Plan Ahead…Tips & Tricks for Organizing a Peace Partners' Session
The Peace Partners Sessions seem to be progressing nicely. There are some very promising songs out there, in various stages of development. We’ve also created an Indaba page to showcase songs that the respective Owners feel are already completed and have been submitted “officially” to the Peace Partners project. This page can be found at:
Peace Partners - Completed Songs
Recognizing that a wide range of experience exists among Indaba members, We figured we’d outline a few steps and offer a few tips that might be helpful, as you start and move forward on your Peace Partners Session. Incorporating these procedures into your Session will help things run more smoothly and improve the quality of your finished song, as it progress from initial idea, through recording and gathering together individual tracks, and into the final mix and mastering stage.
We’ll try to keep things as non-technical as possible. But please feel free to message me, Jack Nimersheim, over Indaba, if you have any questions or would like any of these items explained in more detail.
Session Owners:
1) When you create your Session, try whenever possible to include information about the song’s overall direction, as you see it, as well as more specific items such as key, time signature and tempo. Space is provided for this information in the Description and Information sections…which you, as the Session Owner, can edit.
2) Always include a lead-in count at the beginning of your basic reference track. A simple one-measure count should suffice and will greatly assist other Session members in synching up their tracks, as they begin recording their own contributions to your song.
3) When naming a Peace Partners Session, we request that you use the following naming convention: "Peace Partners - your song title". Doing so makes it easier for someone to find your Session, should they do a Session search with an interest in checking out songs associated with this project.
Contributors:
1) It’s always a good idea to read the comments already posted in a Session, by choosing “discussion” under the “current view” tab, before you begin creating and recording any parts you feel you’d like to contribute to the song. This will help you get an idea of just how far along in development the song is and what the Session Owner is looking for, at any particular time. (Remember, it’s his or her song. Your goal, as a contributor, is to submit a musical idea or part that complements what they hope to accomplish, musically.) For example, if a song already has a bass part that the Owner says is exactly what he or she was looking for, it wouldn’t make sense for you to contribute a new and completely different bass part.
2) If you do have a new idea for what seems to be an already-established part, bring it up for discussion in a Comment. Give the Owner and other Session members an opportunity to consider and respond to your idea before you invest the time and effort required to create, record and submit it…when you may only end up frustrated, if it’s not used in the final arrangement or mix.
3) As a rule, record your contribution center-channeled and at a gain (volume) which peaks at approximately –2db. This will provide a nice, strong signal to work with, during mixing, while avoiding distortion.
4) Unless you have a very special and unique effect you want incorporated into your track, it’s usually better to record it without any special processing -- equalization, effects such as echo or reverb, stereo placement, etc. Such “fine tuning” to a track is always better applied during the actual mixing process. One area where this applies less than to others is, of course, a guitar part. With these, you may want to actually record any critical effects you’d feel your guitar part should incorporate.
5) Please upload a separate track for each musical part you contribute. Say, for example, you sing two different harmony parts. Don’t combine them into a single file when you upload them to the Session. Rather, upload each harmony part as its own, self-contained track. Again, this will simplify mixing -- during which time the mixer, for example, may want to place the two parts in different positions within a stereo mix or apply different volume levels, equalization and effects to each harmony part.
6) When you do upload tracks, please upload an entire track, from the beginning to the end of the song, rather than just that portion of it which represents your contribution. This will greatly simplify synching up your part to where it belongs in the song, during the mix process.
7) If you want to demonstrate how you hear your part fitting into a mix, feel free to do so and upload this example, identifying it as a “rough mix”. But also remember to include a file of the part, itself, isolated from the rest of the tracks.
8) Uploading an MP3 file to the ongoing Session is fine. Indeed, given the storage limitations associated with some Indaba Sessions, it’s preferred. Whenever possible, however, please make sure that you also save on your computer a copy of any part you create as a WAV file. During final mix, we may prefer to work with these WAV files in some instances.
I realize that’s a lot to absorb…and there were some technical aspects I couldn’t avoid. As I said, please feel free to message me, over Indaba, if you have any questions or need anything I’ve addressed to be explained more fully.
It’s pretty amazing, what we’re trying to accomplish…create professional-quality music exclusively over the Internet, utilizing musicians from all around the globe. Following the relatively simple procedures outlined above will greatly simplify this process and give us, in the end, a repertoire of “Peace Partners” songs that should stack up well musically against anything out there.