Guerilla Music -- songwriting

Have an original tune burning in your head? Always wanted to write your own songs? In this Guerilla Music series, we'll explore some practical ways to get that song from idea to soundbite.

Record on your phone

Have a melody ringing in your head but not around a computer? Use your phone's voice recorder to capture those lines before it fades into memory abyss. For those who dont have any composition tools can also use this method to capture raw arrangments. Eg. Sing n strum recording or simple sequencing using available iPhone apps.

Pairing up with an arranger

Although you may have gotten melodies and lyrics down it is by no means complete. Pair up with a person that you know who can help you do arrangements -- adding/editing musical parts so the songs becomes more polished and dynamically interesting.

Collaborate with a band

Instead of having to handle all musical parts yourself, why not consider collaboration with a good band? Depending on the members, having more heads can boost creativity.

Learn to use a DAW

This is my favourite but it requires prior knowledge of sequencing basics. Softwares like ProTools, Cubase, Logic have lite versions that are affordable. Some of them even comes packaged with an audiobox which is an essential hardware to record vocals and instruments into your computer. Computing power and memory capacity have come to a point where alot of things which were traditionally done on dedicated expensive hardwares can be done on softwares.

Collaborate with others online

The the web becoming more social it has never been easier to find collaborators if you're open to not having full control and full ownership. With high bandwidth becoming more ubiquitous, things that are traditionally bound to desktops are shifting to the "cloud". Dont be surprised to find garageband served up to you as a web application in the near future.

Make up of a music sale -- where the money goes to?

CD ($18.98)

Label $5.00
Distribution $1.80
Design/Manufacturing $1.00
Artist Royalty $1.50
Mechanical Royalty $0.80
Recording Costs $1.00
Marketing/Promotion $0.90
Retail Profit $3.00

Digital Download ($0.99)

Label $0.47
Distribution Affliate $0.10
Artist $0.07
Producer $0.03
Music Publisher $0.08
Service Provider $0.17
Credit Card Fees $0.05
Bandwidth Costs $0.02

Wow artist do get paid little. At least in the dying CD trade sales of a million copies would generate $1.5million for the artist. But digital download of singles would reap only $70,000, that is if one can rack up a million purchases at all!

The Big 4

That is the term for the major labels which over the last 10 years have consolidated from the Big 6.

Universal merged with Polygram to form UMVD in 1999. Sony and BMG in 2004. Here are the Big 4s are some labels under their belts.

UMVD -- Universal Music and Video Distribution

Interscope
Geffen
Island/Def Jam
Universal
UMG Nashville
Hollywood
Disney/Buena Vista

Sony BMG

Columbia
Epic
Arista
J Records
RCA
Jive
LaFace
Razor & Tie
WindUp
RCA Label Group Nashville

WEA -- Warner Music Group

Warner Brothers
Atlantic Records
Bad Boy
Roadrunner
WSM/Rhino
V2 Records

EMD -- EMI Group

Blue Note
Capitol Nashville
Capitol Records
Virgin
EMI Latin

Will be interesting to see how these guys can reinvent themselves with the changing tides of digital singles music consumption.

Maximizing Volume In A Song

Have you ever wondered why volume of music on your cds sounds roughly about the same? Certain types of songs sounds slightly louder? This is because most albums are professionally mastered to achieve maximum volume and punch for airplay. Recently I've been trying to use my Studio One to master my remix of a song written by my bandmate. Still learning but seem to have small success at it. Here are the "before and after" samples of the track.

Before: http://cl.ly/1dNS

After: http://cl.ly/1dYt

Here's some things that I learnt.

1) Have a reference track

Take 1 or 2 songs that you like as reference materials. Watch out for tone and volume of individual instruments.

2) Pan thy instruments

Audio has got spatial components - stereo and frequency. If all instruments are centered in the stereo spectrum then everything gets muddled. Sorta like everybody queueing up in one straight line. Can't see all of 'em yeah? Spread them out over left/right space and they can all shine together.

3) Find the frequency hoggers

I'm using a multiband equalizer to analyze frequency spectrum. Instruments played at a certain octave will use certain frequency range. If there're a few instruments using the same range then you might have to sacrifice volume of some/all of them. Maybe it's better to change the octave of one instrument?

4) Use limiters to overcome clipping

If you look at the waveform of a song, they'll be spikes even after attempting to balance everything out. Good idea to use a limiter which will "push down" the spikes to unity (0 db).

5) Tone & feel of instruments gets excited with volume

Surprisingly without touching the EQ of the individual instruments, balancing the volume of individual instruments brought out the tone of those which has previously been overshadowed by a hogging instrument. Check out how the guitars and drums sound before where the bass was hogging the spectrums. Then feel the difference after the bass has been toned down and volumes leveled!