64-Track Recording: “What You Own” Post-Production Report

For my 64-track project, the post-production stage where all the mixing took

place was easily the most difficult portion of this assignment. Trying to get the project to

reach 64 tracks involved a lot of duplication of tracks and a lot of labelling things so I

didn’t lose track of what was what. Trying to capture that rock-n’-roll feeling of “What

You Own” that Rent embodies also proved to be a bit of a challenge considering the us-

age of acoustic guitar in my recording and the more mellow nature of my vocal perfor-

mance. I do feel, though, that I was able to achieve the sound that I wanted with the ad-

dition of effects and EQ-ing. I went into doing this song with the intention of doing it

proper justice, as Rent is one of my favorite musicals of all time and I have a bit of musi-

cal theatre background myself!

To start, I needed to make sure that I reached the required number of 64 tracks

in my project. In order to do this, I used a method of duplicating that amplified the sound

of my audio tracks to be louder and fuller and then adjusted their gain levels so that

there would be no overpowering of one track over another and no clipping. When the

drums were recorded originally, there were 8 tracks. I duplicated them to end up with 17

tracks, doubling up on everything in the setup and then also giving the snare an extra

pop. As for doing this with the vocals, I took the lines that each of the characters sang,

lowered their gains a pretty good amount, and then duplicated them many times so that

the vocals were at a reasonable volume and could really be played around with in terms

of adding effects later on. For Mark Cohen’s vocals, I ended up with 11 tracks, and for

Roger Davis’s vocals, I ended up with 12 tracks, adding up to a total of 23 vocal tracks. I

also inserted a MIDI piano part for during the bridge of the song where piano originally
does come in in the original cast recording. The MIDI part consisted of four tracks,

which I doubled to create 8 tracks. The guitar was definitely the part that I intended on

playing around with the most, so I made sure that this ended up with a lot of tracks to

utilize. When I originally recorded it, the guitar had five tracks. But by the time that I was

done duplicating things, adjusting gains, and adding effects to the audio, I ended up

with 20 TRACKS for the guitar. At the end of it all, my project in total was 68 tracks long.

Way more than I anticipated going into it, but it worked out in my favor in the end result!

As I mentioned previously, I didn’t feel going into the post-production process

that my recording of “What You Own” sounded quite rock-n’-roll enough. This called for

the use of a lot of different effects built into the AudioSuite in ProTools. To make the

acoustic guitar sound more like an electric (in the absence of actual electric guitar), I

ended up running half of the guitar tracks through the Black Op Distortion effect once

and half of them through twice. Still not satisfied with the quality of sound, I also ran all

of the guitar tracks through the Tri-Knob Fuzz effect. This gave it that “wow” factor that it

needed and made it sound a whole lot grungier overall, which I was very pleased with.

In response to the editing of the guitar, however, I really needed to make the vocals

match.

I first ran all of the vocals through the Dyn3 Compressor/Limiter effect so as to

make them sound balanced before I did anything crazy with them. I then ran half of

Mark’s lines and half of Roger’s lines through the Black/Shiny Was effect and the Black

Spring effect, just to make the quality of vocals stand out compared to the original cast

recording and to give my vocals that extra bit of power and force behind them that was

necessary. Next, I ran all of the vocals through the C1 Chorus/Vibrato effect to make
them sound fuller and also added D-Verb to them as well. It really delivered! I also

ended up adding D-Verb to half of the drum tracks and a SUPER subtle bit of it on all of

the MIDI piano tracks, just to make the piano sound a tad more real and not so digital.

In the end, I am super proud of my final recording of “What You Own” from Rent!

I am so grateful to all of the musicians that helped me out with this project as well as my

other projects over the past few semesters, and I am also extremely grateful for all of

the input and constructive criticism that I have received from my friends, colleagues,

and classmates. Being a music technology minor has been super rewarding and an all-

around amazing experience; I am so glad that I got to take part in so many hands-on

projects like this one. I am happy to have been able to get creative with the technology

and also expand my knowledge on the subject of music production and audio engineer-

ing as a whole. It has been really fun!