﻿Hi, and welcome back.
First things first: this video is sponsored by DistroKid. That means they're paying me money to
say nice things about them. It also means you get a VIP link down in the description, which
will give you a 7% discount, and also a little kickback to me to help support the channel.
Now most of you know I don't normally do these kind of adverts. It's not because I haven't had
offers! But I'm making an exception in this case because releasing your music is very
much related to my usual subject matter. In fact, there's little point in any of the stuff
I usually show you unless it one day finds its way into the public domain as a release.
Plus I can offer a personal testimonial in this case: perhaps you remember that time I
won the loudness war with (probably) the loudest song ever made?
I tried to release that as a single with a different aggregator: it was rejected on
grounds of audio quality, along with some advice to "make sure there aren't any puff sounds".
That was kind of hilarious. But I still wanted to release the mix,
so I turned to DistroKid instead, and they handled it quickly, and without judgement.
Since then I've released a full album, an EP, and a bunch of singles, including one half hour
epic that was the sound track to a FabFilter video with the same name; all on DistroKid, and they've
all gone through quickly with no issues. And actually, that's me coming full circle in a
way, and back to the creative side that really got me interested in the first place.
So I'm going to talk a bit about where I'm coming from, and how I got to where I am now.
My first project studio was back in the late nineties, and I put it together to
record demos for my band Elfin. It was based around a Roland VS880 hard disc recorder;
essentially just a digital portastudio, plus a slightly broken 8 bus console, and a small
selection of inexpensive microphones. You're listening to the results now:
this is probably the best mix I managed to produce with that setup…
Shout-out to Daren on vocals and the other guitar part, Sean on bass,
and Leon on drums. They remain excellent people and the best friends I ever had.
Anyway, this was recorded live in our practice room, with a total of four inputs available! Yes
four! How did I manage that? Well in this case I think drums were sub mixed to a stereo pair,
while bass and guitars were sub mixed to another. Then afterwards I just got
to process those two stereo pairs. The Roland recorder was happy to play back
8 tracks at once, so overdubbing vocals after the fact was no problem. But live recording
was limited to just those 4 channels. Of course, none of those recordings ever got
released properly. They were only ever intended as demos for a start; but in those days getting
your music onto the shelves alongside your heroes basically meant getting a record deal.
And for some unnacountable reason, the labels weren't biting in our case.
Anyway, for the next stage of my career I was mostly a live sound engineer. My project
studio was now a home studio, in which I tinkered around with Reaktor builds,
and wrote weird and wonky music that I never released and rarely finished.
So I'm now going to offer up two bits of advice that I think I could have benefited
from back then: Less is more.
This always makes me think of George Borowski: I played support to him aged 16,
my first ever proper gig, and this was the advice he offered us as we came off stage.
I think it was a pointed reference to the fact that our set overran,
but it stuck with me nevertheless. Here's how I interpret it now: you don't have
to throw every idea into every production. Keep it simple. Keep it clear. Make your life easy when
it comes to the mixdown. And your listeners will probably enjoy it more as well.
Less is more. I find it valuable,
when producing, to imagine it as a guided tour. It's interactive and four dimensional,
and your listeners are free to focus on whatever elements they like.
But it's a lot easier for them if you give them signposts, and clues as to
whats important at any given moment. For example, when a part comes in for the
first time, perhaps it needs to be mixed a little louder? Let that part establish itself, allow the
listener to absorb it and digest it; then later on in the mix it can perhaps take more of a back seat
while other parts have the spotlight. Now consider, how much more profoundly and
dramatically you can achieve that effect via the arrangement instead: the first time a part comes
in, simply make sure there's nothing else going on that will distract from it.
The arrangement absolutely dictates how the mix will have to fit together,
and how hard a time you will have with it. Are your kick and bass parts clashing with each
other? Can you fix that by writing those parts differently? Because if you can,
I guarantee that will work better than EQ or sidechain tricks at the mix stage.
Are your keys and guitar parts fighting each other? Well, did you take care that
they're playing in different registers? Maybe different inversions of the chords? Maybe you
could split the notes between them, so they only form the full chords together? Or maybe
the rhythms could change so the parts play around one another instead of on top of each other?
While I stand by mixing tricks like the super separator or the delta channel, an arrangement
based fix is invariably better. In theory, with the perfect arrangement,
you won't need any EQ at all to make your parts fit together,
it will essentially just mix itself. If you don't believe me, go and listen to
a good symphony orchestra play in a good hall, and marvel at that polished, produced perfection
that comes direct from the instruments on the stage, with not a transducer in sight.
Here's one of the songs I've released via DistroKid, called 'Reincarnation'.
Someone asked me a question about it, which I'm not sure I ever answered,
but for some reason stuck in my head: "how did you get that bass part to sound so huge?"
I could offer a number of different answers to that.
I could point out that the bass sound has plenty of upper harmonics, so it has a strong presence in
the midrange as well as in the bass region. I could talk about the saturation and distortion
I used to add even more harmonics and make it richer and fatter.
I could talk about the use of delay or reverb with predelay
to create a sense of ambience without muddying the mix.
I could mention the way the kick drum was ducking the low frequencies via sidechain trickery.
None of these aspects matter as much as one simple point: there's nothing else going on that can
conflict with it! The bass part can sound huge, because it has all that space to occupy.
Later on in this mix I do bring in some other elements, and the bass sound doesn't change,
but it doesn't sound huge anymore at the end, it's just a bass part. That's ok,
it's done its job and its time for the listener to focus on other elements instead.
Ok next tip; the video title; finished is better than perfect.
Back in my hobby home studio days, I rarely finished a mix,
and when I did finish something I didn't really know what to do with it; it would just sit on my
hard drive gathering virtual dust. A proper release still basically meant
signing with a label back then, and for some reason they weren't
queuing up to sign a producer of wonky, hard to categorise, and mostly unfinished songs.
So I'm going to address the problem of endlessly tinkering with your
mixes and never finishing them. Once we've internalised the fact that
the arrangement matters more than the mix, what follows is the realisation that your tenth attempt
to mix a specific arrangement probably isn't going to end up that significantly different
to your first or second attempts. The problems you will face are all predetermined, and there's only
a certain number of ways to address them. It's also important to realise that, actually lots
of really great music has flaws in the production. Nobody cares, because it's great music.
In fact often those very flaws become important parts of what we love about those mixes.
Get your mixes to a level where you're not meaningfully improving them anymore,
then draw a line under them and call them finished. Your progress as an engineer will
be measured by how many mixes you finish, not by how much time you spend on each mix.
And of course, the best way to draw a line under your mix is to release it.
That part at least, is way easier than it used to be: DistroKid could hardly make it easier in fact,
although I do have one suggestion that I'll come to shortly.
Fill in one page with some info about the release; upload your mastered wav file;
upload your artwork; and you're done. Here's a new master of my old song Wolf & Raven,
mixed in 2001 and never before released… and here's me finally releasing it via DistroKid.
It should be live in your usual outlet, perhaps by the time you see this video.
DistroKid warns you it will take a few days to appear on most sites. But I'm a Tidal user,
and I frequently see it pop up there within an hour or so, which just seems amazing to me.
Typically it will be a couple of days before it shows up in my Spotify for artists app. I
honestly don't bother checking everywhere else, I'm happy to take it on trust. Apparently you
can get your music on something called Tik Tok? Whatever that is. I'm too old for it I guess.
You can also opt in to content match, to automatically catch copyright violations.
Funnily enough that's part of the reason I started producing music again…
Here's the thing: when I started to run a commercial studio, it all changed. Of course,
the finishing mixes issue went out of the window immediately: it's simply not an option when you
have clients waiting and bills to pay. But also I no longer had my home studio, and
time spent in my proper studio was now work not pleasure, and the clients had to come first.
And then I did a bit of growing up and became a dad. Spare time, and energy,
were both at a premium for a while. I didn't make any of my own music for several years,
while I instead honed my mixing skills against the grindstone of real clients with deadlines.
I did in fact have a lot still to learn, despite many years of live sound experience.
Mixing a record really isn't the same as mixing a live show.
And when I started making tutorials I mostly used my clients' projects as example fodder,
with their permission of course. However, its become increasingly common for videos
like that to be flagged by content match. Usually I wouldn't use a project until it was finished
and signed off, and probably also released, so my videos would get automatically demonetized.
There is a process by which you can challenge it, but it takes weeks or months in my experience, and
frankly I can't be bothered with all that. Much more fun to make my own examples!
Who cares if the music is weird and wonky, if it demonstrates the point I'm making.
And finally I've come full circle and I can be creative again! I've honed my mixing skills
dealing with real clients and their real world projects, and now I get to apply those skills to
my own compositions, and I can make the wonkiness shine out in ways I never achieved before.
Best of all, with just a few clicks on DistroKid I can share that wonkiness with
the rest of the world, and perhaps find that little niche audience that will enjoy it.
Actually it's now so quick and easy that I should perhaps add a warning: I don't recommend that you
mix your song in the morning, master it in the afternoon, then release it that evening.
There is a happy medium! Give it a day or three after mastering, check it fresh, make sure
you didn't do anything silly because your ears were shot. It's just common sense really.
But that brings me to the one thing that could be improved. The hardest
aspect of preparing a release is, in my opinion, designing the cover art.
I know some creative musician types are also creative visual types,
but I'm not one of those. I lack any talent in that area, and find the process a chore.
So while I have DistroKid's attention, here's an idea you can have for free,
assuming you're not already working on it. How about a tie in with one of the AI image
generating things that's been popping up recently? It could take the song title, lyrics, genre,
optional keywords, then analyse the music for mood, density and such, and spit out a selection
of AI generated images for you to choose from, all rendered at optimum specs for cover art.
What do you think? Winning idea? Actually come to think of it,
I wonder why I've not been using those AI image generators to create my artwork already? Next
release expect to see a giraffe playing a Les Paul painted in the style of Salvador Dali.
Anyway, while I've tried to include some useful advice in this video as well,
the main point of it is this: Other aggregators exist. I haven't
tried most of them. But DistroKid has been flawless in my case, even with more (shall
we say) challenging and experimental material like 'I Won The Loudness War', and I'm happy
to endorse them as an easy and quick way to get your music released pretty much everywhere.
Check the video description for that VIP sign-up link, and thanks for watching.