Mixing Music: The Perfect (and Impossible) Hobby for Home Quarantine

I like to screw around recording weird music. Laying down the tracks is a blast. You loop a beat, play some guitar and bass, layer in some synths, perhaps sing a bit. Then you've got to really harness the power of your DAW software. Add effects. Play with the tempo. And finally, mix everything together into a coherent whole. That's the hard part and professional sound engineers get paid the big bucks to mix and master songs so they sound good everywhere: headphones, your car, a stereo system, in da club, on your computer. It's a real skill.

I recently switched DAW software from Cakewalk Sonar-- which is now freeware called Cakewalk by Bandcamp-- to Logic Pro X. My old PC died, so I decided to buy a used iMac and switch things up. Change is good. It prevents dementia.

I should point out that the debate about which DAW is the best for recording music is an endless infinite rabbit hole. This dude Admiral Bumblebee has a comprehensive and extensive blog dedicated solely to this question. It's an amazing website, but daunting. He makes videos to accompany the madness.

My school is shut down so I've got plenty of free time to screw around with the new software. It's extremely powerful, especially because of the Flex Time and AI drummer features. If you're stuck at home too, perhaps you have time to listen to a bit of my first attempt to record this song-- which is on Cakewalk Sonar-- and then what I did with Logic Pro.

The rhythm in the Cakewalk demo version is fairly static. I may have drawn in some tempo changes, but mainly I am playing guitar to the looped drums. Pretty dull (and the mix is shit). You won't need to listen long to get the picture. Twenty seconds or so . . .



Then check out my new mix. If you use the Adapt time feature on Logic Pro, you can play the guitar-- with all your natural rhythm changes-- and the software figures out the various tempo shifts. Then, you can choose an AI drummer to follow your playing. You can then adjust the Flex Time of either track. It's nuts.

So you should be able to hear more rhythmic variety in the following version. I still don't love the mix, but I'm done with it. I've got to move on with my life (or maybe I don't . . . I'm hearing that my school is going to shut down for a while).