Average track count per project is about 60 tracks but keep in mind that includes all FX tracks, folders, busses and/or anything special. Pure official audio tracks are a bit less.
Mixing, was from roughly end of sept through third week of October. I was sending early mixes to trusted friends by the end of October - November through the holidays was really creative stuff and fixing things that were more orchestration or composition based. In other words there were several songs where I chopped out entire sections as they weren't useful to the song. January and February were mastering and chopping down the tiny things that kept cropping up. It was most difficult when I got down to .2 to .5 dB adjustments, at that granular of level change, what you think when you make the change isn't enough, it requires several listens in and outside the studio after the fact to understand if it was too much or too little.
Mastering FWIW wasn't that much work. Since I mixed thru a mastering chain the entire time there wasn't much to do after recreating the basic chain... I probably spent more time doing small macro level adjustments (see pic).
I was on semi-hold for a couple weeks while we decided on song sequence. It's amazing how level changes needed tweaking based on which song follows which. I had to deal with that quite a bit, song A ends loud, but song B is low key, I had to automate to account for that or the transition would be too jarring. A decent number of small volume ebb and flow adjustments.
I can't say much on hours, for lack of a better term, I'm a bit of a "stoner mentality" so I can sit down and dork with ideas for days and not even notice the time, keeping only the stuff I like and throwing alot away. But that was sort of the decision to do this ourselves, no studio clock, I can spend as much or as little time as I want, I can waste as much time as I want, and I did a lot of all of that.
Things I learned...
1. I caught more stuff that needed attention by laying on the couch in the back of the studio with complete disregard to the mix sweet spot.
2. I also noticed my perception completely changed when I was listening to a render vs live tracks. Once I grasped that I forced all note taking sessions to renders listened to on the couch.
3. I knew it already but was reminded that the brain/ears are a fickle bunch. There were times I decided to make some set of mix changes, got frustrated as to how obvious it was and how terrible everything sounded... Only to return to the previous version and find the changes to be nearly indistinguishable, truly amazing phenomenon.
4. Another thing I knew but is hitting home. I put a shitload of time into the subtle stuff that 99% of the people will never notice. Things that are super obvious to me, most never know is there and never will unless they dig in and listen over and over. I'm glad I did that, it's who I am but nevertheless, the person at the table has to decide if they want to search for the subtle flavors in the dish and/or if it's worth it. I'm fine if the vast majority listen on earbuds riding down the road without paying much attention but if the person is a deep listener, there stuff for them as well.
In all honesty, once the tracking/edits were complete, I could have mixed it in a week and be useable but again, the idea was to relax and have fun so time spent had no expectation on final result. There are a lot of sonic Easter eggs that took lots of time but that's just part of the fun.
Ask anything you want, there's only thousands of things I can describe LOL.
The pic below is what the mastering project looked like FYI - the only FX on the master track is a "just in case limiter" that never fired IIRC and a tiny, tiny, tiny amount of reverb to give a little glue overtop of everything - it's likely never heard to be honest - the rest is per song on the item FX chain: