Making an Independent Rock LP: Royal Chant and The War Cry Of Failure

I play guitar in a Sydney based garage rock band called Royal Chant. We have averaged around 2 EP releases a year for as long as I can remember (5 years I think). In November last year we released our most recent effort, an album called The War Cry of Failure.

I intended to write a post about our production timeline when the album came out but I was busy working on some VR stuff for Tourism Australia. Since moving to California I have had much more time on my hands and thought I would write it up.

Being an indie band member requires much more than writing and performing; you have to be able to do graphic design, build or at least moderate a website, be good at social media, act as your own booking agent, blah, blah, blah…. You probably already know all this. I suck at social media and have never talked to a promoter in my life. I have a lead singer (Mark) who organises that sort of stuff.

Recording a traditional format rock band (drums, bass, Vox, guitar) without a lot of money can be difficult. Our previous efforts to offset these costs have involved massive tours and (successful) Kickstarter campaigns however this time we didn’t feel like going on the road forever (we all had jobs) or doing the Kickstarter thing again (it really does feel like begging sometimes). Our solution was to take our time, record across various cheaper/remote studios and cash in every favour we could.

Usually we have some money and some songs, we book a studio and an engineer for a day and try to smash out everything. We then book another day cause we got drunk and forgot to track the bass on one track and the vocals on another. The recording experience is a mad dash to the finish line and you are so focused on getting a good take it impacts you’re playing. It’s not the most fun.

In July 2015 we tracked 4 songs at a studio up on Port Macquarie and I took the stems home, loaded them into Ableton Live and got to work. This was the largest music production project I had undertaken in a long time and I was aware of the importance of organising my projects and backing up my data. I wanted a source control client similar to git and I found one! Splice (And it’s free!)

In software development, source control lets you keep track of your project as it grows. It allows the developer to capture snapshots of their project as it grows. It makes it easy to find when a feature (or bug) was added to the project and allows you to navigate through your development history. Good source control programs, like git, allow you to make duplicates of your project to try different things and then only combine the best parts. Git is sort of like a big undo button that works in multiple, parallel project universes… Sort of.

When mixing a track you work on various instruments. You start by cleaning up the source audio files with compressors and equalisers and then you get creative, adding effects and placing the instruments in the song (using volume and spatial effects). Splice let me approach mixing like a software developer - incrementally improving various components, saving these stages and backing them up to the cloud. Splice has a very pretty web-based front end. All the client side stuff it taken care of automatically using the Splice Desktop app - it’s so easy! Splice also provides free unlimited storage so I backed up every other half baked project I had ever made.

Mixing at home meant we could agonise over every take. I have a couple mics and an interface so we did some better vocal takes, then some guitar and bass. I came up with a new guitar part for one of the tracks so I added it. I added keys and synths and percussion samples. I played around with drum triggers and sub basslines. None of this would have been possible in a budget and deadlines studio environment.

I got 2 and a half tracks complete before my real job got busy and I had to hand over to a real producer. I had drum sub mixes for the other 2 tracks and had cleaned up all the stems. It was a bit hard letting go.

We have a good relationship with MusicFeeds studio and they let us have the room over 4 weekends to finish off the tracks and record many more, 4 of which ended up on the album. I missed out on quite a few of these weekends due to university commitments however I had already recorded the majority of my parts in my bedroom. Our producer, mixer and engineer for these sessions, Chris aka Monk Fly, was brilliant. His own music is electronic and sits in the LA beat/Low End Theory sort of vibe. Anyway, Mark and Chris spent a lot of time in the studio together and I popped in a few times to contribute some more guitar and backing vocals. By mid-November we had an album.

The next step was to get the tracks mastered. Mastering is the process of preparing a track for playback across all mediums - a well mastered mix should sound the same played through a large PA system or through an iPhone speaker. Mastering will make a mediocre mix sound better but if your mixes already sound good (and thanks to Chris they did) then mastering is just going to make your tracks safe for public consumption. And a little louder.

Mastering engineers will add some colour to your final mix using all sorts of digital and analogue effects however the benefit of a full analog or luxury mastering service is lost on most listeners who are probably not using playback equipment good enough to make these improvements audible. Most listeners are using cheap headphone and mobile devices with bass boosting features that modify whatever sound the Mastering Engineer created. I don’t care much for mastering and am happy to just get a ‘technical’ master - essentially curving the frequencies in the track and compressing the dynamics.

We had previously used various mastering studios in Australia and the United States and I must mention Chris Graham Mastering as a great option of you want to spend a little more cash and time. This time I just wanted it done cheaply and quickly.

LANDR is an online mastering service that uses AI to master your track. The developers claim it has been trained on 1000s of example tracks across many genres. The process for mastering with LANDR is simple - upload your track, choose from one of the 3 intensity settings, pay $5 and receive your mastered track via email within the hour. Easy.

I made the album artwork using pixelmator. I do all the art for Royal Chant and had used GIMP for years however a recent update resulted in some hinky behaviour on my system and I thought I would try something else. Graphic design is not my forte but I am good at typing out ‘Royal Chant’ in different fonts.

Before we went into MusicFeeds studio we did a silly film clip with a green screen for the track ‘I Am A Model’. I have made quite a few clips now and enjoy making them in amateur way. A friend of ours Matt Clements is a real film person/director/editor/camera guy and he offered to do a proper clip for us after he noticed we had a green screen . He is based in New York so we shot a tonne of stuff in front of the green screen and sent it over to him. He made this amazing clip using stop animation and all sorts of tricks and I love it:

Thanks Matt!

After the tracks were mastered they went to our distributor MGM and ended up on all the places they were meant to go: iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, etc… Done.

I think using tools like LANDR and Splice helped us a lot. Splice meant we didn’t need a master hard drive as all projects were stored across multiple computers and in the cloud. LANDR provided a quick and cheap mastering option that actually sounds pretty good!