About 5 years ago I used to listen to a lot of pop music. Not just pop rock or RnB, but actual saccharine sweet UK-pop-charts pop with a dance beat. It was a common occurrence to hear my banging on about the new Girls Aloud record or Sophie Ellis-Bextor single.

The mid-noughties was a golden time for UK pop music. However, in the past couple of years things have really taken a downward spiral for ‘real pop’. There’s still loads of great pop music coming from the UK, but it all tends to be tinged with another sub-genre (dubstep pop, grime pop, folk pop).

This AlunaGeorge single is the first decent pop-pop song I’ve heard in a long time. I hope this is an upwards trend. I miss pop.

Source: Spotify

The 10 golden rules of being in a DIY indie band

A somewhat silly article on the Guardian music site from a band I’ll admit I’ve not really listened to.

However, there are a few scary real truths here I remember from my touring days. Particularly:

when you bump into one of your 10 fans on the way out of the venue and you’re carrying a half-eaten loaf of Warburtons, the remains of a Sainsbury’s hummus and 50 apples, you will kill rock’n’roll for ever for all concerned.

I seriously lived on bread, ham, hummus and apples for 3 years. Depressing.

My End Of Year List™

I’ve never done one of these… but have often thought to. I guess who really gives a fuck what songs someone else has been listening to over the past 12 months.

Either way, here’s a window into the disturbed mind of what I called ‘good music’ this year. In no particular order.

The Hives - “Lex Hives”

For me, The Hives made a bit of a comeback this year. This record is exactly what you want from them – good riffs, good lyrics, good times

The Muppets - “The Muppets OST”

Not only one of my favourite albums, but also one of my favourite movies of the year. Genuinely sweet and funny.

Japandroids - “Celebration Rock”

The one record in 2012 that made me what to punch my fist in the air and shout “I love you man!” at strangers.

Paws - “Cokefloat”

This is what I always wanted Cheat Sheet to be, but I’m just not a skilled enough songwriter as these Scottish upstarts.

Deftones - “Koi No Yokan”

Like The Hives, this is a band I’ve loved for a long time and I was happy to see them make an awesome return to form in 2012.

Seapony - “Falling”

I stumbled upon this kitchy, twee band a few months ago and have been yumming up their entire back catalog ever since.

Sierra Leone Refugee All Stars - “Radio Salone”

2012 didn’t seem to serve up as many awesome African music records as the past few years have. This one was the standout for me.

Metz - “METZ”

Like Bleech-era Nirvana with added Mclusky… i.e.. very, very good.

Emperors - “Stay Frosty”

This record did tire after a little while. But for a few months I was pure loving the 90s Rawk vibe of this new Australian band.

Holograms - “Holograms”

This was the record I wished iceage had delivered last year. Scandinavian Joy Division-esque indie with a hardcore/pop punk twist.

Pulled Apart By Horses - “Tough Love”

Just a metric fuck-ton of fun. Not much more to be said really.

First Aid Kit - “The Lion’s Roar”

I’m really hating on the new bunch of ‘folk-indie’ bands at the moment. This type of music was soooo good 5 years ago and then Mumford & Sons came along and forced everyone to sound boring. Thank fuck First Aid Kit have infected some life into an insipid genre.

And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead - “Lost Songs”

I could never really get into this band until this album. Perhaps because it’s their most pop offering to date and at heart I’m just a massive cheese-fiend.

LISTEN!

I’ve included my two favourite songs from each of these albums on a Spotify Playlist for your pleasure. Enjoy!

Honourable Mentions

And finally… this album by Joyce Manor came out at the end of last year (but I only discovered them in 2012) and it’s probably the record I’ve listen to the most recently… So you should probably just listen to that and watch this amazing video that reminds me that punk is still alive:

Recording a garage band with GarageBand iOS

I’m this band called Cheat Sheet and it’s a pretty lofi affair. We make scuzzy pop punk and silly music videos.

I’m also a big Apple nerd/fanboy. So when we talked about doing some recordings I initially toyed with the idea of recording the whole thing myself on my Mac in Logic. But then I thought – you what? I don’t much like using Logic, it can be clunky and unintuative and as Apple move more and more away from their ‘Pro’ apps, Logic is starting to feel like a bit of a legacy.

You know what I do love making music on? GarageBand iOS. And as Cheat Sheet don’t require anything like Rick Rubin style production, I thought it would be fun to take a shot at recording entirely on my iPhone!

Fiddling about with cables

The sound of drums

I only own one decent microphone: a Shure SM57. Luckily it’s super versatile and what’s more I found a bunch of info about how to get an okay drum sound with just two mics using a method called the Recorderman Technique.

Now I just needed another mic and a way to get both mixed down to one channel - as the iPhone can only record one channel at a time. I planned to do all the recording in a hired rehearsal space (so as not to piss off my neighbours), so I just borrowed a perfectly adequate SM58 microphone off them – the kind you find at most rehearsal spaces and gig venues. It’s not an expensive super-mic, but I suspected it would do the job.

To get both mics mixed into my iRig (an interface for getting audio into your iPhone/iPad) I had them both run though a cheap mixer and balanced them by ear down to a single channel. I knew this was a bit risky, as I wouldn’t be able to go back and make changes to the drum levels, but that’s what happens when you can only record one input at a time!

The tricky part turned out to be getting a decent playback for Matt – our drummer. I had planned to play my guitar through a distortion pedal and split the output out to two sets of headphones so that I could play along with him while we recorded the drum track. However, neither of us had noise cancelling headphones, so the live sound of the drums was too much. He ended up just playing the songs though by memory because he’s rad like that. In hindsight though, proper playback would be nice.

Just two mics into the mixer and then out one channel into the iPhone

Guitar shredding (or lack of)

As incredibly impressive as virtual amps on Logic/GarageBand are, I’ve never been fond of using them for anything other than quick demos. Nothing beats the sound of a nice, loud guitar amp.

So I used my SM57 again and placed it slightly to the side of the speaker-cone on my amp and ran it straight into the mixer - before going into the iRig - so that I could use the mixer to adjust the input level (making sure that it didn’t ‘peak’ red in GarageBand).

Mic placed on the guitar amp -> mixer -> iRig -> iPhone

Bass in da face

When it comes to recording bass, I’m not so down on virtual amps. As a bass has a much more simple signal than guitar, Cheat Sheet bassist Lara just played straight into the iRig and it still sounded cool.

Vox pop

Again, no need to amp anything up here or use the mixer - I just ran my trusty SM57 into the iRig and recorded as many vocal takes on different tracks as GarageBand would let me (considering the 8 track limit).

Using an effects pedal and non-noise-cancelling headphones for playback didn’t work out

Mix-master-me

1) Monitoring (without monitors)

Usually when people record and mix music they use sets of expensive monitors to playback each track and mix accordingly.

I don’t own such monitors. And call me a philistine, but I hardly ever listen to music on anything other than headphones. More specifically… iPod/iPhone headphones. So I thought fuck it, I might as well mix the songs to what 60% of people are going to be listening to it on.

However, I’ve acquired quite a few pairs of Apple headphones over the years, so I thought I might as well give a few different pairs a go.

THEN I HAD MY BIGGEST REVELATION SO FAR. Apparently, Apple headphones don’t all sound the same. Even pairs which were from the same generation device had big differences in sound quality. I couldn’t believe it. So in the end I decided to choose the pair that sounded the most like any of the others - ie. the most average sounding pair. I figured if my recordings sounded good on an average pair then that would cover as many bases as possible sound-wise.

Note: I’ve since compared all these headphones to a pair of brand new EarPods and to my delight they sound very similar to the pair which I picked.

iPod headphones through the ages… I ended up using my oldest pair of ‘third-generation’ earbuds (second from the right) as they had the most ‘average’ sound

2) Effects

I knew I would need to be a little ‘inventive’ when mixing and as I had planned for this to be quite a lofi-style recording, it gave me plenty of room for messing around with the distortions, overdrives and other effects available in GarageBand on the iPhone.

In regards to built-in effects in GarageBand, there are the ‘track’ effects (reverb and echo - found in settings), vocal effect presets and guitar amp effects.

I had originally intended to use amp effects on all tracks, including vocals and drums - as there is a much greater choice of effects and more granular controls. However, I found it really hard to balance the ‘amp sound’ with the effect I wanted. So I ended up only using a virtual amp for the bass.

The vocal effects seemed a better choice but, depending on the given preset, you can only change a couple of sliders for each effect. I got around this by duplicating a track and then applying different presets to different versions of the same track. I would then merge these different versions down to one track for each instrument/vocal line. Hey presto! — multieffects!

Vocal effects in GarageBand iOS - I used the ‘Bullhorn’ preset to add overdrive (and note: very little distortion) to vocals and drums

An additional upside of merging tracks together was that GarageBand automatically ‘normalises’ merged tracks. Normalising means that the peaks in a sound wave are brought to normal levels - not ideal for retaining audio fidelity but perfect for getting balanced levels.

I ended up applying merged vocal effects to both the drum and vocal tracks. The guitar I actually ended up leaving dry because I liked it the way it was. All I did was pan it to one side slightly to make it sound a little more ‘live’.

The downside to tweaking, duplicating and merging tracks for mixing was that I ended up needing to remember lots of settings for lots of tracks and apply roughly the same processes to all of the songs that we had recorded. And even worse, as I wanted to be able to go back and tweak things before they were merged it meant keeping lots of versions of each track - it was a version control nightmare.

Note the ‘Merged tracks…’ version numbers on these tracks. I’ve combined some ‘Bullhorn’ overdrive with the compressor and a little reverb from the ‘Large Room’ presets to my vocals. You can also see the bass with amp-effects

None-the-less I was really happy with the end result of my mixed down songs. If you want to check out one of the songs in its original GarageBand format to see how I did it - you can download it here.

A caveat

As much as I loved the fruits of my iPhone-only labour, I soon realised that there was something that GarageBand can’t do and this includes GarageBand on the Mac. In GarageBand there is no mastering.

Mastering can be contentious and complicated thing. But broadly speaking the end goal (as far as I’m concerned) is to take the mix as a whole and place it at a natural volume without excessively increasing or decreasing the volume of individual instruments. Mastered songs just seem to have a ‘pop’ to them that unmastered ones don’t.

So I’ll admit… I cheated slightly - in that the songs we’ve released still have some outside help. But again, it’s a testament to how awesome GarageBand on the iPhone is, that all I needed to do, was to was copy each song to iTunes – open them in GarageBand on the Mac and use a mastering plugin preset to take our songs from completely iPhone recorded and mixed to something I’m happy to play to strangers.