Julian Grant's Music Production
Grow your musical ideas
Paint your sound
Set your art free
How Does This Work?
Getting your songs out into the world is certainly easier said than done! There are 5 crucial steps you must complete, with each step cascading into the next, to create a delicious sonic masterpiece that is well explored and developed, captured precisely, mixed together beautifully, packaged up to commercial standards and set free for the world to enjoy!
That certainly sounds like a lot, but the good thing is it doesn't have to be done all at once. So I'll use the space below to explain and explore each step so you know what to expect, and then ultimately you can decide if you want to take all the steps with me, or just one or two!
Pre-Production
Bring Your Ideas To Life
So you've written a song with your instrument and sung over the top of it, we're ready to record, right? Not necessarily!
Pre-Production is where we take your song ideas and really flesh out the arrangement, instrumentation, structure, ear candy, etc. The more detailed you are in this area, the quicker, easier, and more predictable the song will end up.
With this step, keeping the creative flow going with speed and decent sound quality is the key. We need to get those new ideas down, hear them in context and release the new creative ideas in your brain, all in real time. Luckily with today's recording technology we can place down decent sounding tracks all within the computer, without the need to mic up a drumkit, crank up amplifiers, wheel around sound baffling, all the stuff that takes up time and creative energy!
If you have a band going already, and you've already meticulously crafted your parts, you could potentially skip this step, save yourself a bit of dosh and move onto tracking!
Tracking
Get Those Sounds Down
Time to get your sounds out of your instruments, through those microphones and into the computer! This is probably the step you already know about and why you're probably here, lets get the band together and play the damn songs!
This is the step that really crafts the sounds of your recording, we get all your instruments laid out, all the sounds dialed in, all the microphones placed correctly and then we hit the big red record button.
This step thrives if you have a good demo recording done (pre-production), and everyone has their parts well practiced and rehearsed. In a perfect world, this step could take just as long as the song does!
This step can vary greatly with time and cost, depending on how many extra layers (overdubs) need to be tracked, do we need to track each person separately or can everyone perform it at once, how many takes need to be performed (we're only human after all!), how much do we have to shift around the recording space to accommodate all the different instruments, etc. So the more prepared you are here, the easier, faster and more fun everything will be!
Mixing
The Plan Finally Comes Together
So you've gotten the band in, everyone has played their best and the sounds are in, it's time for you to take the back seat and let the magic happen!
This step is where the raw tracks are smooshed together and crafted into the beautiful soundscape you imagined in your head.
This step is equal parts technical and creative. The technical is to put the raw tracks together, set their levels and panning, add the processing to help it all glue together, all the stuff you don't want to worry about! The creative aspect is endless, just like the canyon reverb you wanted on those distant twiddly bits!
To help the creative part go more smoothly, there are a couple of things that help greatly.
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A decent sounding demo of the track itself. (It all starts with pre-production!). If your demo is literally what you want to happen, then why change it! Lets get those awesome sounds from tracking and take that demo to the next level!
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Some reference tracks. These are the tracks that you would like your song to resemble, or the genre your song has to live next to. Want your punk band to sound something akin to Green Day, list the tune and we'll aim for it!
Towards the end of this step, I'll need to make sure you're happy with the mix, cause after this step, there's no turning back! This can be achieved in 2 ways, either I can send you the files to listen to, and then you provide me with some feedback of any changes you'd like, or we can get together and have a listen and we can change it on the fly.
Mastering
Let's Get Down To Business
You got your mix back, and it sounds perfect! But when you play it against other songs is sounds quiet in comparison, what gives!?!?
This is the often misunderstood step of mastering! The main aim of this step is make your song compete with other commercial releases within the genre and to supply the correct formats for distribution. This is achieved through loudness checks, tone checks (brightness and darkness), and the nerdy stuff like correct sample rate, true peak and file format checks.
The last thing you want is for your song to come on and your audience experiencing a quite track where they have to turn their volume dial up, or your track being overly bright and suddenly painful to listen to, or uploaded to a streaming service and sounding distorted, or not accepted at all!
I recommend that this step is done by someone other than the person who mixed the song, as this is the last time that fresh ears will be put onto the tune and the last time that any further adjustments can be made. I feel that it's worth it to take the ego hit and squeeze that extra 5% out of the song that perhaps you didn't even know was there!
Distribution
Set Your Tunes Free!
Do you want to keep your new, juicy track all to yourself? Sweet, then we're all done. Want other people to share in your creative expression, then lets get the tune out to the public!
There are a few ways to do this;
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Streaming services only (spotify, apple music, facebook, youtube, etc)
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CD printing, with physical distribution
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Vinyl printing, with physical distribution
Unfortunately I can't help with the physical distribution of CD and vinyl, however I can help you distribute your song to all the streaming platforms!
There's a lot of companies out there trying to get their cut of your song, and a lot of them are moving over to yearly subscriptions, making that one single you release today cost who knows what over your entire lifetime!?!?
I'm already paying for these subscriptions for myself, so why not join my record label, save on the yearly cost, and we'll arrange a split percentage of your royalties.
The bare minimum I need is your artist name, credits, and your album artwork (between 3000-6000 pixels square, as a jpg or png). Anything extra will to be to fill out your band profile on the streaming platforms.
Once this step is complete, IT'S ALL DONE!!!
Previous Works
The proof is in the pudding, as they say. Have a listen to the songs below and have a geeze of some of the artworks as well!
Tracking Examples
Mixing Examples
Mastering Examples
What's The Cost?
It's hard to give an accurate quote with creative works that can vary wildly with how long each task takes and what's involved.
So I've included a rough guide here, to give you a ball park of how much things cost. I've also included some expectations on how long you'll need to be involved for certain tasks.
If you'd like a more accurate quote, please contact me below and describe your project to me. Listing the number of songs, genre, what instruments and some song demos will go a long way to getting an accurate quote.
I'll endeavour to quote on a project price, instead of hourly, to provide you with a bit more peace of mind.
Pre-Production
Time: ~2-8 hours per song
Cost: $50/hr
Tracking
Time: ~4 hours per song
Cost: ~$200 per song
Mixing
Cost: ~$200 per song
Mastering
Cost: $100 per song
Distribution
Cost: Free when combined with mixing or mastering.