Step one is to select your material.
Choose your songs carefully. As long as you are only using your own
stuff, life is pretty easy. However, when you use someone else's
music and/or lyrics, they are entitled to a portion of the proceeds.
This doesn't mean that you should avoid using others' material.
It does mean that you are under a moral and legal obligation
to find the songwriters and license their works. Inside the filk
community this is usually fairly easy, since most filkers can be
contacted via conventions, filk publishers, or the newsgroup rec.music.filk. A good starting point outside
would be Harry Fox, an
organization that handles licensing for a great number of songs. Another
source would be the Canadian Musical Reproduction Rights
Agency Ltd. (CMRRA) If
the song you want isn't there, try contacting the publisher or record
company to find out who handles the mechanical license
for the song.
The good news is that material that has been recorded is subject
(in the US, anyway, I make no predictions otherwise) to compulsory
license. This means that if you follow certain procedures and pay the
required statutory rates (currently 7.55 cents per copy for songs under
5 minutes, 1.35 cents per minute for songs over 5 minutes), you cannot
be refused a license. Note that unrecorded material is not subject to
compulsory license - in other words, if you heard someone sing their
song you can't force them to let you record it before they either
record it themselves or explicitly allow someone else to do it.
The bad news is that lyrics cannot be changed without express permission.
Harry Fox doesn't give that permission. Neither do most other license
clearinghouses. Most of the time, if you can't get permission directly from
the songwriter, you won't get permission.
Second, you need to get those things recorded.
The recording can be done at an existing recording studio or it can be
done yourself. If you do it yourself, you will need to consider the
recording hardware (tape {analog
or digital} or hard drive {dedicated like a Roland,
for instance, or a program like Cubase,
Cakewalk, CoolEdit,
n-Track, or some other}), the microphones,
and some general basics of home recording that are beyond the
scope of this column. You can act as your own recording engineer (the person who rides the
levels and basically makes sure the sound you get is what you want) or
get someone to work with you (it is much harder than you might think
to do this one yourself - can you really concentrate on your best
performance and watch the levels and check for ugly noises at the
same time? A skilled engineer can make the difference between 20 takes
and 2 takes!)
Recording a one hour CD takes about two hours, right? Ummm ... wrong.
Your time may vary based on how many people are involved in the song
(one wag once suggested that the time varies according to the square
of the number of performers), the complexity of the song, and how well
you know it. Also, there will be the occasional phlegm in the throat,
too-loud tapping of the foot, forgotten verse, lost chord, broken
string, and fatigue. Never mind an extra take or two to experiment with
a particular sound that might be really cool. Good rule of thumb: in
four hours of recording time, expect at most three songs and probably two.
Yeah, but once the recording is over, everything else is fast, isn't it?
Nope.
The next step is mixing.
Mixing is, at its simplest, the act of putting all the parts together
to make a clean and listenable arrangement for the song. It usually
involves, at minimum, making sure that no clicks, pops, dropouts, weird noises, or
gross volume discrepancies will appear. At maximum, it involves clearing
away garbage from space in the arrangement that can best be used by
other parts (for instance, cutting low frequencies from the guitar parts
to clean up room for the bass or bass drum), editing out glitches in
a single part (when possible), making each part sound its individual
best when put together with the rest of the arrangement (using effects
or equalization), and then bringing that together to create a particular
sound when the entire song is played.
Mixing will take a minimum of an hour per song. The minimum will be barely
enough to make sure the song, as is, is clean and listenable.
Expect something more like three to 10 times as long as it took to
record the song if multiple instruments and vocals are involved.
Recording is done. Mixing is done. Now we can hand it out?
Well, no. In some form or another, the entire recording needs to
be mastered.
For a filk recording this can be as simple as making sure each track
is as loud as every other and that it sounds good in multiple places
(that $5000 stereo system, that $25 CD player, in the car, whatever.)
For a song with possible radio airplay, there are dynamic adjustments
that are expected (involving compression and amplification) to make
sure that it is as loud and attention-demanding as everything else
on the air. The mastering stage can give the recording an overall
ambience through use of analog amplifiers or effects. Obviously,
it's also the place where that precious set of tracks is
finally put on some medium for transfer to the duplicator.
Now comes getting it to your adoring public ...
Next: Reproduction and Distribution
