info@drewstephenson.com

This is the site for music, click here for my blog on other stuff

Friday 30 August 2024

From Rough To Release - new song-writing blog series

 I am pretty terrible at self-promotion. 

I really should have mentioned a week ago that I've started another blog series focused on helping people take those scraps and ideas and turn them into finished songs.

It's called Rough to Release and you can find the first entry (and subsequent ones) here: https://roughtorelease.blogspot.com/2024/08/the-pitch-taking-your-song-writing-from.html

Thursday 15 August 2024

Want a free mix?

 The offer

Beginner / intermediate mixer / producer looking for musicians to work with to build my portfolio.
You provide the music, I provide the mix.
I see this working as a collaboration rather than a transaction: there'll be some back and forth as I get to grips with things but at the end you get a free mix and I get chance to do some production and develop as a mixer.

My experience
I've been working on recording / mixing / production for nearly 10 years now but have been focusing almost completely on my own music. I'd like to grow my skills by working on some different material.
My material is generally in the Americana / folk / indie-rock genres so probably best not to stray too far from that initially but I'm willing to give anything a go.
You can find my work on www.drewstephenson.bandcamp.com or on the streaming platform of your choice.


Technical details
I work entirely in the box and use the Reaper DAW. So stems or tracks in WAV form or Reaper project files is probably the best starting point.
I have a treated room with monitoring that is flat (+/- 3dB) from 22Hz to 18kHz and would be happy to get involved in the recording side as well for anyone in the York area.

Caveats
I'll be doing this on a best-endeavour basis. I won't take on something if I don't think I can do a good job on it.
If you're not happy with the end result then you walk away with no loss, if you do like it, all I ask is a formal credit.
If you're half-happy then I'm happy to pass on whatever I've done to another mixer with no reservations or conditions.

Interested?
Contact me on 'info@drewstephenson.com'

Thursday 30 May 2024

The Story of Curtis Stirling or A Tale of Three Brothers

Back in 2008 I released (with the kind help of a local label) my first EP.

Last month I released my most recent album.

Across those releases, and every EP and album in the 16 years between, has been a sub story that is finally complete.
Spotify https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3AlSu ... gM5IeeNKgX
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... 3rgBG0ePGI
Tidal https://tidal.com/browse/playlist/f30ef ... 624c31b768
Bandcamp https://bndcmpr.co/c5a7b74b


Apologies in advance for the inevitable variation in recording and production quality. Hopefully by using one of the above streaming service links it will at least be loudness normalised across the tracks.



Wednesday 17 April 2024

Album launch party!

 Well despite an erroneous copyright claim from a certain major label, we are still on for our launch of 26th April.

And to celebrate this momentous occasion we're having a virtual launch party on youtube.

So at the prescribed time of 8pm (BST) simply click the link above and it'll take you to a page where we'll listen through the album together, I'll talk a little bit about the songs and the creation process, and you'll be able to ask any questions or make any comments. Rude as you like. ;¬)



Monday 1 April 2024

Songs From The Distant Borders

 Hold the date! 26th of April. 


Now that mastering is complete I can confirm that we are on track for a virtual listening party at the end of April.
Giving you plenty of notice because this album features several other musicians doing their level best to rescue my terrible songs and somehow make the whole thing listenable.
Have they succeeded?
You'll have to wait to find out I'm afraid, but it is a mighty challenge they've embraced. ;)

Having looked at a number of options I've chosen Youtube as the main platform, but obviously high res versions of the song will be available from BandCamp and Tidal as well.
I will share the relevant links nearer the time.


Wednesday 27 March 2024

Templates and temples

 I've posted a few times on forums about this and a couple of people have asked elsewhere so I thought I'd do a quick post about the mix templates I use and why.

Why templates?

Tackling the last bit first, why use templates at all? I mean, all songs are different right?

Well, yes they are but templates are not there to force you into certain ways of working (unless you want them to be), they're about speeding up your work flow.

So lets start with the first template that appears on most of my mixes, my 8-bus template:


Most of my tracks will have vocals, guitars, bass, keys, reverb, percussion, and ear candy of some kind.
So I have these 8 tracks set up as receiving busses for applying bus-level effects and rough balancing.
They're also linked to a Korg Nanokontrol2 control surface so I have buttons and faders for instant muting, soloing, etc.
They all have a channel strip plugin on that is linked to another control surface, a Qube Mobie One, so I have all my core controls mapped to physical buttons, knobs and faders (I have a BCF2000 as well). 
Which is good because I hate mices.
But the point is, with one 'insert track' command, I get all this set up and routed.

Drums in the deep

So let's move to the next template: drums.

Sometimes I record real drums but more often I'm using Abbey Road vintage drums via Kontakt. And because Kontakt is the spawn of the devil you do not want to be trying to set up multi-channel routing every time you load an instrument - that way madness lies.
So channel one here is the kontakt instrument then I have the individual mic sends to separate channels, and then three sub-bus channels (click the picture to see all the channels): parallel compression, delay (just for the toms), and a crusher (for everything except the cymbals).
These will all route to the drum bus in the 8-bus template above and again they all have a channel strip plug-in on.
If I'm recording real drums I'll generally start with the same template and just get rid of the kontakt track and any others that aren't needed.

Sing like you're winning

My vocal template is complex because it's cunning. Not because I'm cunning, but because I've copied someone who is.

Actual recording happens on channel 1, it then might get multed out to channel 2 if I want to process loud and quiet bits separately (or some other kind of split for effect). These feed the parallel compression track that does a lot of heavy lifting to balance out the overall volume in a nice way.
The two VCA channels are the cunning bit, thanks to an article by Mike Senior, allowing me to easily do manual fine tuning on an actual fader rather than needing to use a mouse. 
And then finally there's a bit of extra reverb for the vocal. The reverb and parallel compression channels will generally be heavily de-essed.

A sense of space

I have other standard templates for things like guitars, bass etc. but they're all fairly standard and boring so I'll jump straight to the final template, for reverb:

We'll work from right to left to talk through this one. The right-most column has the main reverb on it, it's then fed by the three channels to the left, the front, middle and back delays. These have different length delays and EQ settings to simulate the effect of sound travelling further through air. This helps to add a bit of front to back depth to the mix.
The three columns on the left are for various effect reverbs, that will be automated in and out during a mix to add ear candy when needed. Which is a slightly simplified version of a set up used by Chris Lord Alge.

So that's it, templates to speed to things up.
In a similar way I have a standard plug-in chain for the master channel that I'll generally bring in once I've got the core of the song together and then mix into.