better living through irresponsible editing

this week i am at the tail end of a month and a half of hard pushing to finish a record with an artist from LA. he's been staying here at the studio and i've averaged roughly 4 hours of sleep a night over the 6 weeks (i keep a log). i have this thing that keeps me up during the day - this job at nasa that i love a whole lot and care about - so i've been tracking, editing, producing, mixing through the nights and working during the days.

originally, when devon first showed up in early april, we were going to finish the EP (4 songs) that we'd almost finished tracking. that turned into re-recording most the parts and all the vocals. then, as i wrote about a couple weeks ago, one of our friends died, and we suddenly had two more songs.

my studio is the sort of place where musicians come to record and end up writing more new stuff than we can deal with. once, we set everything up to record vocals on a sweet little ballad and this crazy new song came out of him and a floppy tom. i was rolling tape, so i have the birth of the song - from nothingness to catchy little tune - in the middle of this other song's session.

so we jumped from 4 songs to 7, and now there's another song he's written that he wants still to record when he gets back to LA.

this makes my job as co-producer, editor, and mix engineer an entropic mess, but i don't make things easy on myself. jumbling up the writing, production, editing, and mixing processes like this is not for the weak. so you'd think with all the fancy tools i have at my disposal here, i'd look for shortcuts wherever i could. i sort of do, but then i sort of don't.

for example, one of the oldest songs on this record is one that we started tracking more than 2 years ago. some of my friends from the cassettes came over and we recorded a bunch of improvisational parts. that night i recorded two rhodes parts that together became one of the central hooks of the song. for 2 years, our rough mixes of this song have suffered these improvisational rhodes tracks unedited and mostly unmixed.

[background aside (i should learn how to do footnotes)]: i'm not being falsely modest or self-deprecating when i say that my ability to play things in time is severely challenged. i offset this serious weakness with boundless creativity, a willingness to edit, and some unusually keen ears and sense of pitch, harmony, and timber. combine these strenghts and weaknesses with a love for the physics of sound, an affinity for complex layering, and a purist attitude towards capturing special moments even if they're not perfect, and i set myself up for endless hours comping and editing.

ok so back to these rhodes parts. because it was kind of a big jam session that night, i wasn't taking the time to make sure the technical aspects of the recordings were of the highest quality. in addition to my naturally crappy timing (such that almost every note needs to be moved in time (thank the lord we at least used a click)), the rhodes was acting up that evening and would pop loudly when i hit hard. for the rough mix, i had thrown my waves xcrackle plugin on the track, but now that i'm editing for real, i just don't feel right about using that.

this is where the irresponsibility sets in. if i were reasonable and rational about this, i'd use recycle or beat detective or ableton live or some similar time compression/expansion software (i just got melodyne, YAAAAY!) to automatically quantize these parts. unfortunately, on a rhodes part like this, i don't think it sounds good enough to do that. so, over the entire length of the 5 minute song, i go through and manually chop up the part, manually move things, and manually find the best crossfade lengths. this means a several hundred edits per track, just to get the part in time. this can go faster than you think because i can almost hear what a waveform is gonna sound like just by looking at it, so most of the edits on first pass can be done visually. but still - it can take hours.

then there are the pops. this is what one looks like:



i really should just use xcrackle, but the purist in me won't allow it. i already have issues with pops and clicks getting introduced digitally into my audio by protools when rendering anything new. i don't need to encourage problems by starting with bad waveforms that popped on the way in because of faulty old analog electronics (gotta love them). so here's my 100% manual approach:

step 1: locate a pop




step 2: figure out where offending waveform begins and ends and find one adjacent to it that's healthy



step 3: replace bad waveform with healthy waveform



step 4: move rest of audio over slightly to match zero crossings





step 5: manually crossfade edges



step 6: listen

sometimes if i'm feeling extra sleepy and irresponsible i might skip this step, but not very often. it's really the most important part. the satisfaction of having eliminated the problem usually makes it worth it.

i know what you're thinking (if you're still awake). this is ridiculous. this 5 minute part has about 80 of these pops. i have no defense.

but that's what i'm up to tonight. i will be doing this until i change clothes and go to work at 8am. thankfully this push is over tomorrow. i will sleep tomorrow night, then get up and drive to st. louis to see radiohead and visit my dad. devon went to see them tonight in the pouring rain at the nissan pavilion and said it was worth freezing his butt off for. i figure it should be worth the 13 hour drive with a great friend.