Shaping Life for Creativity

In preparation for these posts iv started noting down subjects I want to talk about. Looking back at this weeks notes I have a bigger list than I expect. I feel like I have been able to commit a lot more time to creative constancy this week and it paid off.

My Creative Space

After over a year of living in our new house, i'm finally starting to get the studio together. Most of the time we have been living here the room has been full of box's from moving. I managed to get it into a usable state but being creative in there was very difficult without spending around 10 minutes getting things set up/ packed down every time. This week I decided enough was enough. After a good clear out of things we clearly had no intention of unpacking, screwing in some guitar mounts and having a general reorganise. Things are so much better. Now I can just plug in my laptop and everything is ready to go!

The changes didn't come without making some sacrifices however. Besides being a studio, this room also needs to be a place for my gaming PC and a place for my actual job in procurement. At first I hoped that id be able to set things up so changing between setups would be quick and easy. After trying this for a few months I realised I was neglecting the studio side of things and as a result I was doing a lot less creative stuff. It all come down to the path of least resistance. When ever I used the room I could either spend what limited time I had setting up my studio or I could just jump straight into gaming. It was like the room was already making the choice for me and at the end of the night I often didn't feel good about the choice i made. This is why things had to change. With the new layout the path of least resistance will always be the creative rout and it feels so much better. For now the PC will only be the choice if I want to spend the time setting up. I am also making a rule for myself that when i'm finished the room needs to be reset back to how it is now. Further motivating creativity.

New Mixing Techniques

Thanks to my new studio space. Iv been able to spend a fair amount of time working on a fun little track. It started off being inspired by Amy Winehouse's "Valarie" but then picked up some funk elements reminiscent of The Fearless Flyers and Vulfpeck. Iv poped the demo on SoundCloud.

While making this track I picked up a few new tricks to add to my production process. When using a varied mix of drum samples like I have here I often struggle to get them sounding cohesive. Especially when the original recording picked up a lot of room noise. This rack was no different. This time however I thought id try adding some tape emulation to the entire drum group. To my surprise this actually had a really positive effect!

For this track I used the free plugin Tape Cassette 2 by Caelum Audio. I only needed a little bit of saturation and low pass to get the effect used in the demo. I later found out that this same technique is in a lot of the original Vulfpeck recordings to help limit the sound of the room they recorded in. Its cool to see that I found a very similar use case for it. I think from now on this will be the go to technique for me when trying to pull drums together. The filtering and saturation is very good at pulling different samples into the same space. I have been using the plugin itself for a while as a means to get the "lo-fi" effect on various recordings. Normally making good use of the wow and flutter parameters. Its god to see this has multiple uses.

More Free Plugins!

Talking about Vulfpeck, I also found out that they have worked a lot with Goodhertz to create a number of plugins including a free loudness meter.

Goodhertz Loudness 3 has instantly become my go to for volume correction when mastering. I find it very simple to use visually and it has a really handy feature that lets you set a volume "target" based on short or long term LUFS and the plugin will automatically adjust the gain output to hit that target. It makes it a lot quicker to ensure the final output is averaging at the level you want. Just make sure to follow it up with a limiter just incase!

This is Starting to Feel Like a Long Post!

I still have a few things left on my topics list for this week but this post is big enough. Maybe I will visit them in another post. Until next time!