Finishing off where I left off yesterday with my D.S. project, I imported the new drum track I made into the Pro Tools session. My Pro Tools session now had the percussion track, the new drum samples, as well as vocal layers, background vocals, synths, bass, piano, and guitars.

As I began fixing a few timing issues of the background vocals, I realized that something still wasn’t lining up. The best tool to figure out what isn’t sounding right is the solo track tool. I started by putting the click track back on, with the drums and percussion. These were lined up, so it must have been another instrument. I then added the bass in, and realized there were a few note errors I had to fix. To fix this, I went into playlist mode and found the correct note from another take, and then copied it to the zero playlist. 

Once these were fixed, I brought the acoustic guitar in. Similar to the bass guitar, there were also some note issues with the acoustic. I did the same procedure as I did for the bass on the acoustic by editing with playlists. The notes from the electric guitar were okay, but the timing was a little off, so I just nudged it a bit to fit in with all the other instrument. Finally, I brought back in the synths, piano and vocals, and everything seemed to be lining up okay.

Even though this took a few hours of my time, I felt it was an important task to do. You might think that these would be covered up, but all the little things add up if you are not careful, especially in the final mixing stages and mastering!

The last step to ensure this track was completed was adding risers. For “Dreams”, I found about 4 risers that worked well in the track. I decided to use these same risers in “My Life”, in order to keep consistency between them. I had to make sure these risers weren’t too loud in the mix though!