Delivering 162 vocal tracks for a client - tips on making it as easy as possible for everybody

gm music makers!

I know everybody just loves fiddling around with synthesizers, playing guitar behind your back and just having a hairy canary in the studio, after all, it's a place of experimentation, right?

scene from the movie Bohemian Rhapsody
credit: 20th Century Fox

Well, yeah, of course, but sometimes when you do recording and/or mixing work overseas, the producer will request all tracks, all takes so he/she can go through the session and make the calls himself.

This is what happened to me this week.

I had a session singer come in to lay down some vocal tracks for her agency's clients. These range from DJs to Pop, Hip Hop and custom compositions for film.

They were very orderly when it came to booking sessions, sending files, instructions and payment. It's always nice to deal with clients who make it easy for you.

Preparation

We got everything we needed about a week ahead of time. Three tracks, the singer's background, some demos and instructions on what we needed to cut.

• Lead Vocals
• Harmonies 01
• Harmonies 02
• Harmonies 03
• Adlibs

I listened to all tracks to get familiar with the structure. That way I could set markers and hot keys to get to those markers quickly. A lot of times singers come in and say something like

Punch me in in the second chorus

How the hell would you know where that is if you haven't listened to the song.

We also prepared the kitchen with bottled water (sparkling and flat), a bunch of kinds of tea, and fruit.

Our client requested a Neumann TLM 103 to record, so we had that set up and a backup Shure SM7B just in case she wanted to try something different.

I added a little welcome sign for a little extra touch. I think people notice these little detail.

On the mixer, I always like to send the artist their own headphone mix with reverb, delay and metronome on their aux busses. In this case, I also had the instrumental tracks she sent over the week before. Why? you ask? singers in particular love to request changes to what they're listening to in the cans...

Could you turn up the music please...

Could I get a little more reverb...

I think I need more cowbell...

Gotta be ready for this.

Recording

Once in the booth, you want to be quick. Set the appropriate levels while the singer warms up and use shortcuts, shortcuts, shortcuts. I can't stress that enough. If you have a hardware mixer or control surface, use it. If you use the keyboard, program hotkeys, shortcuts, and macros. If you only use a mouse, I'm sorry to say, you are slowing down your workflow by a huge amount. The faster you can start learning some shortcuts, the better. I promise it will make your recording sessions much quicker.

File Management

This is what I've been up to today and it's a very big deal. Like I said before, we're working remotely with a client in Europe. I need to send the entire session will all composites and individual takes as orderly as possible.

After all the files are neatly organized and cleaned up, I like to use a service called WeTransfer to send large files.

You can customize the branding on your account, which I think looks more professional, and it also lets you know when the files have been downloaded, which is useful.

Any recording/mixing engineers in the house that would like to share some tips?