Here’s a collection of tips you might find helpful the next time a pricey piece of gear stands between you and great recordings.

Help from others

Have a friend perform: Home recording, especially for singer/songwriters and electronic musicians, often involves a single musician writing and recording all the music. But artists in this situation can find themselves too close to the song, at mix time, to make decisions critically.

Working with other musicians might initially complicate recording and mixing. However, creating a great mix depends, in part, on your ability to remove unnecessary details, and most of us are more comfortable objectively critiquing someone else’s work. So asking a friend (or some professionals) to perform a track or two will ultimately make mixing easier, and more effective.

Get more ears on the mix: With any task requiring attention to detail, it’s easy to lose the forest for the trees. And so it goes with mixing. A second or third opinion can draw your attention back to details you’ve glossed over.

And outside opinions needn’t come from other musicians and engineers. (Although the homerecording.com MP3 mixing clinic is a great source for free advice.) Often, regular listeners give the best feedback because they don’t think in technical terms about the production, and instead form their thoughts on how the song makes them feel. And some of the best mix feedback I’ve gotten has come from children, who are unconditioned by musical convention.

Listen on multiple systems: Hearing a mix through different speakers is a little like getting a second opinion. And professional mixing engineers rely on this technique. Chris Lord Alge, for example, keeps a portable radio near his console for checking mixes:

[E]very client who comes in here wants to hear their mixes on it. If it doesn’t sound good through 2-inch speakers on your little boom box, what’s the point? It’s got to sound big on a small speaker.

Simplify …

Avoid dogma: Our hobby (or profession, if you’re lucky) is plagued with religious arguments, like “tube gear sounds better,” and “analog sounds warmer than digital.” Regardless of each argument’s merit, these dogmatic issues over-complicate the recording process, and distract us from the importance of technique – which, of course, costs nothing!

Cut. Ruthlessly: As musicians, our egos push us to put everything we’ve got into every part we record. But virtuoso performances and great recordings don’t necessarily go together. The whole, as they say, is often greater than the sum of the parts.

In most song arrangements, over-instrumentation usually just leads to clutter. And along with being more difficult to mix, clutter rarely sounds good.

Make every part do work: Ensure that every part competing for the listener’s attention is supposed to compete for the listener’s attention.

Practice

Practice your performance before hitting record: The benefits of practice should be obvious to all musicians, but home recording fosters a “write as you record” approach to song creation.

Practice takes time. But it needn’t hamper the creative process; and in most cases it will ultimately save time. Though the tracks may take longer to record, it’s far easier – and quicker – to mix a set of well-performed, polished performances.

Not only do the performances themselves benefit from practice, but the final mix will sound more professional.

Use reference CDs: No single technique will do more to improve the quality of your mixes. Working with a reference mix is, in some ways, like getting a free lesson on mixing from a professional engineer.

Practice mixing when you’re not in the studio: Every mixing engineer should spend time listening critically to professional mixes. Set aside some time every day, say 10 minutes, to immerse yourself in a mix someone else has done. Consider the panning, which instruments take your focus, and how the focus changes as the song evolves. Try to determine the effects in use, and why they were chosen. In modern pop and rock mixes, the interplay between the lead vocal and the snare drum is particularly important, as is the bass guitar/kick drum relationship, so spend some time analyzing these parts in detail.

See Also: Create more professional home recordings

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Some engineers even argue over which type of dither is best, claiming this algorithm is more airy sounding that that one, and so forth. But just because everyone believes this, does that make it true?

That quote comes from Ethan Winer’s great summary of his position on the matter – he’s squarely in the “dithering is usually not needed” camp.

I tend to agree with Ethan. Responsible mixing engineers don’t apply processing to a mix if they themselves don’t hear the effect of the processing. Simply put, if you can’t hear a difference, don’t make the change.

Unmitigated awesome: Daved Lee Roth’s vocal track from Runnin With The Devil, solo’d.

Converting Ikea bedside tables into studio racks: “the Rast bedside table makes a snug rack for music machines.”

Two unrelated sites feature famous songwriters discussing what went on behind the scenes as they wrote:

First, Joni Mitchell on the writing and recording of her most recent album:

When I recorded it, I was sick so a doctor prescribed some penicillin, which I had an allergic reaction to. I was delirious, stressed out, and we worked all night long. I was so delirious that I was playing way back on the beat… [I]n January 2007, I had demos of the Shine songs with me and played them to some friends at a party afterward. James Taylor told me that he had to play on this song. I wasn’t sure if anyone could because it was created in such a rare spirit. But James came in anyway and I asked him to play short figures like a saxophone. So you can hear fractions of James’ guitar playing here.

Jim Vallance’s site has some fantastic insight into the mind of a professional songwriter. Jim, who’s worked with Aerosmith, Ozzy, Bryan Adams, The Scorpions, and Thornley, meticulously lists every song he has ever written. The site is full of anecdotes and details about his creation process.

On our very first basement demo of “Summer of ‘69″ we started the song with the 12-string riff, exactly like the “break down” section in the middle of the song … but on subsequent demo’s we replaced the 12-string with a chunky 6-string intro. In fact, we toiled over the musical arrangement for several weeks, maybe longer. We recorded the song three or four different ways, and we still weren’t convinced we had it right! Bryan even considered dropping the song from the Reckless album.

Now, 20 years later, when I hear “Summer of ‘69″ on the radio, I honestly can’t remember what bothered us.

Lavigne and her co-writer didn’t rip off The Rubinoos. Not even close. Yet most of what passes for discourse on the subject takes the form of sarcastic, kneejerk reactions like this one:

Those songs are basically the same. Hilarious! Avril seriously has the songwriting skills of a 1970s folk artist. She’s Woody Gurthrie reincarnated!

As a writer, it bothers me that anyone thinks the case has merit. But as an amateur producer and songwriter, it particularly troubles me that my peers think there may be something to it. To explain why, I’ll start with the reasons Lavigne is in the clear.

Historical Precedent

Look at the standard of proof used in one of the most famous cases, Bright Tunes Music Corp. v. Harrisongs Music, Ltd., more commonly known as George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord vs. The Chiffons He’s So Fine:

The Court noted that HSF incorporated two basic musical phrases, which were called “motif A” and “motif B”. Motif A consisted of four repetitions of the notes “G-E-D” or “sol-mi- re”; B was “G-A-C-A-C” or “sol-la-do-la-do”, and in the second use of motif B, a grace note was inserted after the second A, making the phrase “sol-la-do-la-re-do”. The experts for each party agreed that this was a highly unusual pattern.
…
Harrison’s composition used the same motif A four times, which was then followed by motif B, but only three times, not four. Instead of a fourth repetition of motif B, there was a transitional phrase of the same approximate length. The original composition as performed by Billy Preston also contained the grace note after the second repetition of the line in motif B, but Harrison’s version did not have this grace note.

Listen to both and hear for yourself how similar two melodies must sound for a judge to side with the plaintiff. Now, check out this video which attempts to make the same case against Lavigne:

The video’s title on Youtube is “Avril Lavigne Steals From The Rubinoos,” so the author’s intentions are clear. But if anything, this back-and-forth contrast of each song makes the opposite point! Girlfriend… and Boyfriend… share 4 words and one note. That’s it. And bloggergirl has a comprehensive collection of songs that use the same “hey hey, you you” phrase. There are many!

So by any rational assessment, there’s no case here, and I suspect (read: hope) the first judge who hears arguments will toss the whole affair back to the street where it belongs.

OK, but who cares?

As the joke goes, both songs actually suck, so why do I even care?

I care for two reasons, one important to amateur producers, and one important to all songwriters.

1. Qualified producers know the allegations are baseless.
The best pop songs sound just similar enough to feel familiar, and just different enough to be novel. Lavigne’s song succeeds as a pop song for exactly this reason. Along with the chorus, I hear at least half a dozen standard pop arrangement techniques in Girlfriend …, from the lockstep kick drum and bass guitar, to the hand clap back-beat.

In fact, many pop arrangement elements are so overused as to be cliche. Think of the chord progression in Stand By Me. And the drum beat in Iggy Pop’s Lust For Life (or, if you prefer, Jet’s Are You Gonna Be My Girl. Or is that The Decemberists Sporting Life?) And how about these lyrics: “I can’t live without you,” “I’d die for you,” and “give me one more chance?”

Pop music is often nothing more than creatively repackaged cliches. And it sells because people feel comfortable around the familiar.

Now perhaps you despise pop music. But every genre, popular or not, has its own cliches, which successful music production depends on exploiting. As I said above, Lavigne’s song and the Rubinoos’ song share nothing more than one of these cliches. So if you think that makes Avril a thief, in short if you believe she ripped off the Rubinoos, you might not be cut out for music production.

2. Copyright issues affect ALL songwriters.
Have you ever used someone else’s melody without their permission? I know I have. I didn’t copy the melody wholesale like Harrison with He’s So Fine. But I noticed after my song was finished that a particularly catchy section was similar to an Arcade Fire song.

When I realized this, I didn’t change the melody. I certainly didn’t call anyone to ask if it was OK. In fact, I didn’t even feel guilty about it. Because I know that all art is derivative. It’s art’s very nature that as musicians, writers, and painters, we play with, and hope to improve upon, what came before. Copyright law in most of the world allows for this. The standard a plaintiff must meet to win an infringement case is strict enough to ensure that artists aren’t punished with capricious lawsuits simply for practicing their craft.

But whether you’re a mixer, producer, or songwriter, these lawsuits have the potential to hurt us all. When the music-consuming public watch videos like the one above, many will conclude that Lavigne really is a thief. This fosters an image of songwriters as plagiarists, and worse, it cheapens our art.

And consider this: If a case as tenuous as Rubinoos v. Lavigne is allowed to proceed, does that mean we’d need to start policing ourselves as songwriters? Ponder how your writing would suffer if you had to …

For that reason, I feel it’s important that we keep informed opinions of the issues. I’ll close with some of my favorite resources for doing just that: Copyfight, and The Recording Industry vs. The People are regularly updated clearinghouses of copyright-related stories, and both pay particular attention to the music industry. And for a Canadian perspective, DCC and Michael Geist’s blog are must-reads.

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Linkin Park’s singles often inspire the question “haven’t they already written this song?” An mp3 that does the rounds from time to time mixes Numb (on the left) and Pushing Me Away (on the right) to illustrate this with almost comical effect: All Linken Park Songs Sound Exactly The Same.

As shown below, and forgive the hyperbole, much more than they sound the same all Linkin Park songs look the same. And while it’s easy to criticize the band for their overuse of a formula that’s by now cliche, the similarity between their tracks at least holds a lesson on the importance of song arrangement in pop music production.

The Linkin Park Formula

The standard Linkin Park structure looks like this:

1. Quiet intro: Each song has a relatively quiet two-measure intro.
2. The instrumental kicker: The full band come in together on the down-beat, and play two or four high energy measures, usually instrumental.
3. Quiet verse: The song eases off for a verse or two, heightening the dynamic contrast between the song’s sections.
4. Heavy chorus: Usually the same chords established in the kicker, with Chester screaming over top for added emotion.

Here’s how it “looks” in practice. Each image below shows the audio level in (roughly) the first 90 seconds of a Linkin Park song. Note that I adjusted the tempo of a few tracks for better visual alignment:

What I’ve Done

Faint

Somewhere I Belong

Crawling

Numb

Lying From You

If the pattern isn’t clear to you, mouse-over each image to highlight the 4 sections: Intro, kicker, verse, chorus. And click the title to hear the song on Youtube.

There’s nothing particularly surprising or innovative about the structure. But its repeated use by Linkin Park is clearly successful: They’re one of a few acts still selling lots of CDs.

Why It Works

There are several reasons why this song formula works, and whether or not you record pop music, understanding the reasons will make you a better producer:

Dynamic contrast: Our senses are drawn to change (remember why we listen to reference tracks while mixing?) so we find dynamic, evolving sounds more interesting. The up-and-down of a typical Linkin Park song grabs listeners’ attention on an instinctive level.

Memorable hooks: Because it’s often jarring, the kicker at the start of Linkin Park’s songs is memorable, and makes for a great hook. Pop songs hit or miss mainly on the effectiveness of their hooks.

Familiarity: For lovers, it breeds contempt. For pop music artists, familiarity breeds fans. It’s a truism in the traditional music industry that to succeed, a band needs a “sound.” Linkin Park’s re-use of the same basic song structure makes their music instantly recognizable, and lets their listeners feel immediately comfortable with new material.

Again, you may not write or record pop music. You may even despise the stuff. But knowing why a band would choose to re-use a formula like this will help you make better decisions about your own song arrangements (even if only to avoid having your music compared to Linkin Park.)

Cheap Gimmick?

What does this say about Linkin Park’s music?

On one hand, the band and their producers deserve kudos for finding and exploiting a successful formula. They’re in the entertainment business, after all, and appealing to fans is any entertainer’s number one job.

On the other hand, it’s hard not to view the six images above as a statement on the music industry. The major labels decry the actions of listeners who download music from free sources. But this is the alternative they offer: The same song, repackaged six different ways. The vast majority of music listeners who aren’t Linkin Park fans ask the same question I did in the first sentence, “Haven’t they already written this song?” And the obvious follow-up question, “Why would I pay for it more than once?”

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