Apocalypsol Production
- Jordan Aston
- Aug 14, 2019
- 7 min read
At the beginning of this trimester I began working on some music for a music video game collaboration with some game students. The initial theme of the song was intended to be dark and ominous, but fast paced, kind of in the realm of Radiohead or The Cure. I wanted to make a song in 7/8 because I hadn’t done this before, and I’d been toying around with a guitar riff that just so happened to be in 7/8. I spent a lot of time in the MIDI studio fleshing out the song on Ableton, as it seems to work for me to write music quickly that way. With the full intention to re-record what I was doing properly in the studios I began by making a drum pattern with the standard 808 samples that Ableton gives you to go along with the riff I’d come up with on guitar. The song quickly turned out to be something completely different to what I had planned to do but I was happy to continue and see where it ended up.
I recorded guitar DI into Ableton and used guitar rig on all the tracks to get the different sounds I wanted. Usually effected with reverb, chorus, delay and then EQ’d with a high pass filer and moderately compressed to emulate the types of guitar tones you would hear on most records by The Cure.
I added a virtual piano and played an ascending arpeggio which was panned from left to write in each of the verses. I got this idea from a song by I Know Leopard who are a big influence on me lately. I Know Leopard also feature strings throughout their recordings, so I decided to pull up an Ableton plugin and record some digital strings to see how it sounded. I think you can tell by now that I was simply doing anything to this song by this point, based on what I’d been listening to in the past 24 hours…
I wanted the strings to have a ‘larger than life’ feel so picked a melody that would sit in a frequency spectrum that wasn’t heavily occupied by other instruments and with a little help from EQ’ing, reverb and panning, I was able to get them to poke through the mix and grab your attention when they come in (much like the strings in any I Know Leopard song). By this point I had a fairly finished song (minus lyrics) and was able to send it off to the game students so they could create the game around this version. Here’s the version of the track I’d created on Ableton alone which was sent to the game students:
It was now time to get into the studio and record some real drums for this track. I asked a member of my band to come in and play on the track since the technical level of playing was a bit out of my reach as a drummer. The reference track I used for the drum sound alone is a track called ‘Tasmania’ by Pond. To me the snare and toms sound quite deadened. To try and emulate this I got a bunch of toilet paper and folded it up then taped squares of it on all the toms and the snare. We also used a snare disc on the snare to kill some unwanted ringing and add a little texture.
The drum sound in just about all Pond songs is heavily compressed and very ‘apparent’ and loud in the mix. They use a lot of hard panned and heavily effected guitars and synths taking up stereo space in the left and right field so I wondered how the drums could still sound so tight and in your face without competing for space with the other instruments. So, I decided to use a single overhead to capture the overall sound of the drums and leave it dead centre with only a few other microphones capturing the other parts of the drums close mic’d. Panning the toms only hard left and right, I thought this would get me on the right track to get close to my reference as you can clearly hear the tom rolls running from left to right in Tasmania.
Production Technique!
One thing that’s always bugged me is how drummers like James Ireland from Pond are able to play so incredibly in time when recording. That was until I heard about a process called elastic audio.
“Elastic Audio is a time manipulation processing system in Digidesign Pro Tools. It was introduced in 2007 with Pro Tools 7.4. Elastic Audio (also known as Elastic Time) enables the user to change an audio file’s tempo or timing in real time without altering the file’s pitch, allowing for quick rhythmic or time-based adjustments without the need to render audio.”
("Pro tools: Elastic Audio - WikiAudio", 2018)
Since I hadn’t used this technique in the past I jumped online to find instructions on how to go about this process. While there are a number of uses for elastic audio to be used, the purpose for me using this technique was to line up every hit I could find that was off the grid to help tighten up the overall performance. To begin, you want to highlight all of your drums tracks and engage elastic audio from the tracks control panel. From here you’ll have to choose from 4 different algorithms:
Polyphonic (Polyphonic sounds – guitars keyboards etc, anything playing 2 or more notes at once)
Rhythmic (best on drums and percussion)
Monophonic (single note instruments including bass and vocals)
Varispeed (for when changing timing and pitch)
From here you need to decide between making your tracks sample based or tick based.
Sample based (regions and information are tied to the minutes and seconds of the session)
Tick based (regions and information are tied to the bars and beats)
Since I am trying to line up my drum hits with the bars and beats of the session I’ve selected the tick option. At this point you want to change your track view from waveform to warp markers. The quickest way to get here is to shortcut with CTRL + ALT + <. Your track view will now be in warp view. From here you go through and create analysis lines on each of the transients you want to adjust by double clicking on the light grey line closest to the transient. Once you’ve gone through and placed all of your warp markers, adjust them to the grid or wherever you’d like them to be (in my case I’m snapping them onto the grid since I’m aiming for a perfectly tight drum sound) then have a listen back to see if you’ve run into any phasing issues which is possible since you are moving recorded audio to set next to other recorded audio in time.
The final step is to render what you’ve done so Pro Tools doesn’t have to think in real time every time you press play. To do this go back to where you engaged elastic audio and selected your algorithm, but this time select Rendered Processing.
Listen here to my recorded drum track pre and post elastic audio:
Since I’m focusing on the drum sound in this production I decided to learn how to apply parallel compression especially since it sounds to me like this has been technique used on the production of the POND drums.
Parallel Compression:
In order to do this, you begin by setting up a ‘parallel compression bus’ or ‘crush bus’ by sending all of your drum tracks to a stereo bus and renaming it crush. From here, select all of your drums tracks and go to edit > automation > copy to send, then select the letter of the send you have chosen. In my case it is send F. This will copy the balance of each instrument to the aux so your volume levels directly reflect the mix you’ve already done. Now make all of your bus sends PRE FADER so you can have one mix for the dry sound and one mix for the crushed sound, they are different because your auxiliaries are pre fader.
Now we need to wack a compressor on the crush track and find some settings. I just grabbed the Dyn3 Compressor/Limiter to do this. Open up the attack and close the release to make it pump a little, drop the threshold and gain back up to where it feels right for you. As Falconer (2009) suggests,
“Often the attack and release are brought way, way down — even as low as the Compressor/Limiter Dyn3 can go. I didn’t want too much pumping to occur for this particular track and was happy with the impact of my drums, so I’ve actually used reasonably tame settings for a parallel compression bus.”
When gaining, I tucked the crush track right up underneath the drum bus as not let it overpower to dry sound of the drums. We now have a nicely mixed in parallel compressed drum track that’s added a world of punch and character.
Listen to my drum track quantized + parallel compression:
Now, I have given the game students a track with quickly mixed drums and instruments just so we could get something done on time. I plan to continue with this mix until I’m happy but in order to tick off a few LO’s here is a link to the ITCH page where the game exists online.
LINK to itch page: https://jordanaston93.itch.io/apocalypsol
And here’s a link to a roughly mixed version of everything which will be the final submission.
APOCALYPSOL PLAYTHROUGH
References
Pro tools: Elastic Audio - WikiAudio. (2018). Retrieved 12 August 2019, from https://www.wikiaudio.org/pro-tools-elastic-audio/
Hibbard, M. (2014). Avid Pro Tools Tutorial: Adjust Time and Warp Using Elastic Audio - The Beat: A Blog by PremiumBeat. Retrieved 14 August 2019, from https://www.premiumbeat.com/blog/avid-pro-tools-tutorial-adjust-time-and-warp-using-elastic-audio/
4 Steps to Elastic Audio in Pro Tools. (2019). Retrieved 14 August 2019, from https://www.loopmasters.com/articles/2842-Using-Elastic-Audio
Thornton, M. (2010). Elastic Audio — Better Than Beat Detective?. Retrieved 14 August 2019, from https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/elastic-audio-better-beat-detective
Templeton, S. (2017). How to Make Your Drum Tracks Snap with Two-Stage Parallel Compression. Retrieved 14 August 2019, from https://reverb.com/au/news/how-to-make-drum-tracks-snap-two-stage-parallel-compression
Falconer, J. (2009). Give Drums Impact with Parallel Compression. Retrieved 14 August 2019, from https://music.tutsplus.com/tutorials/give-drums-impact-with-parallel-compression--audio-2118
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