The Manager’s Chair #1 – PrePro
Posted on Friday, January 6th, 2012 // 0 Responses.
Okay, fine. You want to make an album. Well, no, hold on. Before you book 3 weeks in the log cabin or lug all your gear into an abandoned church, make sure you’re prepared. As a 22 year old with a couple progressively better-sounding records under my belt and ever-growing equipment related debt, let’s pretend I am qualified to talk about this kind of thing. Let’s use the album I happen to be making as a case study.
Beneath the glossy sheen of the master and the perfect tape saturation emulation on the 2-bus are the songs. If the songs aren’t good, nothing you add to them is going to change that. Let’s look at this in terms of chicken. I love buffalo or teriyaki sauce as much as the next guy, but it isn’t going to salvage fatty, lumpy, chicken. The songs on the album should be free-range, or something. We will see that sometimes it is okay to feed them steroids or HGH. Sometimes it isn’t. We’ll get there in a couple weeks. How many weird metaphors until then? Keep reading.
So you’ve hatched a litter of 20 or so chickens. You can’t raise them all, though, unless you’re Rancid. They raise as many as 22 chickens per album, but I think most of us would agree that sometimes you can just have too many chickens. Sometimes you have to leave some to get eaten by a wolf or raise them in the b-side coop. The chickens are songs, guys, you getting this? I’m done with this.
Bad songs are like gross chicken.
Once you have songs that you believe in, you get to start preproduction, or pre-pro (honestly I’m not sure if anyone actually calls it that). Pre-pro is a catchall term for everything you do before you play the first note that ends up on the album. We demoed 9 songs in the summer of 2010 and let them marinate (LOLOL) for a year and a half. When it came time to record the album for real, we rehearsed fairly extensively for a few days, tweaking them (plus a 10th song) until we were sure that they were the best possible songs they could be.
Part of the preproduction process is figuring out the vital stats of each song. Okay, I wrote it in A, but I have trouble singing the notes in the bridge, so maybe it should really be in G. I play my guitar in half-step down tuning for this reason. One time someone at an open mic was condescending to me about that and said “of course you do.” I don’t really know what that means.
The other thing you need to decide beforehand is the tempo of each song. I spent about 10 or 15 minutes with each song setting up a click track and mapping out the tempo changes so that we could record to an accurate metronome. I’ve love nothing more than to make a record live in the room, based off of feel alone, but I don’t have the resources for that right now. Until that day, it’s to a grid and we’re overdubbing. Get over it.
Once everything is prepared, it’s time for the self-doubt marathon known as tracking (that’s what us industry folk call recording). More on that next week!
We will talk about this next week