Master Thesis in Sonology (ESMUC/Pompeu Fabra)

7/26/2019 Master Thesis in Sonology (ESMUC/Pompeu Fabra)

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CARRIAGE MOVEMENT EP

by Z+S

Mster en Sonologa MSON - 2012/2013

Corrado Scanavino


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_ Abstract

I decided to produce a record as my Masters project to immerse myself

into artistic and technical music production. What I present here is an EP,

comprising ve songs written by Sumcho and I and including input from four

other musicians.

All sounds have been recorded at home and in studio, then mixed paying

close attention to the coexistence of acoustic and electronic rhythms. I will

describe the whole process in detail, from the rehearsals and writing of the

songs, to the mixing and mastering of them.

The music is a mixture of various genres, spanning along experimental

electronic, progressive rock, jazz, punk and noise. Enjoy.


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_ Index

1. Introduction Page 1

2. Pre-Production Page 2

2.1 Rehearsal location

2.2 Rehearsals Page 3

2.3 Writing down songs Page 3 2.3.1 Starting From a Rhythmic Idea

2.3.2 Starting From a Harmony/Melody

2.4 Recapitulating Page 4

3. On Studio Production and Rearrangement Page 5

3.1 Recording Drums Page 5

3.1.1 Recording Setup

3.1.2 First Session (Oki Doki) 3.1.3 Second Session (Quid Quillo)

3.2 Recording Guitars Page 10

3.3 Mixing Drums and Changing Section Durations.

3.4 Recapitulating Page 11

4. Post Production Page 12

4.1 Preparing songs for the mix

4.2 Mixing, Re-Rearranging and Finishing Touches Page 13 4.3 Mastering Page 16

5. Conclusions and Acknowledgment Page 17

_ Bibliography Page 18


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1. Introduction

1

1 https://www.ableton.com/en/packs/konkrete-drums-2/

2 http://zenjiskan.bandcamp.com/album/early-wrks-ndncblzero

This work began in April 2013, with the intent to produce a record with

ideas and material developed for two concerts around May/June of the

same year.

The work contains ve songs, for a total duration around twenty-ve

minutes, written by Zenjiskan (me) and Sumcho. The structure of the record

and the form in which the songs are compiled, suggest the notion of an EP.

The motivations that led me decide to produce an original record as my

Masters project were the desire to bring out new experimental music, and

to immerse myself into artistic and technical music production.

The musical instruments used in the production of this record are:

Analog synthesizers, an Arduino based digital synthesizer, a self-built

Monome, an Akai Mpd, Novation Launchpad, drums, guitars, objects and

eld recordings. All sounds have been recorded at home or in-studio,

except for a few rhythmic elements taken from a sample library for Ableton

called Konkrete1.During studio production, other musicians were involved, letting them

hear the raw, basic tracks and then invited to play improvising with their

instruments, mostly guitars and drums. During one of this session, when

recording drums, I decided to add live drums to every track, hence an extra

studio session was programmed especially to record drum sections.

The music we propose is a mixture of genres such as experimental

electronic, ambient, indie rock, jazz, punk and noise. I call it

undanceable.I present this EP as my Masters project, and also as my new musical

product, following the self-produced compilation called Early Wrks LP2.


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2. Artistic Pre-Production

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3 http://zenjiskan.bandcamp.com/album/lluvias

The collaboration between Sumcho and I began in March 2013, when I

propose him to play together a gig I was invited to play alone. He said ok to.

Since then we started to talk about which kind of music wed like to do, set up all

our instruments and began rehearsing.

2.1 Rehearsal Location

As a rehearsal location, we choose (for the lack of alternatives) my home

studio in an attic in Raval. It is a small room, 1.5 x 3 meters long, capable of

hosting two or three people at most. It has a beautiful view toward the Tibidabos

mountain and the rooftops of Raval, with plenty of inspiring (and noisy?) old

analog TV antennas.

Here we had already jammed and recorded stu, such as a long noisy and

annoying improvised session, which later I decided to produce as a four live

pieces LP, called Lluvias3. This was the starting point for our new project.

Figure 2 A view from my home studio.Figure 1 Our rehearsal location, my home studio.


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Artistic Pre-Production

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2.2 Rehearsals

There were ve rehearsal sessions, around six hours each, spread

between two months. During each session, the basis of a song had been

written. There were a few extra sessions, in order to compose additional

sections or to add more instrumentation to existing ones. This led us to ve

demo tracks.

The two concerts we performed in May and June, during which we

added more live instruments and voices, could also be considered as

rehearsal time. Later we decided to include in the record some of the ideasdeveloped during these live performances.

2.3 Writing Down Songs

We basically employed two methods to begin writing the songs. But

before that, in every rehearsal, we have spent some time playing around

with our instruments, and investigating over timbres. We were also talking

a lot about what sound we wanted to achieve and which sounds we

needed to get it.

2.3.1 Starting From a Rhythmic Idea

One method was improvising some percussive rhythm with an Akai Mpd

and then using this base, adding chords with a polyphonic synthesizer and/

or a simple melody/bass-line with a monophonic synthesizer.

Once we got the basic rhythm (and therefore tempo) and a few chords,

we started looping them with Ableton Live, eventually adjusting the

tempo. After we started thinking on a progression for the song, like a

change of emotional status or ambience, and consequently trying to apply

changes to the percussive rhythm and the harmonic rhythm, evolving

toward the direction we wanted to go, such as creating intensity, pain,

happiness or whatever other feeling we could imagine.


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Artistic Pre-Production

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2.3.2 Starting From a Harmony/Melody

The other method was the opposite, i.e. by starting with a chord, a chord

progression or a kind of harmonic rhythm, and then layering a percussive

rhythm over it, again with the Mpd or with the Monome, which allowed

us to play live and loop in real-time. Also, Ableton helped us organize

the workow, such as creating separate sections of the song, and rapidly

recalling them to add new instrument or copying one section, playing it

with some of the instruments muted and so on. And hence Ableton was,

inevitably, involved as part of the compositional process.

2.4 Recapitulating

Five unnished songs were produced after two months of rehearsing.

All of them were built up in Ableton and had been used for two live

performances, triggering each basic section of the songs with the Novation

Launchpad and playing around and over them. Up to this point the

instruments employed were:

- Ableton

- Akai Mpd

- Dave Smith Tetr4

- Dave Smiths Mopho

- Novation Launchpad

- Samples

- Electric guitar

- Shure 57 - Field recordings

- Max/Msp

All sounds were recorded at my home studio, with an Apogee Duet

sound card, some of them through a Mackie 1402-VLZ3 mixer, others

directly through Duet or a PreSonus TubePre V2 valve pre amplier.

Therefore comes the studio session.


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3. On Studio Production andRe-arrangement

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The ve tracks written were not complete, we only had time to develop

the basic ideas but not evolve them into nished songs. I always though

something was missing, and during the studio sessions I realized what

it was. The acoustic sound of a full drum kit, recorded with top quality

microphones like the ones at the Esmucs studio. Once mixed, I felt in love

with that sound (or noise, isnt it?), of a real drum kit played by a realhuman drummer, or at least someone who really enjoyed playing it.

Initially, I was thinking about just re-recording some guitar sections,

invite some friends to play some ris or lls with guitars, violin, piano or

any other acoustic instrument, to add to some interesting details to the

songs. I had planned at most two sessions and then employ the rest of the

studio time to re-arrange and mix down all the tracks. But, after inviting

a drummer to the rst studio session, and mixing the recorded tracks at

home, I decided to concentrate my eort in studio to record drum sections,

and move the mixing time to my home studio.

3.1 Recording Drums

I recorded all drum sections during two studio sessions, with three

dierent drummers and two drum kits. In both cases a sonologist helped

me with drum placement, microphones and cables, if it werent for him Im

sure I wouldnt have obtained the same result (so thanks dude!).


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On Studio Production and Re-arrangement

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3.1.1 Recording Setup

I placed the drum in one of the corner of the recording room,

surrounded by absorbent panels, as shown in the picture below, since I was

trying to get a clean and less reverberant sound, to process it later.

I used a very similar microphones setup for the two sessions.

- Bass Drum:the Subkick and

AKG D112 in front of the kick, one

or two inches from it, with the 112closer to the center than the Subkick.

Then a Shure 57 inside the bass

drum, near the membrane hit by the

pedal, to capture the punch. Dynamic

microphones were used due to the

heavy attack and strong vibrations

produced by the kick.

- Snare:a Shure 57 in theupper part, pointing closely to the

membrane towards the Border of

the snare. Also two tiny condenser

microphones Akg C 518 set up

very close to the upper and lower

membranes, to capture the color as

well.

- Goliath and Toms:

Sennheiser 421, one of the most popular large diaphragm dynamic

microphones, suitable to capture the strong, punchy sound of the Toms.

- Hi Hat: a pen style Shoeps (cannot remember the model), little

diameter condenser microphone, hypercardioid polar patter, placed in the

upper part of the Hi Hat, pointing towards the center of it, slightly oriented

towards the wall to decrease lacking from other drum parts.

Figure 3 Setting up the rst recordin session.


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- Plates:a pair of Akg 414 condenser microphones, with a cardioid

polar pattern, placed at the two extremes of the drum kit area, one meter

away from theplates, pointing at the center of the drum, slightly oriented

towards the plates.

- Ambience:an Neuman U87 in the corner of the room, behind the

drummer, two meter above the ground, pointing at the drummers head.

3.1.2 First Session (Oki Doki)

The rst session was planned to record some rhythmic samples, not onlyfor our project, but also for the drummers solo project and to record an

improvisation between the drummer and another electronic musician. But

the electronic musician canceled the day before the studio session, so I

talked to Oki Doki (the drummer) just before the session started and asked

him if he would agree to play over our demo songs, which he agreed to.

Another musician was present at the session, so I asked him to play guitar

together with the drummer.

After a long improvisation between the two, we went out to lunch, andwhen we came back we started recording three of our ve songs. I let them

hear our songs for the rst time, and asked the drummer to play some

rhythm according to the tempos of the songs, but above all to feel free to

improvise everything that he thought was good. I tried to explain that I

love his playing attitude with his band, especially when he comes out with

strange plates sounds and sudden rhythm changes. And that was all, we

started the session.

In this occasion, I created a long version of our songs, repeating every

section two or three times, to lengthen the songs to around ten minutes

to give the musicians time to think about what to do and possibly repeat

interesting ideas several times. I did a separate mix for both players to let

them listen to each other while listening to the song.

About 40 minutes of music were recorded, without click track, with

barely any pause between each of the three songs.


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3.1.3 Second Session (Quid Quillo & Mariana)

For the second session I planned to record drums for the two remaining

songs of the EP. This time I decided to invite two other dierent drummers,

to get some contrasting drum styles into the same record.

The rst drummer was Mariana, while the second was Quid Quillo, a

friend from NY who had already heard the songs before. Also present at

the seesion where the rst guitarist and Sumcho.

This time I decided that the drummers should play over the original

versions of the songs, and to record a few takes for each one. I toldMariana to play whatever she wanted, to have an experimental approach

and investigating over timbres. Three very experimental takes came out.

We recorded a lot of ambience sounds, especially with the plates.

Then it was Quid Quillos turn, who played each song three times,

together with some punch-ins for specic sections. This time the click track

was set in Pro Tools.

It was a pleasure for me to see Quid Quillo playing on our songs and

also to record him. Unfortunately the sound of the drum kit used this time

(older and heavily degraded) wasnt so good, therefore I needed more

mixing time to produce a decent sound from the recording.


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Figure 4 Two photos of the second drum session.


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3.2 Recording Guitars

In both sessions described above we also recorded guitars, while the

drummer was playing. Two dierent musicians were recorded, Valillon and

Sumcho.

To record them I used a Shure 57 in front of a Roland Cube 30x amplier,

at one inch from the speaker.

A lot of eect pedals were used by both guitarists, a EHX Micro Q-tron

(Envelope Filter), EHX Clone Theory (Vibrato/Chrous) and EHX Stereo

Memory Man with Hazarai (Digital Delay) together with the in-built eectsof the Roland amplier.

I didnt really asked them to play specic melodies in a specic key or

scale, I just told them to play. A very interesting (to me) and poignant

melody came out from Valillons guitar playing during the rst session.

I later decided to use it as main melody for the rst song of the EP.

3.3 Mixing Drums and Changing Section Durations.

Once the studio sessions were over, I listened to the recorded tracks

several times in my home studio and decided which parts to add to the

songs. Then I mixed separately the drum tracks to obtain the sound

I wanted from it, paying attention that it was consistent with other

rhythmic sounds of each song.

I spent several hours on it, since often electronic and acoustic rhythms

are present at the same time on this record.

Finally, I found some interesting drum sections, longer than a specic

sections duration we had though for the song, so I ended up changing the

duration of some song sections and, in some cases, giving the drums more

prominence or even assigning to them the leading role. This has meant that

we had to re-arrange those sections later.


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3.4 Recapitulating

Two studio session, of about 10 hours each, were spent to record

additional drums and guitars for this record.

At the end of the studio production, we got the ve songs lled with

lots of drums and some guitar. Later I decided to use some extra material

recorded in studio, which sounded great to me. Hence we had to change

the duration, or even replace some sections, of the original versions of the

songs. That caused some sections to be later re-arranged while preparing

the songs for the mix of the whole EP.

At this point we have added the following instruments:

- drums

- guitars


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4. Post-Production

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This process began after the last studio session, lasting one month or so,

which was done entirely at my home studio.

The starting point were the earlier version of the songs, which were

roughly mixed in Ableton, together with the guitar and drum tracks

recorded in studio, which were mixed in Pro Tools with the stereo mix

(taken out from Ableton) of each song.

4.1 Preparing songs for the mix

At this point I had half of the work in Ableton and the other half in

Pro Tools. For each song, I initially prepared the tracks in Ableton, removing

unwanted eects used to play the song live, so to can import them into

Pro Tools.

For convenience, I will describe the process to mix a single song, since it

was similar for each of them.Once I got all tracks into Pro Tools, I separated them into groups, i.e.

rhythm, bass, harmony, melody, and so on. Then I listened the whole song

several times, re-thinking about the structure of the song. Some sections

sounded better with drums, while others with electronic rhythm, others

with guitar, while some seemed meaningless.

So I started changing the structure of the song and discussing it with

Sumcho, sending him various redesigned versions of each song. When we

reached an agreement, I began the mix the song.


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Post-Production

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4.2 Mixing, Re-arranging and Finishing Touches

I used Pro Tools 10 on a MacBook Pro to mix the EP, an Apogee Duet

sound card and a pair of Yamaha MSP5 Studio Monitors.

The mixing process started with several listening to the song, always

imagining what emotions we wanted to transmit or ambiances we wanted

to recreate and, technically speaking, xing things werent working. Then,

for every section, I began identifying the leading actors -instruments or

sounds-, the secondary and the supporting ones. Here is where I processed

most of the tracks, assigning them to a specic place in the frequency, timeand space. At the end of this process I had, more or less, the song working.

After mixing, some rearrangements were needed, especially for those

sections that sounded poor after a few listens. In such case, Sumcho and I

rearranged these sections and immediately recorded them into Pro Tools,

listening to it again and again until we got a decent version.

To go deeper, I will explain the process of mixing one song, the third of

the EP, called Meg. Please refer to gure 5.

I started with a pre-mix of the drum tracks (grouped by the blue color), and

then I sent the whole tracks to an auxiliary track via the Bus 3-4 to process the

drum as a single instrument. The other tracks were imported from Ableton (the

last 8 tracks, comprising electronic rhythm, synthetic bass and pads), except

for the guitar track recorded in studio, the voices and additional sound tracks

(darker blue and purple tracks) recorded directly into Pro Tools. So I began

mixing the pre-mixed groups.

In particular I added delay with SoundToys Echoboy to the voice track to

give it more prominence, while leaving the other voice tracks unprocessedsince they were used as background vocals or rhythmic elements. Then I xed

the stereo image of the bass track with Waves S1; the sound, produced by a

synthesizer, had a wide and varying stereo image. In the last part of the song I

also added a delay to bass track, since I wanted to give it more prominence. I

applied two dierent equalizations to dierente sections of the pads track and

automated the bypass of the two Massemburg MDW5 plugins used here. I


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Post-Production

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compressed and gated using the Waves C1comp-gate the drum mix. I left the

electronic rhythm tracks imported from Ableton almost unprocessed since they

were already produced samples and worked well. I only appied to them a small

compression with Waves C1 in order to control the peaks. I applied reverb with

Waves TrueVerb to the guitar track to hide it a bit farther away from the vocals

and pads plane.

As nishing touches I used three little synthesizers, which I like to

consider production tools as well as lters and eects, to add some noises,

feedback and pseudo-random glitches to some parts of the song, especially

for bridge sections, anticipating changes or to introduce a new instrument.These special tools were:

- Korg Monotron Duo through a Korg Monotron delay

(feedback and noise)

- Standuino PI (Arduino based random digital synthesizer)

I manually compensated the delay of each track to the one with most

delay, put a limiter on the master track to prevent clipping though I had

roughly made sure the mix wouldnt exceed 5 dB. I also monitored themaster track regularly with a Paz Analyzer to check if it was covering the

desired spectrum and stereo image. So my mix was ready for mastering.


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Post-Production

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Figure 5 Mix of a song in Pro Tools.


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Post-Production

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4.3 Mastering

I will describe the master processing I did for the rst song of the EP, called

Boards of Tibet or simply BOT.

I decided to gear the master mainly towards internet media (MP3, AAC), but

also for CD. I wanted the song to sound vintage, dramatic, intense, pure and

loud in some parts. I also wanted the song to preserve part of its great dynamic

range.

Since I assured at least a 5 dB headroom, and even more in the softer parts,

the rst thing I did was apply a small parallel compression to the entire mix,

using compressor, and set it limit () at -24dB.

Then I widened a bit the stereo image with Waves S1 to get a more

enveloping sound and MS multiband equalized and compressed with

Brainworks BX2 and XL to reinforce the low frequencies and surgically

deemphasize some harsh mid and high frequencies.

Then I sent the audio to the Kramer Master Tape (Waves MPX) plugin,

modeling a vintage tape machine, setting parameters to color the sound as

desired. I set the MPXs tape speed to High to preserve high frequency content,

set the input level until I saw the VU meter display +3dB at most, added a bit of

distorsion with the Flux parameter, a bit of Wow & Flutter.

Lastly, I maximized the overall level to -0.1 dB with Waves L2.

I used the Pro Tools 10 option to directly upload the sound to my

Soundcloud, without worrying about mastering for Mp3.


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5. Conclusions andAcknowledgments

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Building up songs starting from noises and accidental recordings has

always fascinated me, but this time I choose a dierent approach to

composition, starting from rhythms or harmonies. I tried to follow a typical

musical scheme to compose, structure, arrange, rearrange and choose the

elements composing the songs. The goal is to address a wider audience.

The order of the song has been chosen to give a narrative to the EP.

It begins with an austere ambient/progressive rock song and ends with a

pulsating dance-oriented one. It ows through three more songs, always

trying to balance the tension between dark atmospheres and relaxing

parts, pushing the limits of the box using noise and randomness, but

without breaking these limits.

I handled the whole process, from building up songs from scratch with

Sumcho, to nal mixing and mastering of them.

I always tried to do my best during this year, and I would like to thank

all the musicians involved, especially Sumcho and Valillon, the professors

Enric i Ferran for their availability and professionalism, and Pbinni for her

pacience.


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_ Bibliography

18

Winer, Ethan. The Art of Equalization[on-line].

Available at

Rod, Elliott. Compression in Audio Recordings[on-line].

Available at

Barry, Rudolph. Understanding Audio Compressors and Audio Compression

[on-line]. Available at

Robjohns, Hugh. The Real Benets Of Parallel Compression [on-line].Available at

Pensado, David. Secrets Of The Mix Engineers [on-line].

Available at

Lamere, Paul. The Loudness War Analyzed[on-line].

Available at

Why does Proximity Effect Occur?[on-line].

Available at

AA.VV. Microphone-data[on-line].

Available at

Haeny, John. Kramer Master Tape White Paper [on-line].

Available at

_ Books

Crich, Tim; [2010, Third Edition]. Recording tips for engineers. Focal Press.

ISBN 978-0-240-52176-3. Hepworth-Sawyer, Russ & Golding, Craig; WHAT IS MUSIC PRODUCTION?

A producers guide: the role, the people, the process. Focal Press.

ISBN 978-0-240-81126-0.

Krapp, Peter; [2011]. Noise Channels, glitch and error in digital culture.

University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0-8166-7624-8.

Toop, David; [2001].Ocean of Sound, aether talk, ambient sound and

imaginary worlds. Serpents Tail.

Documents

Master Thesis in Sonology (ESMUC/Pompeu Fabra)