The Search for Artists is Now on… and also Free

So… who wants their work mixed, mastered and promoted for free?

Yep, that’s right.

If you’ve been following the posts, you know we’re approaching the opening day, and we want to start with something to show.

So, what we are now offering is the chance to send us three examples of songs you want to get mixed professionally, (your own songs, obviously,) and we’ll stir up everything in a big hat and choose a list of ten artists of varying genres to feature on our website.  It would be quicker and easier if you have a rough copy on soundcloud or bandcamp for us to listen to, but we are happy to look at any files you may want to send our way, too.

This means that everyone who visits our site, or follows one of our leads will see your tracks on a personalized profile page, filled with examples of us raving about how awesome you are.

“Is there a catch?”  I hear you ask in a suitably suspicious fashion.

Pictured: possibly you.  (Disclaimer – our services are generally offered only to particularly musical cats.)

 

Well, no, not really.  This is one of those genuine “everybody wins” situations.  There are, however, a few conditions you and your tracks must meet:

 

1. All three songs must be separated into stem files in order to mix them.  This means that every instrument part should be rendered to a WAV file – not every take.  This should mean all stems end up roughly the same length, and start at the beginning of the song, even if there’s only a few seconds of audio on each one.  We can’t reconstruct the song from scratch out of dozens of random takes!

2. All stems should be of good quality.  We specialize in turning home recordings into pro productions, but we can’t do that if your recordings are made on a tape recorder in a shower cubicle – unless, of course, that’s what you’re going for, but there are easier ways to get that done in post-production, starting with a clean, clear take.

3. We can’t promote excessively profane songs on our website – this includes excessively grisly imagery or the Cannibal Corpse variety.  Sure, we can justify a few moderate cuss words for the sake of art, but this is going to be promoted to all walks of people of all age groups, so try not to get all Limp Bizkit on us.  This is not our personal stance – we don’t mind one bit how sweary things get – but offended people don’t tend to turn into happy customers, ya dig?

Plus, if we get your song stuck in our heads and repeat it in front of the kids, our girlfriends are going to kill us…

4. If you want a particular guitar sound, but haven’t got the relevant amps and heads to hand, don’t worry.  Just let us know and we’ll re-amp a DI signal until it rocks how you want it.  If you can’t provide a DI signal, we might be able to double-amp your takes.

5. All stems should either be in WAV or AIFF format.  Please don’t send us any mp3 takes.

6. keep an eye on your inbox!  We’ll want to send you examples of our progress while we work, so we can be sure you’re happy with how it’s shaping up.  We can also set a bit of time aside to Skype if you like.

7. You must send us an email declaring that you are the owner and (if necessary) copyright holder for you music, and that you are happy to allow us to use your work for promotional purposes – both yours and ours.  Don’t worry too much about how to do it – we’ll prompt you when the time comes.  For this reason, we cannot accept any cover songs.

 

We’re looking for artists from a wide variety of genres, and we won’t discount anything – no matter how obscure!  If you have a great chiptune track you want to include, go nuts.

We are, however, hoping to get examples from all the major genres in amongst them:

Pop, Rock, Metal, Hip-hop/Rap, Folk, etc.

Hopefully, a bit of Jazz, Blues or Reggae – you know?  Music everyone can identify with to a certain extent.

That’s about it, really, so all I am left to say is that if you are interested, you can get in touch via the contact form below. If you need to send tracks to us via email instead of pointing us to a host site like soundcloud, we will contact you as soon as possible in order to get them.

 

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Either way, we’ll let you know, and there will be a guaranteed discount for everyone who applies, to be redeemed during future purchases from Dark Teddy Productions LLP.

You really haven’t got anything to lose.  We promise not to use your material for any unsavory purposes, and we won’t come to your house and eat you, either… you know, just in case you were worried that we were considering it…

Besides, dark teddies only eat chocolate pudding.

Lots of love –

Devin and Tom. x

The Journey from Mess to Master.

We thought you might want to know about what happens between the moment you send us your recordings and the moment you get your finished mixdown.
At first, we considered explaining it, but then we thought: sod that – we’ll put together a playlist of the same mix at different stages in production, to show you exactly how each product would sound if you decided to buy it.
So, without further ado, I hereby present you with the playlist:

 

 

 

As you can see, we've taken one of our old favourites, Buried Alive by Hunters Grace, and yesterday afternoon, we made four different tracks out of it.

We chose Buried Alive because it’s a good way to show off.  As any audio engineer will tell you, heavy metal of any kind is your natural enemy when mixing.  There’s just so much stuff going on at any one time, that it’s really easy to end up with a sludgy mess that sounds worse than when it started.

First of all, we took all the stems and simply dropped them into our sequencer.  Go ahead and take a listen to the one called “Buried Alive – Before Mixing – we’ll wait…

Heard it?  Sounds pretty naff, doesn’t it?

Not to worry.  The second track on the playlist is an example of of one of our products called the “Demo Mix”.  This is essentially, a nice, transparent mix done with no extraneous special effects – really useful for handing out at shows or sending out to labels.

Third on our list is our standard mix, here called the “advanced mix”.  For the purposes of this example we have raised the volume to make it into a reference mix, so it doesn’t sound too quiet by comparison to the other tracks.  This track is mixed with all the bells and whistles, like exciters, saturation, emulation and so forth.  This is how a track should sound before it gets mastered.

Last of all, is the “Mix & Master”.  This represents all the work that goes into making a song ready to publish.  Notice how it not only sounds louder, but fuller?  It is, in fact no louder at its highest amplitude than any of the other tracks in the list.  It is simply very carefully compressed and limited, with plenty of subtle tweaks and sweeps up and down the equaliser to give it all the power and punch it needs to sound perfect.

Coup De Hunters Grace

Dark Teddy’s take on Buried Alive by Hunters Grace. We were given complete freedom with this mix, so all the stops were pulled out!
Be sure to check out the band:
@hunters_grace

A Quick Mix.

Here’s a quick mix* done this afternoon by Devin.

It was recorded by Jasmine of Hunters Grace, and is a cover/mashup of Crawling by Linkin Park and Lost in Paradise by Evanescence.

*As it was thrown together in an afternoon, Devin didn’t go as far as de-breathing the vocal tracks, but apparently, Jasmine rather likes it that way.  Chalk one up for circumstance, I guess.