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.

If you aren’t aware of how the Agile Music Project works, go read the first couple posts, or the about page, for a description of how we are attempting to use agile software development practices for creating music.  Specifically, we are following a process called Scrum.  For those of you who may not be familiar with the process, check out the Scrum Primer or the Scrum Guide.

Agile software development requires processes to coordinate between many independent developers. The lessons we learned from practicing Agile in the software world translated well to our band.  For instance, we worked in two week sprints and planned goals for each sprint.  We had daily “stand-up” meetings to keep everyone updated on our individual progress.  At the end of a sprint, we evaluated our goals and measured our progress so that we knew approximately how much we could get done next time.  This let us ensure and monitor that the band is making progress all the time, and we didn’t stagnate (hopefully).

We could each have tasks for a song to write or record our parts, and the final mixing step was somewhat analogous to QA finding bugs and smoothing out the resulting work.  Ohm Studio really functioned as a sort of source-control for us, while Logic Pro functioned as an IQA environment to fine tune the product for deployment.  Releasing the song on the internet (via Sound Cloud and our website) functioned as a final deployment to production.  Once we began drawing these parallels, we were able to use the workflows and solutions we found in the software world to create solutions for the band.

I have since seen several talks and publications about using Scrum and other Agile practices for other tasks outside of software development.  Specifically, our band was mentioned in the book “Agile Changed My Life” by D Ray Freeman.  So it seems this is not a unique idea to our band.  However, reading about it and actually doing it were completely different beasts.

If anyone has experience applying Agile or Scrum to other tasks, or would like some help doing so, let us know!

The second obstacle we dealt with is software.  There are a lot of recording packages out there of varying quality.  Audacity is a long standing favorite in the free software world, but it does lack some features and ease of use of other non-free packages.  Several of us had the Line 6 software available with our Line 6 devices, but this was not an option for everyone.  Garageband was a favorite among the Mac users, but we didn’t have a good way for us Windows guys to coordinate with them.  We also did some recording through our Jam Hub hardware, which was great for capturing our jams and ideas, but was not the ideal quality for a release track.  We ended up using Ohm Studio, which is available for free through Valve’s Steam software.  We already had the band connected on Steam since we make heavy use of the Rocksmith game for learning songs, so Ohm Studio was a natural choice when we found it.  This software allowed us to individually record and tweak our tracks on our own time and put everything together effortlessly into one project (it works somewhat like shared Google Docs, if you have tried simultaneous editing there).  Also, one of our members does have a license for Logic Pro, a much more professional recording solution, so we ended up exporting the project to that software from Ohm Studio for final mixing before release.  This workflow was essential for a group like us that only meets to play together once every two weeks.  If we had to setup recording sessions for all of us to be together, we would have never made it this far.

The first obstacle you will have to overcome is how you will physically record your instruments.  We were lucky to have access to an electronic drum set that had audio output capabilities.  This saved us from having to mic a drum set and getting an appropriate acoustic environment for recording.  The rest of the instruments were easier, since they are all electronic guitars and bass guitars.  Several people have simply used the mic input on their computers to record analog with good success.  A couple of us were lucky enough to have USB recording capabilities in our normal setups.  The analog inputs are subject to noise from the cables, just like in a live setup.  While the USB interfaces tend to be higher quality, they tend to be subject to some recording lag, depending on the equipment and software combination that you use.  I personally overcame this lag by monitoring my sound directly from the amp, rather than monitoring the sound through the recording software.  This means that I did not have problems hearing myself play, but the audio did not sync up on the recording software when I played it back.  Luckily this is easy to fix in most recording software – I just moved the whole track back an appropriate amount to make it sync.  You can even do this visually, if you have software that shows the wave forms of each track, as you can then see the peaks where the beats are and line them up.

So AMP has been recording our first few songs and we are currently working on our second original song.  For most of us, this is our first venture into playing in a band and recording songs.  I wanted to make a few posts cataloging a few of the things we’ve learned in this process.  I hope this will be of use to anyone else starting down this path, and I hope to get feedback from anyone who has more experience in this process.  Also, since this is the Agile Music Project, I will be drawing some analogies to agile software development strategies, since that’s what we do.

Stay tuned!