Blogging in B Minor

I just finished the final stages of production on a new cut called “Angels of the Night”. As with most writers, I never know where a song’s inspiration will come from – or when it will come. I had the music finished and fully produced for this piece for a good 3-4 weeks before the inspiration came and everything started flowing lyrically for this song from the primary message to the melodies. This is how I typically write – the music comes first and then I write the lyrics and create the melodies from that foundation. There are different schools of thought here but most believe that if you write lyrics and then try to set them to music it’s more difficult. I find that I can work more effectively with music first. As an example, I could have a bar in the chorus that is perfect for a verse that contains a total of seven syllables (chorus in Angels of the Night….”they’ll do all they can……to lift your wings up again“). It would be hard to pigeon-hole lyrics to this music if the chorus that was prewritten had, say, five syllables or ten. Are there people who can do it, and do it well? Absolutely!! All you need to do is look at Elton John and his lyricist Bernie Taupin. The difference here, however, is that Bernie is a talented musician in his own right so when he’s writing lyrics, he already has some general ideas in mind from a musical standpoint and he passes those on along with the finished lyric.

Anyway, due to recent health issues, I’m exposed to a lot of people who are dealing with some pretty dire circumstances and I learned about a boy being cared for by my Neurosurgeon (if you care to read the “back story”, you can find it here http://www.sacbee.com/health/story/169025.html ). She along with the team of doctors essentially saved his life. I view people like her as Godsent, thus the metaphor of angels. Someone in that office even made the statement “they are like angels – I don’t know how they do what they do”. The story about this boy inspired me to write this song. It started with him in mind but as with most songs, I tried to strike a balance between the personal and universal so everyone could identify with it and apply it to their own lives, in their own way. The metaphor of angels took on new meanings as I continued to write and let the song sink in.

Here’s the cut:

Angels of the Night

Verse 1

Have you ever wondered why
When the well was running dry
When it feels like borrowed time
How life can change on a dime
Have you ever wondered why
Through the days of cloudy skies
And the nights of no sleep
Why it’s hard to look before you leap

Intro Chorus

People come and go and some just fade
But angels they are always there
They help you face life unafraid

Chorus

The angels of the night
They’re here with you they’ll be your light
They’ll do all they can
To lift your wings up again
Please believe and just hold on
They’ll brighten the stars that fade at dawn
Raise you up so you can soar like an eagle flies
Angels of the night

Verse 2

Have you ever floated away
On a cloud above the fray
Looking down so all you see
Is how you’d like your life to be
Have you ever stopped to think
Why the world’s so out of sync
Why your friends think you’ve changed
Why your life’s been rearranged

Intro Chorus

Chorus

Repeat Chorus

Copyright 2007 © Mark Miller. All rights reserved.

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This is off of the beaten path of music but deserves visibility. It is so moving and also serves as a strong reminder that regardless of your stance on what is happening in Iraq and abroad, our troops are simply called to duty and willingly serve us.

A friend of mine sent this to me and I was so moved that I had to post it here in my blog. It has received 9.2 million hits on YouTube. Take a few minutes and check it out.

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I was watching Later…with Jools Holland. It’s a great show on Rave (Dish) and caught this band Duke Special. I had never heard them before (or the lead singer/songwriter Peter) but they are truly unique and quite brilliant.

Duke Special is one of a kind, a unique and talented young Belfast man whose bruised romanticism and soft Northern tinged vocals are at sharp juxtaposition with his wild dreadlocks, smudged eyeliner and unfeasibly wide trousers.

On stage, Duke Special explodes into musical mayhem the battered old trademark gramophone wheezes, huge cymbals clash, egg whisks and cheese graters break free from the kitchen, a stumpf fiddle screeches and the crushed velvet covered piano thumps and tinks in unison but its the very core of the songs, his heartfelt, passionate poems, that will remain in your head long after the lights have gone down.

On a more personal note, Peter (Duke Special) is a legend in many circles (Ireland, UK, and other areas of the EU). A talented musician playing for the love of it. He has relentlessly toured the UK and Ireland for the past 3+ years, playing in some terrible and some fantastic venues in order to get himself heard. Anyone who has seen him live will have instantly fallen in love with his incredible music, that ranges from the beautiful “Wake Up Scarlett” and “Love is a Series of Scars” to the up beat “Freewheel”.

The song below is called No Cover Up – a good piece of writing.

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Amy Winehouse has just started breaking in the US but has already had great success in the UK with a Brit Award and topping the UK charts with her album, Back in Black, back in December. The Back in Black album went straight to the Top 10 of the Billboard charts (#7) and sold more than 60,000 units in its first week of release here in the US.

She has a unique style with jazz influences – think Sarah Vaughan with some great, uniquely-styled soul added into the mix quite heavily. I’m a huge jazz/soul fan although I don’t write or play in this genre at all. Nonetheless, she takes it in a different direction. She’s a bit troubled at this point in her life unfortunately – it’s a well publicized fact but you have to appreciate the artistry and songwriting – she’s an incredible talent and if you haven’t heard of her you will.

Here is the video release for Back and Black, the key single from the album:

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I have consolidated this information along with additional information related to studio hardware under the My Studio page on my blog. Please be sure to visit that page for additional information regarding my studio.

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Like most of us who have home studios, I perform my own mastering. I’m definitely not an expert – I’m a songwriter and that’s what I love to do. However, this is a necessary part of the process and over the years I have come up with some techniques that seem to work pretty well. I was only able to do this purely out of reading a lot of books, articles and learning from others who can execute this part of the production process quite well. As I will never be able to equal the quality of what you would achieve by sending the native tracks out to a mastering facility, my final tracks do end up coming out with what I believe is a good balance between compression, eq, spatial qualities and that extra “sheen” that is needed to make the tracks shine. It’s also worth noting that I don’t have to pay the $300-$500 per track that a higher-end mastering facility would charge to make this happen and I’m fairly satisfied with the results.

First of all, to provide background I utilize Cakewalk Sonar Producer on the Windows platform. I use primarily a RAID (striped) disk array that is 1 terabyte in size. From a hardware standpoint, I use an EMU 1820m as the digital audio interface which receives my condensor mic, all guitars, basses and other instruments that require an XLR input, preamp or direct 1/4″ connection. The condensor mic I use for all vocals is a Studio Projects C1 – this is an amazing mic for the cost. You can read more about this mic by accessing this post in the blog. Enough said for purposes of this post.

In this post I will briefly run down what I do. I’ve tried all kinds of different plug-ins and processes but I found myself going back to a few core, staple processes that seem to be the right mix for what I am at least looking for. If you’d like to see the results, all of my tracks employ these tools and you can just go to http://www.markmillermusic.org/mp3/ and listen to a few of the songs.

First off, I work in the Sonar Producer environment on Windows. I have worked in this environment since it was DOS-based, thus my reasoning for not switching to Pro Tools or another system such as Cubase SuX. Following is a snapshot of a fully tracked out production I am currently working on in the Sonar environment

I use various plugins here, particularly the BBE Sonic Maximizer, Waves Renaissance deessers and TCWorks Native Reverb on vocal tracks as well as Antares Auto Tune. Here is a view from the mixing board in Sonar:

Once I have finished my work here, I mixdown the entire project (export it) into two (left and right) stereo tracks. Step two is to pull it into the mastering environment which for me is Wavelab. The mixdown process is simple for me. Most of my music is built upon soft-synths triggered by playing external keyboards. Guitars and so forth are plugged into preamps but other than that, it’s straight-forward. Effects are applied at the time of mix-down and any routing on the console above, such as the aux send you see, is also done at the time of mix-down.

Mastering

Here is the Wavelab environment with a song I am currently working on called “Angels of the Night” loaded up.

You’ll notice on the bottom I have metering loaded to monitor the mix. On the right I have the mastering section where you can load VST/DX plugins of your choice to apply to the digital audio file. I have a staple preset that I tend to use for all of my songs. Presets here work great. You can build a preset by loading all of the plugins you’d like to use for a preset, setting all of the dials and settings exactly as you’d like and then saving it. Later, you can call up that preset and everything is as you left it. It’s also very helpful if you decide to build presets song by song.

My primary preset consists of the following plugins:

Roger Nichols Detailer – for me this applies compression mainly and brings the amplification up without distorting. You obviously don’t want listeners having to crank up their stereo volume to 30 to hear your songs on CD. I have noticed that this plug-in makes a huge difference and it has a lot more capabilities than I am even tapping. I need to spend more time with it frankly. I have heard great things about Roger Nichols other plugins as well but I just haven’t had a chance to look into them. They are quite affordable as well so I would definitely take a look at them. You can check them out at http://www.rogernicholsdigital.com/

BBE Sonic Maximizer – this plug-in just gives the mix a certain sheen – you really have to hear it to tell the difference. If you turn it on and then hit bypass while the song is playing, you’ll know that you cannot live without it. The primary control that gives you that sheen is the “process” knob. You can also get some very nice low contour with the knob on the left and of course you have an output level knob. I typically just leave that pegged.

Izotope Ozone Mastering Tools – for me, I simply use the CD Mastering preset here. It employs a harmonic exciter, eq, loudness maximizer and multiband dynamics. Also, the loudness maximizer does not conflict with the Detailer compression as noted above. With most of my songs, I don’t normalize tracks in Sonar. I peg them up to about -1 o 0 and then export. Once out, I use the detailer and bring them up by about 3-4dB there and then use the CD Mastering preset here as is. There are many other presets available here and you can experiment with them. Izotope has an array of other plugins but if you look around on the web and in any mags, Ozone is the one that gets the press. It’s a staple.

Waves Deesser – As I mentioned, I deess my vocal tracks in Sonar, but once in the mastering environment I deess the entire mix with a “full mix” preset found in the Waves Renaissance Deesser. It will take any last artifacts out of the vocals and so forth leaving you with a clean mix – and it’s a great deesser. Some will over compensate and leave you with a mangled track. This does not.

Again, I am NOT a mastering master by any stretch of the imagination but I have been able to find some pretty good methods over the years of making my tracks sound pretty good, not by my own ears but based on the input of others so I at least know I’m doing some things right. Again, feel free to take a listen at http://www.markmillermusic.org/mp3 for the results. To hear the end result of the project you saw loaded up in Wavelab above, Angels of the Night, you can do that with the embedded player below:

Learning all of this took time – when I first started trying to do all of this I had tracks that sounded absolutely awful. Like anything, it takes practice and I still have a lot to learn. It would be great to have an engineer, producer, etc. etc. and just be able to focus on writing songs which is what I love but this is also something that I do actually enjoy – it’s just not the part that reeeeally inspires me.

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A personal post – my wife Rachael and I took a trip back 2 months ago with our son Aidan up to the Lake Tahoe area to take him sledding. Having lived in Southern California up until last year, we never had the opportunity with busy schedules and such to get him out there to experience this. He had such a great time and was amazed. Anyone who has children knows the feeling of experiencing life vicariously through a child’s eyes all over again.

I recall sledding as a child – I could go all day long and never miss a beat and he took full advantage. I went on to do a lot of skiing and will certainly get him involved here in the next few years. Aidan will be five at the end of this year and now that we are in the Sacramento area and less than 2 hours away from some good ski resorts, it will be a nice diversion from the daily grind.

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This video montage to MercyMe’s amazing song “Hold Fast” is something that totally worth taking in. Writing about it here cannot even do it justice. The song itself moved me so much which I first heard it that I played it 5 times over. Even the lead singer of MercyMe said that when he started putting the chorus together he knew this was something special. Below the video, take a look at the interview with MercyMe about the writing of the song. Enough said – take a look…

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I have tried quite a few condenser mics over the years – ribbons too. I’ve tried some rather expensive mics in pro studios such as Neumanns. As much as the Studio Projects C1 won’t compare to a $1,500 Neumann vocal mic, this mic ranks up there as high as you can go for the cost – a mere $250. I have used this mic exclusively for vocals, however, many have used it for close miking of instruments as well as a spot mic for wind instruments, strings, percussion and guitar amps. To give you some particulars (and if you don’t know technical details about mics, you can just skip the rest of this and go try one out!), the Studio Projects C1 is a large diaphragm, fixed-cardioid condenser microphone employing a 1.06” (27mm) capsule, high quality, low noise amplifier and balanced, transformerless output circuitry. It features switchable -10dB or -20dB pad and 6dB@75Hz or 150Hz high pass filter for added control in various recording applications and a clear, full response expected from a large capsule microphone design.

Another note – as the saying goes, your signal is only as good as your weakest link so make sure you have good mic pres. I’m using the E-MU 1820m which utilizes the same pres as in the ProTools setup. These pres coupled with the C1 create great vocal tracks. One of the chief complaints with the digital environment has always been that the resulting tracks lack the “analog warmth” that you used to be able to get from direct to tape recording. This mic doesn’t leave that type of artifact on your tracks at all. You don’t need to run this through any type of analog simulation plug-ins (and I haven’t found this necessary with other tracks anyway for the most part).

I would highly recommend checking this mic out if you can. Go someplace where you can lay down a track with it. You won’t be sorry.

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May as well put the other great cut by The Fray up. This is the video for Over My Head (Cable Car) by The Fray. Another great song. Isaac Slade, the lead singer, pianist and songwriter is a talented guy and for a band that just formed in 2002 they are tight.

The song “Over My Head (Cable Car)” was written about Isaac’s brother Caleb (whose nickname is “Cable Car”) who had been the first bassist for the band. Feeling Caleb was not helping them reach success, the band asked him to leave. In the music video for the song, Isaac’s youngest brother Micah was cast as a childhood version of Isaac. Isaac Slade went to Faith Christian Academy with Joe King

Another interesting note – this video was made on their own before they were signed by a record label.

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I thought I would take a moment to make songwriters aware of an amazing resource available on Bill Pere’s web site. Bill Pere is an internationally published songwriter, recording artist and songwriting coach. He has had 13 top-ten songs on various Indie charts for more than 120 consecutive weeks. He has been included on soundtracks and podcasts on college and satellite radio – quite simply, he has been extremely successful and knows exactly what he is doing. We learn from those who are successful and understand the craft, plain and simple.

What he has created, for all of us to learn from, is something called “The Songcrafter’s Coloring Book”. It is absolutely amazing. The links to the PDFs that make up the Coloring Book can be found on the link to his site above. It is worth pointing out, however, that in my opinion one of the most interesting resources here is a diagram called “The Anatomy of a Song”. Basically, he has taken the process that we all go through (if done correctly) in crafting a song and boiled it down into a flow chart type of diagram. It is an interesting study to say the least.

I would encourage anyone who is serious about their songwriting and wants to improve their craft to study what he has put together from A-Z. What Bill has put together for all of us to access is such an amazing tool – and he has done so freely which is just as amazing in this day and age. I would like to give Bill credit here for doing this. It obviously took him a tremendous amount of time and as I’m sure he utilizes this in his coaching, for him to place this on his site for access by songwriters like you and I is so very nice of him.

Kudos to Bill – and to the songwriters out there, again, you are missing out if you don’t study this in great detail.

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