My latest single just dropped on Spotify, Apple Music, Youtube Music, Amazon Music, really every streaming platform on Earth by way of Distrokid. It’s also on regular old Youtube.
It’s called “Just for a Moment,” and the B-Side is “Union Street (Hold On).” Give me a listen, like, and follow if you’re a fan.
I have a track I’ve mastered. It’s -14.7 LUFS and -1.2 True Peak. I’m pretty happy with it other than I wish it were about a decibel louder. So I thought I’d try to go for -13.5 LUFS. But it seems whatever I do the true peak is more sensitive to than the LUFS. For instance, the first thing I did was raise the gain on the Multipressor in the master chain from 1.6 to 2.0. The overall LUFS integrated went to 14.4, but the True Peak went to 1.0 which I want to keep under. Should I increase the limiter then? Shorter version of the question: How to increase the LUFS without increasing the True Peak? Thanks! I bought a copy of Levels.
I do think I have figured out one thing: Just a small bit of audio or so can make your True Peak sky rocket out of the blue while 98% of the mix is well below your target, even though it’s not necessarily audible. Once you identify that bit, and it’s not hard with a metering plug-in like Levels or Youlean, you can create an identical track, cut and copy that bit to it and apply more processing to just it, whether that be a Limiter, faster attack time on your compressor, and then it frees up the majority of the track to breathe! [I made these comments to this video post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BS07ChRkY4M ]
I recently made two different covers of the Josh Rouse song, “Michigan.” The first I made on the iPad with Garageband. I played the Spanish guitar and sang into the the little pinhole microphone. Then I added some “smart” instruments, bass, drums. So this one is done basically in “click” time, but I still think it came out sounding pretty good, considering the circumstances.
The second was done with more Professional mics and into Logic Pro on an iMac. I basically just played a steel acoustic and sang at the same time, no overdubs or click track. So it’s live and more natural.
So, two different sounds with the same song, but I kind of like them both for different reasons.
Now, if I could only do some of my own songs!
Did this today out on my back patio featuring three songs: “Your Love Chases After Me,” by Mindy Smith, “Another Bad Night’s Sleep” by The Silver Seas, and “Kuzbass” by Josh Rouse. I used the new iPad video Camera and I used the FiRe field recording app on my iPhone for vocals and on my iPad 1 for the guitar. Then I brought those wave files into Logic for some mixing and used iMovie on the iMac to edit and add titles as well as the Logic mixed audio track. I think it sounds and looks good!
This is one of my favorite songs I’ve ever written. Actually it just came to me in a flash as I was struggling with a Christmas Song cover (“God Rest You, Merry Gentlemen”) It almost came kind of as a subconscious relief to my conscious suffering with the other song. So maybe that’s one secret to creativity: You work on something that may be a little difficult, a little structured, and as you’re going along, in a flash the “lyrical” part of your mind comes to the rescue with something original and fun. Kind of as a relief or a reflex.
