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The
Making Of An Album
Page 8
- Adding Effects and Processing the Digital Audio -
by Michael Tyler
Computer Music Products
Once again, I made backup copies of all the songs before processing the digital audio tracks. Although I had enough room on my hard drive, I decided now would be a good time to store these backups to a data CD (not audio CD!). To do this, I had to save each song as a "Cakewalk Bundle" file. This assured that all MIDI and digital audio was stored together, as a "bundle" with each song. (Cakewalk normally stores MIDI and audio in separate directories as part of its file management scheme when actually working with a song.) A bundle file assembles all the song's components into a single unit when performing a backup of this type. I simply formatted a blank CD as a "data CD" and saved all the songfiles to it.
Now that I had backups of the songs, I was ready to start experimenting with adding effects and digital processing to the audio tracks. I had originally planned to use WaveLab's real-time VST functions for all of this, but discovered that the real-time effects that I heard did not match what came out after I applied the effects as a permanent edit. I was a bit disappointed because WaveLab can process audio more quickly than most other digital processing software.
It was at this time that I decided to install Cakewalk's Audio FX-1 software. As it turns out, I learned to appreciate the convenience of being able to process the audio all within the Cakewalk environment. It really did streamline this stage of the project. Cakewalk already included some processing tools, but adding the Audio FX-1 software gave me additional tools that provided some interesting and handy capabilities. The software displays an on-screen control panel when it is being used. This made it easy for me to setup my own custom audio filters and processors that I could save and later recall whenever I needed them.
I mentally divided the songs into two main categories -"orchestral" and "praise band." With this in mind, I used more spacious-sounding reverbs on the vocals in the "orchestral" category than the ones I used in the "praise band" category. I gave the backing vocals more "presence" by converting the mono recordings to stereo. Often, I would add some thickening chorus effects to fatten these tracks a bit. On a couple songs, I even shifted the right and left tracks slightly off time with each other (by just a single clock tick) to make them sound fuller yet. I left the lead vocal without any chorus effects at all, but did add reverb. Some of the other processing I used was 2:1 or 3:1 compression, applying limiting filters to avoid distortion, and playing with the EQ to enhance the clarity of the vocals. On the live tambourine and trumpet parts, I applied compressor/limiter filters and added some reverb.
I took my time at this stage. Most of what I did was experiment with various effects and processing settings, listen to a preview of whatever I was going to apply and if I liked it, I used it! I spent about two weeks tweaking the audio to my liking. I found I needed to take frequent breaks to be able to remain objective about what I was hearing (yes, your ears do get "tired" after awhile!).
After I was satisfied with the final audio processing, I saved all my changes and made a cassette tape for Jeremy to review.
Next Page (pg. 9) Final Mixing and Mixdown
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