I had an interesting chat with a taxi driver the other day. We were talking about living and working in Taipei, and he asked me what I did for a living. "I'm a musician. I produce records," I said.
"So you work at a record store?"
"No. I make recordings."
"You mean like CDs?"
"That's right. I make CDs for my record company."
"Those CDs are amazing things," he mused. "My brother-in-law collects them. He must have hundreds of them. They're not cheap at all."
"No, they're not," I laughed.
"If you ask me, I would rather listen to the radio. It's free." He patted his dashboard.
Neither one of us said anything for several more intersections. Then suddenly he turned around and gave me a puzzled look. "I have something to ask you," he said.
"What's that?"
"Those CDs, they're made at a factory, right?"
"Yes, a CD factory."
"So you work at a factory then."
"No, I'm a music producer. I'm responsible for recording the music that goes onto the CD. I work with the musicians in the recording studio."
"My brother-in-law says that CDs have to be pressed at a factory."
"That's right."
"But I don't understand."
"Understand what?"
"How do you squash all those instruments into a tiny little CD?"
I started to wonder about my work. Did most people wonder how all those instruments got squashed into CDs? Was what I did for a living considered rocket science to many? The equivalent of sending a man to the moon? I hope not.
The recording process is actually quite easy to understand. There are several clear steps in bringing a musical idea to life on a CD. That's what I'll discuss today.
Step 1: The Idea
This is actually the most difficult part of getting a project off the ground. Someone has to have an idea of what they want to do, and has to convince someone with money (the record company) to pay for it.
It sounds simple enough, but this is not often the case. For example, say I have an idea. I want to do a Taiwanese version of the California Raisins, using Betelnuts instead. The project has a catchy name, The Betelnut Zippers, and will involve techno remakes of Taiwan oldies.
Remember, I only have an idea. It doesn't mean anything until someone with pulling power at the record company says, "I've got a great idea! Let's do a Taiwanese version of the California Raisins!"
Ahhhh. So the trick is to find a way to make someone else come up with your idea first. This is a very zen-oriented, reverse psychology, Sun-tze's Art of War-type concept at work here. In the music business, if you have an idea, but no one else came up with the idea first, then your idea never really existed.
Step 2: The Compromise
Once someone else has come up with your idea, then you are ready for the next step. "I really think that's an incredible idea!" you say, complimenting the record executive on his original thinking.
"I know my band can do an incredible job," you continue. "Our bass player is addicted to betelnut. Maybe we could even get some betelnut sponsor to promote our tour!"
“Great!” he says. “And we just signed this really gorgeous Hong Kong actress, BooBie Hsu, who’d be perfect for this project!!”
Since you happen to be the first musically inclined person the executive sees after his revelation, and you also think it's a great idea, it only makes sense to give you the project.
While everyone is still excited about the Betelnut Zippers, you need to get your budget together as soon as possible before this executive goes out golfing with another producer and has another idea.
So the next day, you fax over a much-inflated budget. It's enough to cover the cost of fourteen people recording at a French chateau for two weeks. You have to do this because whatever budget you submit, it will automatically be slashed by sixty percent.
You plead that it's impossible to make anything of value for so little. You are an artist. You need some breathing room. It will take you months, and you won't make any money. Your car will be repossessed, your mother is in the hospital, your uncle has debts. Of course you are happy to get the forty percent, but you have to make the executive think that he's grinding you into the ground to get the best deal. Record companies love getting a good deal.
Step 3: The Song
This is where you imagine a bunch of musician’s sitting around in their hotel room, strumming guitars with their girlfriend’s sitting on their laps, smoking illegal herbs and spices, crooning away to their muse. Not quite. Usually a musician is doing something nondescript like washing the dishes, taking a shower, or sitting in a taxi, when a little melodic bird suddenly flies into their head. This is the artistic approach. The let’s-see-what-comes-out-of-my-inner-self-dude kind of route. Other times, a musician will be practicing with their band, and ideas sort of materialize and a group consensus sort of takes place, and from this a song is born. This is the cooperative approach. Still, at other times, a musician will sit himself down at the piano with a piece of paper, and toss around little parts of melodies, molding them into cohesive musical elements. An intro, a hook, a chorus, a theme. He writes these ideas down, and records them onto tape or into a computer. The phone is off the hook. This is the professional approach. But sometimes you are on a deadline, and need to come up with twelve songs to give to the record company to get your idea off the ground. Since most producers can’t write, they resort to their other talent, the phone. Call as many songwriters as you know, and tell them that “Hey, we’re doing a retro-techno-ambient-alternative kind of California Raisin thing, but with Betelnuts instead. I need to select some material by next week. NT$30,000 per song. The record company is paying.” Next thing you know, you have twelve songs. This is the Taiwan method.
Step 4: The Lyrics
So you have twelve songs, but none of them have lyrics to them yet. The demos arrived only with some basic guitar and someone humming or la la la-ing on them. Where are the words? This is an interesting phenomenon in the music industry. Taiwan especially. Producers prefer to be given songs without lyrics. Once they decide on the musical direction they want, they can concentrate on the lyrical direction. The lyrical direction depends on the way the record company want to promote the record. There are as many lyricists as there are songwriters. So you call up some proven ones. Ones who have a track record. (You see their credits at the KTV in the lower left corner). You say, “Our image is the happy Betelnut. BooBie Hsu will be the lead nut. We want to make them feel lively, cute, lovable. There needs to be a lot of sunshine, something good for the kids, plently of smiling. Definitely no red teeth.” They say, “No problem. Don’t worry. I’ll fax them over on Tuesday. NT$25,000. Thanks.”
“Sitting all day under the sun,
Just me and my Betelnuts, having some fun,
We’re happy and cute, we live in a tree
Life is so easy, life is so free
La la la la…… (songs these days need lots of “la’s” or “di’s da di’s”)
We all live in the betelnut tree, the betelnut tree, the betelnut tree….
We all live in the betelnut tree, the betelnut tree, the betelnut tree….
La la la la….”
Step 5: The Arranger
In the old days, an arranger's job was to write music for the musicians. He would take a song, add some flavor to it, and do an arrangement for a band. But these days, especially in Taiwan, the arranger plays a more crucial role. Since most producers don't know anything about music, his job is to make musical sense of the producer's ideas. He's usually some guy with about twenty keyboards and a Macintosh computer in his bedroom who hasn't slept or shaved for three weeks because he has been working on some ungodly deadline. His job is to take your basic melody, whatever lyrics you give him, and using his keyboards and computer, come up with a complete song. Ninety-eight percent of the music you hear in Taiwan is made this way -- usually by some poor guy staying up three days in a row hunched over his keyboards, pressing buttons on his computer. This kind of music is called MIDI, as opposed to recording live. It's cheaper and quicker to use a single person with a computer than bring in a whole bunch of live musicians.
Step 6: The Studio
Once the arranger has added all the computer parts to your masterpiece, you are ready to book a studio. This is where the arranger dumps his computer information over to tape. He lugs all of his twenty keyboards and Macintosh over in a taxi, and sets them up again in the studio. This takes forever, so you walk back and forth to the coffee machine, asking every five minutes if they are done yet.
Once everything is in place, an engineer hooks up dozens of cables to the back of his machines, and one by one, each sound is transferred to tape. The tape usually has 24 or 48 tracks, which means that 24 or 48 different parts can be recorded onto the tape at the same time.
To understand this easier, imagine a typical cassette tape. That thin tape inside the plastic case can record two tracks, left and right, to create “stereo.” Now imagine a giant cassette tape that weighs five kilos and requires a monster cassette tape player. The tape is several centimetes thick and dozens of instruments and vocal parts can be simultaneously recorded. The player is about the size of a washing machine and is ridiculously expensive, so studios charge a lot of money to use them. The going rate is anywhere from NT$1,800 to $5,000 an hour.
Once all the sounds have been recorded, we can later adjust the loudness, bass, treble and add effects individually without messing up the other sounds. That’s because they were all recorded on separate “tracks.”
Later on someone from the record company drops by. “We’re working a bit with the lyrics. We really liked your basic idea, but the singer has trouble singing all those la la la’s. We might have to change things a bit.”
Step 7: The Musicians
After the arranger goes home, the musicians show up. Since everything up to now has been done on the computer, the mix sounds a little sterile and needs something to give it some life.
Usually, we add a guitar for rhythm and solos, and sometimes a bass to change the feel a little, or a drummer to complement the bass. If there are any horns on the recording, they come in and play their parts or solo. This is usually done one at a time. Sometimes we'll record the rhythm section together, which means that the guitar, bass and drums are recorded at the same time, but this is relatively rare in Taiwan.
Step 8: The Singers
At this stage, almost all the instrumental parts are on tape, and the songs are starting to sound pretty good. It's time to bring in the singers. This is what you typically see in a Mariah Carey video -- some people wearing headphones standing around a microphone with their throat muscles popping out. Believe me, your throat muscles would be popping out too if you had to sing a verse one hundred times to make it sound perfect.
Step 9: The Star
BooBie Hsu shows up late with three other people. A promotion person, her makeup artist, and reporter from the TV station. “Cool studio!”
“Have you had a chance to go over the material?” you ask.
“Nope, I’ve been too busy working on my new Hong Kong movie, Super Cop Killers In Action.” She tosses her sky blue sequined jacket on the console and sits down behind the mike. “C’mon, let’s do it! I have to be done by 6:00 for my hair appointment. Oh, by the way, they already faxed me the new lyrics. They’re good!”
When BooBie starts to sing you realize that your budget is going to go over. Way over. You’ll have to record one or two phrases at a time, piecing all the stops and starts together into a cohesive whole. It's going to be time-consuming, hair-pulling surgery. You wonder, why bother with a star in the first place? Do the Betelnut Zippers really need her? The answer: Yes. Record companies need someone who looks good on TV to sell records. Period.
Step 10: The Typical Unexpected Change
What’s going on here? The once happy go lucky Betelnuts have become lovesick and lonely. The sunshine is gone. The clouds have come out. It’s raining. It’s miserable. It’s become a Taiwan Pop Song.
“If you only knew, what I would do
To hide my lonely eyes
The clouds, the trees, the birds and bees,
They listen to my trembling sighs
Whisper, whisper, whisper to me
My beautiful Betelnut lover…
Oh where are you? Oh where are you?
My long lost Betelnut lover…
Oh…….Oh…… (The la’s have been replaced by the more reflective oh’s)
Step 11: The Mix
This is where everyone leaves the studio except you and the engineer, and you start moving around knobs and faders on the recording console. The idea is to make each sound fit aesthetically and creatively into the whole of each song.
This is one of the most important parts of the recording process apart from getting a good idea or writing a good song. It's creative and a lot of fun. If you work fast, you can be done in a week or two.
When you are finished mixing, you leave the studio with a production master. This is usually a DAT (Digital Audio Tape, a small cassette which records sound digitally, like on a CD) or a CD-ROM.
“Betelnut Lover” is almost done. There's just one more technical step.
Step 12: The Master
Mastering is a subtle art that few people really understand. After you have spent all that time mixing, why do you have to go to another studio to do it again?
In the studio, all the instruments are mixed down onto a production master. In the mastering studio, the production master is polished up to make sure everything sounds right before it is sent off to the CD factory.
Mastering is usually done in a small room containing very expensive stereo speakers and a lot of weird pieces of equipment covered with knobs and buttons. In addition, the mastering engineer has a good set of ears -- he or she is trained to hear anything that sounds abnormal or sticks out in the normal musical range.
Many things can effect a mix. The room. The engineer. The equipment. The speakers. The air conditioner. The mood. The mastering engineer is a final set of objective ears in a controlled listening environment. This is the icing on the cake. You leave here with your final master feeling proud of all your hard work. The music will never sound any better than it did in the mastering studio.
Step 13: The Meeting
After you have your master in your hand, you have to play it to the record execs at The Meeting.
You will take something that has been created in a million-dollar studio and play it on a Puffy Fuzzy Logic Ultra Mega Bass system that was won as a door prize at the company's year-end party four years ago.
You are at a serious disadvantage. The phones will be ringing. People will be coming in and out of the room. There are so many variables that can screw you up. So you have to be very careful that the mood is right for The Meeting.
Mood effects people's judgement. Your six weeks of hard work will go down the drain if you pick the wrong time to play your creation. Wednesday before noon is a good bet. Not before a weekend, not on Monday. Never before a holiday.
This is the last major obstacle. If they like Betelnut Zippers, you're home free. You have a chance to work on other ideas. If not, you will never know, because no one will ever tell you. They will only tell other people about how much money they wasted on you. It's a slow painful death, and almost always the outcome of someone having a bad day.
Step 14: The Factory
If you've managed to get past The Meeting, then your product will more than likely be released. Betelnut Zippers is on its way to the CD factory! You can relax now. Your job is done.
Um, kind of. So much music gets butchered at the factory, it’s scary. Wires gets crossed. Left turns into right. Extra hiss is mysteriously added. Unidentified bass is amplified. Vocals all but disappear.
More often than not, it's a case of one person at the factory who thinks he knows more about your creation than you do. And he is just dying to add his own extra artistic touch to your project. Your job is to make sure this does not happen. Sometimes I have stood next to this eager little man while he puts the master into the duplicating machine, peering over his shoulder menacingly, making sure it is properly sent on its way.
Step 15:The Record Store
This is where my taxi driver walks in and says, "Hey, do you have that new song by the Betelnut Zippers? I wanted to see how they squashed all those instruments onto that CD."
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