"Tear It Down" - Making-of TSL4 Theme Song

Hi, I'm Jimmy Bates, I produced and helped create the song Tear It Down which was produced for Teamliquid.net for the use in the TSL 4 broadcast's intro video. In making the song, I worked with two musicians from my band What's Left Is Right (http://www.whatsleftisright.com), Josh Buchholtz (who also plays SC, he goes on TLnet by the name of 'buchholtz' ) and Mike O'Mara. In this article I'll detail the experience I had while making the song!

Welcome to my studio ^^

Well, before I start, I'll link here to the full song.

You can also find it on SoundCloud here for download.

And I'll link to the TSL 4 intro (from the Ro32):

TSL 4 intro :D

There's a lot of technical information that could go into describing how a song is made, and for me, the technical information is the whole experience. That being said, I'm going to try to make this article as user friendly as possible ^^ If you have any questions about how I did any certain thing, please ask me! If you have critique you want to say about the song too, please do! I won't get offended at all.

I first got asked to produce the music and sound for the TSL broadcast, in particular the introduction video, by Nazgul. I've been on the forums for quite a while, and we had a similar interest in MMA so we got to know each other online a bit. He had known I was a musician and recorded in my own studio, so after hearing my portfolio, he asked me to produce a song for the TSL, and acquainted me with Lip the Pencilboy (www.salonalpin.net). From there, we established what direction the video was going, and what direction I wanted to take the music. One comment I've noticed is that it reminds people of the Ever OSL 2007 intro, which is a REALLY sharp comment since that was the main influence I used when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do in terms of musical direction. ^_^

Ever OSL 2007 Intro - my fav starleague intro

I contacted my bandmates Mike (who plays drums) and Josh (who plays guitar and sings) about this project, and they both wanted to be a part of this, so I made a rough sketch of the song using MIDI drums piano and bass, and playing my guitar directly into my audio interface, and then sent the mp3 to Mike, who made his own version of the drums, and Josh, who developed vocal parts for this song. Josh, being an SC2 player himself, was particularly excited about being on this track, and he too regularly visits tlnet! ^_^ Afterwards, I made a short version of the track, 50 seconds long, so that Lip could figure out how he wanted to sync certain things up to the song, and off we went to actually record the song for real!

Mike on drums!

When I record a song, generally I like to start from the foundation and go up. To me, that means starting with the drums, then recording bass, then guitar, piano, vocals, and then whatever synths need to be added on afterwards. When a band is playing a song, the guitarist will be relying on the drummer for timing far more than the drummer will be relying on the guitarist. So therefore, I started with drums, and called Mike to come over and set up his drums for recording. As is standard in the recording industry, I set up so that each drum had its own mic, and that the cymbals were recorded by two overhead mics up top (as you can see in the picture below). This was a day-long process, and we ended up getting 5 or 6 takes that I was able to edit from.

The mic setup on the drums

When I edit, I generally make "composite" tracks of what I record by taking the best take of every part in the song, and then stringing them together to make the best possible version of the whole song. There's actually quite a bit more to editing than that, and editing is probably the most meticulous and labor intensive procedure in the whole process of making a song, but that's the short version of it.

After the drums were done, I was ready to record bass and guitar. I recorded the bass myself by putting a few mics on my bass amp, edited it, and then got Josh to come over since I was ready to record guitar.

JOSH!!

Much like the different races in SC2, each instrument presents different challenges when it comes to recording! With drums, you have to be very aware of how the microphones work with each other, and you're usually dealing with a lot of tracks and a lot to edit. With vocals, usually you have to be a bit of a psychologist and coach the singer so they are comfortable, saying what they need to hear so you can get the best performance possible. For this song, the guitar presented the most irritating challenges, though, particularly because the guitar amp cabinet was wired incorrectly and in such a way that the sound in the room was fine, but only one of the speakers was actually playing the full signal that was coming out of the amplifier, so it was very hard to get a good sound into the mics. Once that was fixed, however, I was able to mic the guitar amp up and get going on recording.

Pretty standard setup.

Since Josh is a much better guitar player than me, once I had the song figured out in terms of structure and what not, I showed him my guitar parts. After he learned those guitar parts (pretty quickly, they were pretty basic), he took them, and basically made his own version of it, adding a lot of flair and then coming up with other guitar parts to layer on the main guitar line. In the end, we had come up with 4 guitar parts, one that plays throughout the whole song, a second guitar on the chorus, a second guitar on the second verse, and a clean part during the bridge. Honestly, I think the guitar parts in this song helped huge in making this song a lot more interesting. The guitars took a few days to organize and record everything, but we finally got it done and were ready to go onto vocals.

WOOT vocals

At this point in recording, you can really hear the song coming together and it's a good feeling, you generally have a lot of momentum at this point. This was probably my favorite part of the whole recording session, because it's with the vocals that you can really hook a listener to your song, and to me, the vocals is where we can really express our artistry. We used a large diaphragm condenser microphone to record the vocals, which is a really crisp sounding microphone that can record delicate acoustic sounds. We recorded in a room that was treated really well acoustically, which means that there was no echo or reverb in the room, and therefore the vocals I was recording was really clear.

The first day of recording the vocals consisted of getting the verses done and the choruses done. Since this was such an important song to us, we really wanted to focus on each section and make sure there was a lot of expression at every point in the song. We also recorded a LOT of takes per section, just because we want everything to sound as good as it can, and that means paying attention to every word and making sure it's at the right volume, right pitch, and the word is being enunciated properly. Recording that many takes can be quite a long process though, because you have to be very aware of how fatigued the singer is, but luckily Josh has been recorded enough that he has very good endurance when it comes to this. After we were done recording, we had a few beers while playing 2v2 for the rest of the day. ^^

glhf lolol

After editing what we had recorded vocally, we then got back in the saddle and recorded the bridge, the harmonies, and then the remaining little bits of singing that we hadn't recorded yet ("You're going down, you're going down!"). Harmonies is one of my favourite parts of producing because I have a strong theory knowledge due to my piano background, and this usually allows me to recognize what vocal harmonies can be sung at any given point. After the vocals was done, I was able to get the piano sequenced, and all the remaining synths sequenced, and then I was ready to actually mix the song.

Mixing is when you take all the tracks that you've recorded and edited, clean them up, make them sound really good individually AND with each other, and then set the volume and pan so all the tracks mesh together sound wise. There's so much technical information that goes into mixing that I could write a 5000 word essay on it easily. But really, the main things I have to note are that I was extremely careful to make everything sound really crisp and clear, and as weird as this may sound, my goal was to make the drums sound like drums, guitar sound like guitar, etc. When you record with a lot of different microphones, you'll record a lot of sounds that muddle what you want, and therefore you'll spend a lot of your attention on removing the unwanted sounds but being careful not to remove the sound you want as well.

I used both Logic Pro and Protools to record. Logic was used to sequence the piano and the synths, and Protools was used for recording, editing, and mixing. This is the Protools session for the song.

If anyone has any questions in terms of mixing, I'd be more than glad to answer, but I'll leave a spoiler with some of the more technical information on mixing so anyone who's interested can read it:

+ Show Spoiler +

Now that everything had been recorded and edited, the song was ready to be mixed. The mixing stage is where you take each track, you clean the sound and make it sound good, set the levels and panning for each track, blending it together into a stereo AIFF or WAV file that is then ready for mastering (explained later). Before I started mixing, I made a short version of the song from the full length version for the TSL 4 broadcast intro video, and that was fairly easy as it was just a matter of copy and pasting certain parts and making it sound seamless.

When it comes to mixing, there are three main "inserts," or "audio processors," or effects if you will, that you will use:
- Equalization (abbreviated as EQ): This is where you can change the frequency content, or tone, of the sound. This means, you can make something sound brighter, darker; you can remove the low end, add low end, remove the high end, or add high end to the sound. But most importantly, you can simply remove sounds that you don't want to hear, whether its because they are unintended sounds that the microphone picked up, or there are two instruments clashing. A common example of two instruments clashing would be the bass guitar and kick: It is very easy for the bass to be overwhelming in the song and to completely drown out the kick. A good solution to that is often to remove the frequencies from the bass that the kick will be around, and it's also a good idea often to remove frequencies from the kick that the bass is around too. That way, both instruments have a spot in the mix.
Now, while EQing is a very essential tool to mixing that you'll likely have on almost every track, it is very easy to over-EQ something, and completely warp the sound of the track that you're EQing, often making it sound worse than what it was originally. As a general rule of thumb, when EQing, usually less is more.
- Compression: When you compress a track, basically you are evening out the volume spikes that the track would have, therefore simultaneously controlling anything that would be too loud, but also making the softest parts of the track more audible. How it does this is by setting a volume threshold that the compression will kick in, then setting a ratio that any signal above the volume threshold will be divided by. Clearly, if you divide a signal by any amount, you will have 'signal loss', so afterwards, you can apply "make-up gain" which is where you can crank the signal back to where you wanted it volume-wise before you applied compression.
If you're mixing a song, you'll likely use compression on most of the tracks, but a particularly good example of a time you'd want to use compression is for vocals. Since there will be a lot of times where the singer is singing softly throughout the song, such as perhaps a verse, it's easy for the vocals to get drowned out of the mix. Even in louder sections, it's common for a note to have a lot of presence until the very tail end of it where the singer lets off a little bit. If you put compression on the vocals, you can raise the softer singing parts so that it stays above the mix, and it'll also make sure that if the singer bursts out in volume on a particular note (especially a high note), that it doesn't overpower the mix and just sound awkward.
- Reverb: Most people know what reverb is, but if you don't: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverberation. Reverb is used on most tracks, as without it usually everything will sound extremely dry. The trick with reverb is to set it to a level where it sounds natural: If I sent a track to someone, I really don't want them to notice the reverb, I just want it to be there. And with that being said, most effects, unless being used to really creative purposes, are usually supposed to be unnoticed.

Most of the tracks in this song have a combination of these 3 things. There are other audio processors such as delay, phasing, but the meat and potatoes of mixing will be done through these processors, plus setting volume levels, and panning.

When I was mixing Tear It Down, I started by applying EQ, compression, and reverb to the drums, working my way through the bass, guitar, piano, and then vocals. The main things that one should look out for when mixing are to avoid instruments clashing or drowning each other out in terms of sound, and to make sure everything sounds like it should. As simple as making "everything sound like it's supposed to" sounds, it can actually be very difficult, and it's also very easy to lose yourself in your own idea of what the mix should sound like, when the idea isn't grounded to reality. It's a really good idea to keep checking with other songs that are within the same genre to make sure that your sound is "in the same ballpark" and give you guidance in terms of what you should be striving for. After mixing, really meticulously checking the mix constantly to make sure that it sounds "up to par" with what I want in a mix, I was able to output it to a stereo WAV file that was ready for mastering.

The mastering process is quite a bit simpler than the mixing process, with the goal of the mastering process being to take the stereo WAV file that was outputted, and simply make it sound acceptable by industry standards. That means making it as loud as other tracks that are on the market are, and fixing small mistakes that you might have made during the mix (such as, not having enough bass in the mix). If you are dealing with a whole album of songs, it'll be in the mastering process that you create seamless transitions from one track to another, therefore making the album sound like an album, not a "compilation of songs."

Essentially, all I really wanted to do was to raise the volume of the mix to nominal level, and I also used a stereo widener to create a bit of distance between the left and right since the mix was a little bit too muddled down the middle. I was pretty happy with my mix in general so not a lot needed to be done, so at that point I outputted the master file and was ready to send Tear It Down off to teamliquid.net, and send the shortened version to Lip, who then placed it in his video.

With that all done, it was merely a case of putting the shortened version of the song to the video Lip had created, and then putting in sound fx in, and we had the completed TSL intro vid + a full song to boot.

Hope you enjoyed! You can contact me at jbates.productions@gmail.com.
http://www.soundcloud.com/jbates-productions/

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