At Last, We Have Funding, But Opening May Be Delayed…

Many weeks ago, we applied for a modest loan in order to get some essential new equipment for the proper operation of Dark Teddy Productions.
Since then, we have been subject to the most bizarre and extensive list of checks the office can cook up in order to be allowed to have it.

Seriously, we were first asked to submit three kinds of ID, as is standard procedure, as of now, we have ended up needing to submit approximately eleventy-bajillion identifying documents, a credit report and our souls for fraud checks and scrutiny.

The good news is, we should finally be getting our bloody money over the next week or two.

The bad news is, this may force us to push back the previous opening date of Feb 28th until some time in mid March so we can actually open fully operational.

Take heart from this, however, as we would rather be delayed for a couple more weeks than tell you guys we’re ready and make a mess of our work by trying to set up the last of the services while producing music.
Even though it’s going to cost us our £400 bonus to actually do it…

But the punishments of bureaucracy are always laid upon those last in the chain, which basically means us and you guys.

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So, we apologies for any delays this may cause, and any hopes of getting your work mixed and mastered before mid March you guys had, but we are going to get this sorted or die trying… or try dying… or do some tie-dyeing.

Lot’s of love, Devin & Tom!

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

Forum Now Open!

Good news fellow human creatures!
The Dark Teddy Forum is now up and running, and ready to accept members.

We encourage you guys to join up, as it makes a great place to offer help and advice to other home-recording musicians.

Also, there is a bit of a competition going on right now.

If you head over to the “Recording Tips & Questions” sub-forum, you will find a sticky post called “Free E-Book”,  In that thread, we invite you to give us any and all suggestions you can think of for things you would like us to put in our home recording guide.

You might as well, you know – we’re writing it for you guys to get the best recordings made at home that you can!

There will be considerable discounts available for the best suggestions – be they content, structure or general clever advice!

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Go to the Dark Teddy Forums.

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.

Guitarists Wanted in South Wales!

We have a quick message from the magnificent Hunters Grace.  They’re in a bit of a pickle, and they need YOU!  So, without further ado, I hand you to them.

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Hey! Hunters Grace here…

We are currently on the look out for a new lead guitarist as our current lead guitarist has made the decision to leave the band in pursuit of other ventures.

We have been gigging with our own material since February 2014 and have become well established in our local area. We gig most weekends and have played as far as Aberystwyth & Wrexham. We have around 10 of our own songs plus we add covers into our set to make them a little more interesting.
At the moment our focus is on writing our first album, as we have recently been offered a record deal/world wide distribution deal upon its completion. This deal including touring and festival opportunities. In the short time we have been gigging we have also been featured in Terrorizer magazine and Kerrang! We are due an E.P review in Metal Hammer very soon also…

You can find our stuff here:

https://soundcloud.com/hunters_grace

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmNIdPh95xo&list=UUs5BaLI4Eg-2Sp2zAIVwpAA

https://www.facebook.com/HuntersGraceOfficial

If you are interested please ensure you meet these requirements before contacting us:

1.) Obviously you have to be a competent guitarist with your own gear.

2.) Having your own transport is pretty much essential seeing as we tend to gig all over the place.

3.) If you could contribute to the writing process in a way that compliments our style that would be fantastic! Although this isn’t a complete necessity as we are able to write the music between the three current members… but again, it would be awesome to have some fresh ideas

4.) No timewasters please Don’t contact us if you are not able to commit 100%!

We may also be interested in a second guitarist… so if you are more of a rhythm player then please drop us a message

– Hunters Grace –

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You can respond to their request here!

Also, you can hear Dark Teddy’s mix of Buried Alive here.

 

Web Site Under Construction!

Yep, you read right.
We’ve finally settled on the software we want to build our site with and started on our first draft.
So far, it’s looking a bit spartan but seriously awesome.
There might be some sneak peeks to follow!

Until then, we’re still looking for responses to our survey, so feel free to help us out!

Attention, All Music Humans!

Greetings, Earthlings of the interwebs.
I bring news of new services developing in the changing music industry!

It would be really awesome if all you other musically-minded folk out there could answer some survey questions for us.  (See below)

(No, we aren’t trying to sell you anything dodgy, neither are we going to steal your contact details and pretend that we are giving away a car – it’s completely anonymous.)

It would be a great help to us, and you may even learn a valuable lesson along the way…

Well, you might – who can predict these things?

Rejoice, for you may not all be subjugated!

Praise to Ziltoid!

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.

A Swift Breakdown of Dark Teddy Productions

Dark Teddy Productions is currently under construction, but when it is finished, you can expect a fully interactive, highly professional, correspondence based audio production service.

In the mean time, you are invited to enjoy a taste of our production examples.

On this page you can get to know more about our working process, our engineers and the services we are going to provide.

Devin Lawton & Thomas Martin

The Engineers

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Thomas Martin is a composer, singer/songwriter, musician and, of course, audio engineer.

He is dedicated to creatively and holistically finding the sparkle within every home recording and has a deft ear and subtle hand with the console.

He has been recording music since his teens, and forged a firm and lasting friendship with Devin Lawton during their college days, where each recognised the diverse ability within the other.

Devin Lawton has been recording and producing music for over ten years.  He is also a singer/songwriter, composer, voice actor and musician.

He has always treated every mix as if it were his own, and refuses to quit until he and the artist are completely satisfied with the results.

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The Company

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In the studios, we tailor everything we can to the modern musician.  This does not, however, mean that we are only interested in modern music!

We are aiming to make a difference to all the bands and performers who want to make a name for themselves as artists, with a polished, powerful playlist, but without having to go through the soul-sapping process of appealing to a stagnant music industry first.  (Don’t forget, we had the same dream!)

So we sat down and thought:

What do I wish I could have done to get my music to people who want to hear it as I wished it could sound – so I didn’t have to sell a muddy demo to an audience member at a gig all those years ago and apologise in advance for it, because it was “still a bit rough”; every time, knowing that it was as good as it would ever get, because I just couldn’t pay thousands for a studio engineer to strike a deal with Cthulhu for me, so it could shine like something really shiny?

(Okay, so it was a complicated thought.  Rest assured that it probably took a lot longer for us to make sense of it than anyone reading this.)

Unlike other studios, we won’t offer “out of the box” production on an analogue console and racks of patch bays for a high premium.  Neither do we charge you a high price when we mix and master your work in a digital audio workstation just so we can pay for the electricity we need to run said mixing desk – even though you’re not using it.  we do what we can to keep prices down for the artist.  This means that we will get you any authentic analogue-style sound you want without having to resort to charging you for running the giant mixing desk we keep hanging around the studio.

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Before too long, we will be posting a download link for a PDF with a full breakdown of our services and company thingummies, you know, just in case you want to know everything you could possibly want to know about what it’s like to give us money for stuff.

Until then, (yes, I know you know what’s coming,) join us on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Soundcloud and fill in our survey if you haven’t already!