Award Sounds Music, Photography and Consultancy

A short series of articles on collaborating with other people to make your music better, make it heard or to help them move their music forwards.

 

1. Recording

1a Engineer  read more »

I said in the previous article that I'd provide details of my most common composing workflows.

Sync to video Soundtrack  read more »

As well as composing and recording, I play guitar in a band, playing a mixture of covers and our own originals. We don't stick too closely to the originals when we cover them, realising that we only have four members (guitar, bass, drums and vocals) so many songs have to be stripped down to work.

Going from a song that has many parts to a cover version with only four instruments can leave you feeling a bit naked when playing live. It doesn't help that as guitarist, I often have to play several parts at the same time.  read more »

The main function of a compressor is to reduce dynamic range. They're not just used to increase perceived volume so you can achieve the loudest CD on the planet. That's in itself is worth remembering.

Most have a make-up gain/volume knob. The most common setting is to have the compressor set to reduce the volume above the threshold, resulting in the peaks being levelled out. That reduces the overall volume of the signal, so the make-up gain is increased to "make-up" the difference.  read more »

The Short Answer

Everything

The Longer Answer

The longer answer is that every series of actions we perform can be thought of as a process. Understanding those processes will help us improve, even as individuals, whether we're concerned with Music, Audio, Photography, Moviemaking or what have you. I'll discuss each in turn and set the scene for forthcoming articles.

A Basic Process

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I like to upgrade one thing at a time, knowing that I can reverse the upgrade at any point if possible. I like the look of Apple's Logic Studio 8. At the price, it's got to be the best value DAW currently on the market. I'm using Logic Pro 7.2 and relatively happy with it, but I'm beginning to feel the pull towards the upgrade.  read more »

A piece of music from a few years ago, part of the Tales from The Olive Grove album, some of which was featured in Showreel 2.

There's something about this piece, Freedom, that I've always liked from a composition and performance perspective. Nowadays I'd play and record it differently to achieve a better sound and production.   read more »

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Click Away - Musical Creativity 5

I find click tracks useful when I use them as a metronome and solely as that. They help me keep time. The problem that I find is that they're boring, so I don't respond to them very well. I can play accurately enough along with clicktracks, but the end result to me is never as interesting from a creative viewpoint as what I get when playing with other musicians.  read more »

Here is a brief selection of some of the music that Award Sounds has created over the few years as well as some musical ideas that I'd created before that. As I move through the library, I'll upload the better material so you'll see an improvement in the quality of composition and production over time. This first crop of excerpts go back about 3 years.  read more »