Music Development Workflow

We found a pretty good workflow a couple sprints into this project.  Ohm Studio worked well for us, since we could work as an agile team with independent efforts through a sprint, but still produce a great sounding final product.  However, we found some interesting hurdles in the recording process that we had to adapt to.

Our first iteration of recording Kryptonite had some issues.  We found that the final mix just didn’t ever seem to line up smoothly.  No matter how much editing we did, it sounded like a mish-mash of tracks, rather than a coherent band.  We had a click-track (basically a metronome) going in the background for us all to sync up to, but it turns out music isn’t that simple.  We discovered that recording the drums first helped a lot with this.  The drums gave us a human to sync up with, which let us sync up all the musical nuances in a more natural way.  We thought about recording it live, with all of us playing at once, but our current gear would not produce a recording of the quality we wanted when recording like this.

These kinds of problems definitely mirror some issue we have had in software development.  Developers need to be able to work independently, but they still have to coordinate constantly to produce a coherent product.  The drum track provided that coordination, just like it does when playing live.  However, this means that we are all blocked until the drummer finishes his part of a recording, which is not the most agile approach.  We do end up prototyping songs as each of us thinks of an idea, but the final mix is a different story.  We have not found a better solution to this at this time, but we are always looking for ways to improve our workflow.  It is not uncommon to run into this problem in software development – you may be waiting on one person, or even another team, to complete a section of work that upon which you are dependent.  In the software world, we can often compensate for this in a number of ways, so hopefully we can find a solution applicable to the band.

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