Intern Amar Singh - Week 4

When I started my internship at Tapeworks, I remember sitting in the control room thinking to myself, “it’s cold in here”. Now that I’m sitting at home steaming away in this heat, I’m kind of wishing to be back in that icy control room- The AC for the live room hasn’t been working though. The AC in general starts to get strained in this kind of heat, so this week at Tapeworks was cut a little short. Still got some work done though.

I got to meet the other student intern, Shirley, at the start of this week and worked on a few more a capella songs with her. She was the lead singer for that “Feelin’ Good” mix that I was working on a few weeks ago. She seemed to get a bit embarrassed when Bill played another mix she sang on, so hopefully she doesn’t mind too much that I was working on that other mix.

One of the a capella songs we worked on was a cover of “Cowboy Take Me Away” by The Chicks. Compared with the previous a capella songs I’ve worked on, this one was recorded using multiple stereo pairs with the group singing together in the same room rather than individual tracks for each vocalist. The lead was still recorded on its own.

There was a little less editing that needed to be done since there were less tracks to work with. Edits were trickier to do though because the performance of the group was “baked” into the stereo tracks. I didn’t try using Melodyne to tune the group performance. It might’ve been able to do it, but it sometimes struggles to separate out notes in polyphonic textures. I mainly tried to adjust rhythm in a few spots, but it was hard to make clean edits without any artifacts.

Shirley pointed out to me that since the group performance was doubled, the texture of everyone singing together would blend out most of the imperfections and make them harder to notice. She was right. Listening to the tracks soloed did magnify issues that were probably less of an issue than I thought they were. We still went in to edit a few spots though.

For the mix, we had multiple mic pairs to pick from with warm and bright characteristics. I learned about the Shure VP88 mic which is an M/S microphone with a built in stereo matrix. Pretty neat. Since the song had something to do with cowboys, I thought leaning into the U87 pair with its warmer sort of sound would connect well with that rustic country idea. After listening to the original song though, I realized the sound was more clean and bright.

There probably wasn’t any wrong answer to which mic pair to use, but listening to the original song did help give us ideas for how the mix could sound.

The other a capella song we worked on this week was “Baby Don’t Leave Me Alone With My Thoughts” by Lake Street Dive. I was having a really hard time remembering the name of that song while writing this, but luckily Bill texted me the name of it. Thanks Bill.

Shirley had already worked on the tuning and editing in Logic. We had some trouble exporting the files to Pro Tools, but once we got through the computer troubles, we kept on working on the editing a bit more and started mixing.

Bill had Shirley finish up the editing in Pro Tools since she doesn’t use it a whole lot and wanted her to get some practice in. I helped her out a bit by showing her how to use groups to edit multiple tracks at once and a few shortcuts to do fades and break clips into regions. She got the hang of it pretty quickly despite mixing up the D and G keys for fades a few times- She was able to lock in pretty well though.

For this time around, I went straight to the original song to get an idea of what their mix sounded like before I went to mix our tracks. I tried matching the original’s sound as best I could and also tried out some plugins I hadn’t used before. For the lead vocals, I used this Abbey Road Plate Reverb from Waves that was pretty cool.

Bill gave us some tips for the mix like making sure the lead was sounding as best it could before we added the rest of the vocals around it. There were a few distracting mouth sounds we had to go through and quiet down. That was likely from the mic just being positioned a little too close to the lead singer.

It was reaffirming to hear his advice though. Tackling mixes with lots of elements is tricky, so having one thing to anchor the sound of the mix to helps make the process a little easier.

Getting to work with Shirley on the mixes was pretty fun. I’ve been doing most of my editing and mixing alone at the studio. There have been a few times I’ve gotten startled by Bill entering the control room after I’d spent a few hours working on a mix by myself. It’s also easy for me to exhaust my ears listening to a mix over and over again.

It was nice having someone to chat and joke with while working. Not to out her, but she did at one point launch Minecraft on her computer and decided to play it while I was mixing. Very productive… and I was definitely not a contributor to any distractions whatsoever-

I ended the week off watching Bill do a bit more mixing for a client. I got to see some more engineer-client type interactions with Bill making sure the mix sounded the way the client wanted. I also got to hear some interesting conversations about different industry things like how music for film works.

So that about covers it for this week. I only have one to two more weeks left in my internship before I have all the hours I need for school. Then I’ll be writing a paper about it and be all done with my degree. “Hurray!” I cheer, with nervous excitement and uncertainty. I should be okay-

I’ve got some more Amar gaming facts to end the blog with. I recently finished playing Cuphead. A little annoying and tedious to get through at times, but still pretty fun, with really nice art and music. I’ve started playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a medieval RPG. A surprising amount of walking around and listening to people talk. You do get to do quests and swing a sword around though. Tedious and fun in a different sort of way.