2010 – is it that time already?
By Fran Ashcroft
It’s a pea souper here in Liverpool, ships’ foghorns blaring on the Mersey. It’s the end of 2009.
Well, much as I love tracking musicians live, I haven’t done a lot of that during the last 12 months – virtually every job this year has been remote mixing and mastering. So many indie artists record themselves, it’s inevitable. Those home recordings fall into two categories – ones that have a gazillion tracks with loads of plug ins, or a small number of tracks, often with sonic problems. By and large, the less confident the artist is with recording, the more tracks and fx, and in those cases I encourage a lot of weeding out and fixing. Partly to improve their arrangement skills – but mainly to save me the pain of doing it!
But what have I learned this year? Probably how to avoid any mix eq, and use the characteristics of my limiters and compressors for tonal adjustments instead. And I don’t mean multiband plug ins either. I suppose it’s an extension of my tracking methods, where I just use mic choice and placement (studio owner complains to engineer “I’ve got this great desk, and HE WON’T USE ANY EQ!!”).
With remixes I’ve also gravitated to only using reverb on vocals, and letting that form the space for everything. It works surprisingly well – probably because I tend to pan quite close to centre.
The other lesson – or rather reminder – I had this year was; DON’T FORGET TO PROMOTE! I’d been booked solid right up until July, mainly on longer term album projects, which all came to completion within a couple of weeks of each other. Things were busy, and I neglected to bring in new projects early enough to replace them. This meant that it was far too quiet during the summer, as my lead times with preparation are often 6-8 weeks. So I was left without any substantial recording right up to November. And now it’s totally packed through to next March. Had I planned my schedules better, the work flow would have been much more even.
So what for 2010? To kick off, a couple of records on 2″ 16 track – how fab is that. Lots more mixing and mastering, and these here blogs, of course! (Thanks!!! – Ed)
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