Audio Recording

This is good news for those producing music in home recording studio. One of my songs “Stay Cool My Friend” and “Dream” was used as a soundtrack by a 48 hour film project in Vietnam.

They licensed it through my music publishing page. The 48 hour film project(www.48hourfilm.com) is for film practitioners to shoot, direct, produce, edit and finalize the film within 48 hours. So this means that the film crew should be able to decide the script, acting as well as the sound tracks appropriate for the movie scene.

Since they are only given 48 hours to produce, the film is usually short which around 10 minutes. Below is the film entitled “Special Day” by the Socrates Team submitted as an entry in the 48 hour film festival in Vietnam:

The song “Stay Cool My Friend” is featured starting 2:40 in the film. I recorded, mixed and mastered that song a long time ago, I think in the year 2008-2009 with some re-mastering done in 2010. I wrote the lyrics and music as well as performed the drums/guitar recording arrangements of that song. It is a meaningful song about friendship.

Below are the recording gear, plug-in and software used to produce that song:

a.) Windows PC
b.) Creative Audigy Soundcard
c.) Adobe Audition 1.5
d.) Sony FX plug-ins
e.) Rocktek overdrive for guitars
f.) Behringer Xenyx 502 mixer
g.) L2 waves Ultramaximizer

I recorded the guitar twice to create a nice guitar ambiance for left and right. The vocals are recorded in a separate recording studio. The reason is that I do not have good vocal isolation booth and facilities at that time. I spend around 500 pesos for the vocal recording (one hour session only). I then transferred the vocal tracks to my home studio mixer. The song is performed by Jeanine Maningo.The rest of the instruments which are the drums, guitars and bass guitars are all recorded and produced in my home.

Surprisingly “Stay Cool My friend” song in that film is using a very low audio resolution which is a 128kbps MP3 version. I am planning before to contact the film producers (at the time the film was still in production) and offer them a much higher resolution such as a CD audio wav (which I have) but it looks like they are happy with that version.

The reason why they downloaded 128kbps MP3 is that it is used as the default audio resolution in my music license page mp3 streaming. Right now, I am slowly converting the quality of the audio streaming to 320kbps and I hope to provide a 16bit 44.1 KHz wav to film producers in the future.

The audio tracking and mixing technique in that song are clearly discussed in this blog. You can find my audio compression, panning and EQ settings/techniques used by searching this website. Those are used to produce that song.

The song “Dream” is featured starting 5:18 in the film. The song is produced using the same set of gears and instruments as “Stay Cool My Friend”. This is one of first experimental set of songs where I mix the bass guitar at a lower frequencies compared to the kick drums. You can read more details about that in my tips on how to mix bass guitar.

My recent licensing success in film shows that music productions need not to be expensive just to create a reasonable broadcast quality recording. A broadcast quality recording can be created with simple set of inexpensive gears, a critical listening ear and applying correct music production techniques.

The high resolution 320kbps MP3/multitrack version of that soundtrack is available below for reference:

“Stay Cool My Friend“:

“Dream“:

The above songs can be licensed in www.audiorecording.me/license-music/, my music publishing website.