Here’s an indie short I did the music for. It’s part of the “One Nation Many Voices” on LinkTV. If you like it, go vote for it.

Homebrood rocked the Skybox Cafe last Friday night. We had a great time, pulled a great crowd (much larger than I was expecting) and sounded great (if I do say so myself). We easily played several notches above what we achieved at the few rehearsals we had. The night ended too quickly for me. By 1:30 am I was still up for another set. But, alas, nothing lasts forever.

It was just a blast playing the old ‘brood tunes. For those that made it, thank you for the support.

On another somewhat related note: yesterday I confirmed my re-entry into the music education field. I agreed to teaching music 1 day a week starting in September. It’s something I had been thinking about for a while. I taught full-time for 8 years and don’t want to get that extreme, but after 3 years without students I’ve been missing it. So, a single day seemed like a good way to get back into it.

For those interested in lessons, give Mike at Connecticut Music a call to get more info or to get on the schedule.

That’s right, the reggae band Homebrood is having a reunion show on Friday August 3, 2007 at the Skybox Cafe in Fairfield. So if you’re into some good reggae and blues and want something to do that Friday night come on by.

Skybox Cafe
1494 Post Road
Fairfield, CT

Being a musician I tend to spend a lot of time with my computer writing & recording music. Now, most of the time I am doing this I listen through a relatively high-end signal chain. My MacBook Pro connected via FireWire to a Metric-Halo audio interface that is, in turn, feeding my studio monitors (Event 20/20bas bi-amplified nearfields). Over the past few days I have been pulling the house apart to clean & rearrange. This weekend I was in the kitchen area and since I don’t have a music playback system there in the kitchen I used the laptop and iTunes.

All I can say is, kudos to Apple for finally developing a laptop with a decent playback system. For the record, it’s a 17″ MacBook Pro, so it may be that the extra size gave them the ability to put in decent sized speakers. I know my old 15″ PowerBook couldn’t compete with this one.

No, I won’t be dumping my studio playback system or stereo system, but it’s refreshing to actually hear a bass line on laptop speakers. I’m listening to jazz & classic rock, so the bass is not mixed way up front or enhanced with a sub-bass plugin or the like – though it is well mixed stuff that is mostly from first release CDs from the early/mid ’80s that weren’t over compressed or limited during “re-mastering”. Plus I tend to rip CDs in as AIFF files (full PCM files), because I can hear a difference with MP3s…though a friend insists that AAC with VBR is practically indistinguishable from the original CD – but that’s something I’ll put to the test another time.

I’ll just leave it with…I am impressed.

Two weeks ago my Fostex X-30 4-track cassette recorder met it’s end. It was a sad moment.

Now, it’s not as if I’ve been using it for anything – it had been retired about 15 years ago when I moved on to other recording gear. Coincidentally, I even spent some time a few months back dumping many of my old 4-track recordings to my computer to remix them and preserve them in digital form. What made me sad was the fact that I spent more time with that recorder from about 1987-1992 than I did with most people. It was like saying goodbye to an old friend.

I still haven’t brought myself to actually discarding it. I can’t seem to let go just yet…even though there seems to be no chance of fixing this. Saddest part is that there are many recordings I didn’t transfer. Old jam sessions, old song and things I recorded for other people.

I suppose it’s a bit ridiculous to get sentimental over a piece of out-dated recording equipment, but it was one of those anchors to the past that we all tend to keep around for no real good reason.

Perhaps it’s better that it did happen. Sometimes holding onto the past can be dangerous. Though, I’m beginning to learn that sometimes getting reacquainted with things from my past can be good…but that’s a post for another time.

Here’s a cool tip for smooth background vocals. This can be done in just about any DAW or on an analog console, as long as you have a stereo compressor available to you. As always, there are no hard & fast rules in mixing but these setting should give you a good starting point.

Step 1: Pan
Start by panning your background vocal tracks so that they are not right on top of your lead vocal. I tend to keep the lead vocal centered and pan the background vocals no closer than about 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock, but will also pan them as extreme as hard left & hard right. Just try to place each voice in its own space.

Step 2: Low end management
Once you have tracks panned properly, bring the levels to about where you want them to sit in relation to the lead vocal. Now place an EQ on the track insert for each background vocal and engage a low shelf filter set at about 80Hz and start with -9dB gain. With the tracks playing move the frequency higher until you hear it begin to thin out the vocal part. Back it off just a bit to just before you really noticed it. Do this for the remaining background vocal tracks. This insures that the vocals do not interfere with the instruments that belong in the low end (like bass & kick drum).

Step 3: Submix
Now you want to add a stereo Aux track to your mix and set the outputs of all your background vocals to this track. This is how we set up a submix for the background vocals. This fader will now control the overall volume of the background vocals.

Step 4: Automate (ride those faders)
Now, you are going to want to go one background vocal track at a time and automate your volume levels. Listen to the track in its entirety and get an idea where you think it’s too quiet or too loud, and then go through and automate the fader levels to balance out those sections. I like to enable the automation record on the mixer and then have it memorize my fader moves as I play the song. Then I will go through and smooth out my automation by adjusting the automation in the volume track view with the pencil tool. Just to be clear – this is being done to the actual individual background tracks & not the aux submix fader.

Step 5: Add some gel
Now that we have the tracks all going to our aux submix fader, the low end is nice & clean and we have the levels where we want them we need to get these tracks working together. For that I like to add a small amount of compression on the Aux (submix) track. Insert your favorite compressor on the background vocal submix. Set the ratio real low (1.6:1) and the threshold at about -20 dB. Set the attack to about 10 ms and the release about 100 ms. Now play the song and watch those meters, you want a maximum of 3dB of compression. Adjust that Threshold setting until you get that to happen. Then play it through again and adjust the release point until the compression sounds smooth.

Step 6: EQ
I know we added some individual EQ to each track to tame the low end. Now what we want to do is affect the background vocals as a whole and keep them out of the way of the lead vocal. Place an EQ on the background vocal aux track just after the compressor and engage a peaking (parametric) filter. Set the mid-frequency at about 3kHz, the bandwidth (Q) about an octave and the gain at -3dB.

And there you have it. The great thing about this trick is that you can apply it to other elements in a mix, like guitars or percussion. Plus, the submix technique is very useful for keeping large mixes manageable.