LIbrary Request. What Would You Do?

[VanderBoegh]

If a network were to contact the library for alts, that would add one extra step to the process, making it incredibly unlikely - just due to time constraints - that this would happen.

Let's say a show needs to be finished by TONIGHT. They love your cue, but it has a bad ending and they want something definitive to end the scene with. It has to end with a huge bang, but your cue falls flat - or has a dreaded fadeout ending. However, that TV show is being produced in Los Angeles, and your library is in New York. 1:00 pm on the West Coast is 4:00 pm in NYC. If the library DOES get a request from the network, they'd need to be able to reach out to the composer almost immediately. Then, the composer would need to be instantly available and able to make very quick alt mixes or cutdowns, ship them off to the library, who would then turn them around to the network. All within that one-hour window of time before the library guys go home at 5:00 pm. If you're out grocery shopping, or walking your dog, or just don't hear your phone vibrate, you'll lose precious minutes out of that one-hour window. So, it's highly unlikely this could even possibly get handled in time, unless you're a full-time composer and are in front of your DAW all day. But if that were the case, you'd most likely have given the library all cutdowns of your music from the outset.

I may be exaggerating circumstances just for this illustration, but it seems like shows are always pushing their deadlines, oftentimes finishing up their final version with scant time to spare before it airs. So nobody has time to waste.

As for what I supply my libraries, this is what I typically give (note, in some cases libraries don't ask for all this stuff, but when they do you have to deliver it):

"Darling Debutantes"
"Darling Debutantes (bass & drums)"
"Darling Debutantes (no lead)"
"Darling Debutantes (30 sec)"
"Darling Debutantes (15 sec)"
"Darling Debutantes (5 sec stinger)"

As the guys above me said, it's rare that you'll ever need to register your own tracks with your PRO. Let the library handle all of that, unless specifically asked otherwise.

Hope that helps,

~~Matt

[Casey H]

Also, probably more common than the show asking for alts is the alts being pitched up front as entities to themselves. Most sups are too busy to request alts-- when they don't hear what they want, they move on to something else. I'm sure there are exceptions but I would say this is the more likely scenario.

I've had a number of alt mixes placed (e.g. bass and drums, no lead guitar, no drums, etc.). I got the placements because the tracks were already in the library and included in their pitches to shows.

If all indications are it's a solid library with a track record of placements, I'd definitely spend the time to give them what they are asking for.

Good luck!
Casey

[andygabrys]

Danny,

Seems like you have gotten a lot of solid advice which mirrors what I feel as well.

I remember when I first signed my first 50 tracks to a couple of non-ex libraries. One of them wanted to see some alts and especially button endings. Being very green, none of my cues had this stuff properly in place. Although it was a trying experience and somewhat frustrating - I went back to all the cues and properly tied them up.

Result:

One of those tracks got placed on American Pickers in 2011 and has continued to be used every since. If i hadn't bothered to go back and work on it - It likely wouldn't have ever seen a broadcast use. That was my first TV placement.

IMO - these pieces are your assets. Although making production music is a game of quantity - If you spend the time to make quality assets, then they will get used more often. If you skimp and cut corners, you will cut down the number of possible uses. If you don't go back and make those alts and 15/30/60 cut downs and stingers, then you limit the ways in which your piece can be used.

As far as you registering the pieces:

Not withstanding Rob O.'s experience - I have never registered any library pieces on my own. Its always been the publisher. Sometimes it comes in via cue sheet. Sometimes it has taken a year for pieces to get registered. Some publishers list every version of a cue as a different entry, which does inflate your cue count in your PRO account. Other publishers list all the other possible names under the "alternate titles" area of the cue registration.

For pieces that I pitch directly to music supers / production companies / film producers or write custom for entities where I retain 100 writers and publishers share - I register the main title with my PRO with my writer and publisher info.

Good luck!

[cosmicdolphin]

Danny,

Seems like you have gotten a lot of solid advice which mirrors what I feel as well.

I remember when I first signed my first 50 tracks to a couple of non-ex libraries. One of them wanted to see some alts and especially button endings. Being very green, none of my cues had this stuff properly in place. Although it was a trying experience and somewhat frustrating - I went back to all the cues and properly tied them up.

Result:

One of those tracks got placed on American Pickers in 2011 and has continued to be used every since. If i hadn't bothered to go back and work on it - It likely wouldn't have ever seen a broadcast use. That was my first TV placement.

IMO - these pieces are your assets. Although making production music is a game of quantity - If you spend the time to make quality assets, then they will get used more often. If you skimp and cut corners, you will cut down the number of possible uses. If you don't go back and make those alts and 15/30/60 cut downs and stingers, then you limit the ways in which your piece can be used.

This is great stuff and very timely as I am just dealing with our first Forward to generate contact from a Library.

Andy I'm interested to know at what stage you may make these multiple versions? Would you do it right off the bat? Or wait until it gets a forward... Or leave it until the Library follow up on the forward ?

By waiting I worry about not being able to exactly match subsequent new edits that may have to be made months later with the sound of the original because I master everything individually and I may vary what plugins I use.

I.e sometimes it may be Oxford EQ + Slate FX-G + L3.... Another time my Liquidmix SSL & Pultec emulation + Oxford Inflator....very much depends on what sound best on each track.

If I do everything from the get go I guess it may never get forwarded never mind signed...that's eating into time I could spend writing another cue.

Also what would you typically cut out or leave in each version.. Is the 15s version basically the " chorus " type part etc?

And what is a Bumper.. That's a new one on me.

[VanderBoegh]

If I do everything from the get go I guess it may never get forwarded never mind signed...that's eating into time I could spend writing another cue.

Hey fellas, people tend to overcomplicate their alt mixes, when it's really a super easy process. Here's what you do:

1) Simply MUTE channels that you don't want in your alt mix.
2) Bounce the track.
3) Done.

Leave everything as-is except for the muting of tracks. Don't touch anything else. No re-mixing is necessary... in fact, re-mixing is a horrible idea. Just mute things and bounce. Do it after you're satisfied with your mix, then move on to the next cue. This process should only take about 5 minutes tops - especially now that ProTools has an offline bounce feature.

~~Matt

[andygabrys]

If I do everything from the get go I guess it may never get forwarded never mind signed...that's eating into time I could spend writing another cue.

Hey fellas, people tend to overcomplicate their alt mixes, when it's really a super easy process. Here's what you do:

1) Simply MUTE channels that you don't want in your alt mix.
2) Bounce the track.
3) Done.

Leave everything as-is except for the muting of tracks. Don't touch anything else. No re-mixing is necessary... in fact, re-mixing is a horrible idea. Just mute things and bounce. Do it after you're satisfied with your mix, then move on to the next cue. This process should only take about 5 minutes tops - especially now that ProTools has an offline bounce feature.

~~Matt

Absolutely. And what you do is put all your mastering goo (eq compressor FGX L3 etc) on and leave it on.

Bounce the main mix.
Bounce the alts as Matt said by muting tracks. If you have enough master limit etc on the main mix, the alts will be similar enough in volume in most cases.
Make your 15/30/60 putdowns in the same project, and for ease and speed, in the same TIMELINE - don't save as in the manner of SONG, and SONG 15, and SONG 30. Copy the same arrangement you have for your main mix, and have it later in the timeline. In that copy, chop out sections and use Shuffle mode to bring the remaining parts of the arrangement together (all DAWs have something approximating shuffle). Once you have your 60 (that goes totally quiet with a button and fade by 59.5 seconds), then copy that later in the timeline. Edit that copy to make your 30. And so on for the 15. Not all libraries use 15s BTW. A bumper is sometimes pretty similar to a 15. Then copy your 15 later in the timeline, and in most cases you will have enough meat left to make your stinger.
Then bounce each section - main, 60, 30, 15, sting.
At this point you should be done.

if you make things more complicated by opening up a different project to master each stem after doing this, well, that's your deal, but you are wasting your time. It's way simpler to just have everything with the master plugs on the output fader and go crazy.

BTW - its just an observation - but if you are using both FGX and L3 on your master stem - why? Are you using the L3 multi band to help rebalance your mix? Its way easier to just re-orient your mixing so you have the proper frequency balance before you go to "mastering". The idea being really, the mix is perfect. The mastering just brings it up to competitive volume, and maybe adds a little extra compression for glue. The more work you have to do on the "mastering", the more it slows you down.

[andygabrys]

Sorry. Didn't answer your first question.

I try not to do things twice. So if there is any approval stage (from client, library, or a taxi forward / deal) j wait until the track is approved.

If it's for a library brief and I know that hat I write hits the spot to begin with, I make all the versions and alts straight away.

[Danny]

Thank you Paulie, Rob, Matt, Casey, and Andy.

You guys are true Gentlemen and very helpful.

[cosmicdolphin]

BTW - its just an observation - but if you are using both FGX and L3 on your master stem - why? Are you using the L3 multi band to help rebalance your mix? Its way easier to just re-orient your mixing so you have the proper frequency balance before you go to "mastering". The idea being really, the mix is perfect. The mastering just brings it up to competitive volume, and maybe adds a little extra compression for glue. The more work you have to do on the "mastering", the more it slows you down.

That's a great tip about making the Alt's further down the project timeline ..I hadn't really thought about it that way and would have made a separate Project for each one otherwise.

Regarding mastering I seem to have a different workflow to your good self. I use very little on my 2buss of my DAW perhaps 1 or 2db compression and raely some EQ ...so I always have a "clean" final 24bit bounce with some headroom.

Any mastering I always do separately in Wavelab, partly because I once spent a day with a Pro whilst he mastered an album I'd mixed some of the songs on so I've thought of it as an entirely separate process from mixing...got the Bob Katz book as my bible etc. etc. ! Also some of the plugins I have a quite CPU intensive and I can be often be pushing the limits of my available horsepower near the end of a project and that's including pre-bouncing my VSTi's to audio.

Thinking about it though I could save any Wavelab FX chains as a preset for each piece instead for full recall of any Mastering setup.

Regarding FX-G & L3....I don't use L3 Multi in mastering applications unless somebody has sent me track that is way out of balance..sometimes I'll use L3 Utlra but switch off the Limiter in FX-G...it all depends. The thing I like most about FX-G is the constant gain switch so I often put it at the end of any chain so I can just use that.

My weapons of choice are BX-XL with it's mid/side Voodoo & FX-G ..and I also have a Liquidmix so the Pultec type EQ's come in handy and I have the Fabfilter EQ which is great generally for surgical stuff. But I was taught to use these things lightly..a coupl of db's worth of makeup gain from 3 plugins tends to sound better than bossting a track up 6db with just one IMHO. YMMV !

Mark

[andygabrys]

Regarding mastering I seem to have a different workflow to your good self. I use very little on my 2buss of my DAW perhaps 1 or 2db compression and rawly some EQ ...so I always have a "clean" final 24bit bounce with some headroom.

Not so different than you might think. I don't enact any master plugins until the mix is finished. So I always have a mix that is not peaking above digital zero to begin with.

Any mastering I always do separately in Wavelab, partly because I once spent a day with a Pro whilst he mastered an album I'd mixed some of the songs on so I've thought of it as an entirely separate process from mixing...got the Bob Katz book as my bible etc. etc. !

if you master peoples records, or if you have mixed an entire record for someone, and then you are going to master it, keeping mastering as a separate step at the end can be quite helpful, as in that case you are truly trying to coalesce a number of sometimes very different sounding mixes into a complete work that sounds like an "album". Then you can deal with apparent level, stereo width, punch and eq on a basis that makes things more homogeneous.

OTOH - if you are producing tracks purely for film / TV use where all your mixes need to be in a ballpark range set out by a number of reference tracks (which may not be so similar in apparent level, width, punch, brightness) then you can easily master within the same project that you mix in. In my case like i described, I always make a clean mix with headroom and then I turn on my master chain and go to work. It has all the benefits that I described above regarding making alt mixes and cut downs, and its a "one top shop". When stuff leaves your hands its done.

Also some of the plugins I have a quite CPU intensive and I can be often be pushing the limits of my available horsepower near the end of a project and that's including pre-bouncing my VSTi's to audio.

With regards to CPU overages - that is a problem. On my older Mac Pro I sometimes reached the point where I needed to freeze tracks, or bounce to audio and inactivate or delete the previous tracks. But that also had a lot to do with the Slate FGX (which I favor as a limiter) being a very CPU intensive plugin. These days its been recoded so its very light on CPU. And I got a newer Mac Pro 12 core so the CPU issues have completely disappeared. In the two DAWs I use (Pro Tools 12 and Logic X) they each have workflows for deactivating or powering down tracks to recover CPU.

I have also noticed that the Waves L3 is a little more intensive than the L2, and the L316 is a complete hog for CPU. So I rarely use them. And if any, I generally use the L2 - for the reasons you stated - pushing a couple dB on several different plugins is usually more transparent that just HAMMERING the mix with one.

The thing I like most about FX-G is the constant gain switch so I often put it at the end of any chain so I can just use that.

BTW - most limiters have a "constant gain" type workflow - on the Waves stuff its circled. Click and drag down on the arrow to both increase gain / decrease threshold and decrease output.


but the drawback is that there is no apparent level metering with the Waves stuff so you need another plugin for that (if that matters).

Right on!