Hello world!
So for those of you in the know, I have recently released an album for which I was in charge of the production, recording and mixing for, you can find it for download on SoundCloud or Spotify at these links.
And if you like what you hear, stay tuned to my page, I'm releasing my own EP called "ASCII ART" which I am beginning work on very soon, already a few tunes ready for that one so look out here:
Twitter: @BENVCR
So here's my track-by track breakdown!
The entirety of this album was produced, recorded and mixed in my home studio using a Rode NT2000 mic fed into a Focusrite Pro14 audio interface. A Shure SM57 also features on some tracks, to give a more aggressive sound than the condenser microphone.
For every track on this album, Cubase 6.5 was the DAW of choice; although I also use Logic Pro I find audio editing and recording much easier in Cubase thanks to the VariAudio feature and the incredible ease of Cubase's Lane Recording, which allows me to loop various sections of the song and get 4-5 takes very quickly with minimal effort.
The instruments come from a wide variety of plugins such as NI Massive, FM8, Kontakt, Sylenth, Vanguard and Nexus. There were also some sounds coming out of my Motif XS keyboard.
1. Still Living(Intro)
This song is one of the easier songs on the album to produce; although it sounds like it we recorded this in-studio as a kind of "guide" for how we wanted to introduce the album for live performances. Amzo wanted to keep it really mellow and basic and just have an idea to explain the "Still Living" concept.
The piano track and the vocals were recorded simultaneously and off the grid in order to have more of a "live" feel; the piano part is a multi-voice that I built in the Motif XS keyboard range, consisting of 1 "concert grand" piano patch for the release sounds, an electronic piano sound, a supersaw wave and pad strings. I then came up with the melody basically on the fly and just rolled with it.
To process these I added quite a loud "hall" reverb with a long decay sent to both the piano and vocal track in order to give it a "live" sound, much stronger than I would normally add to a track. I then added the claps and found some background noise in order to make it sound like a jazz club, which was the vibe I was looking for(intimate jazz club for a heart-to-heart before the album begun).
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2. Hands On The Wheel
I decided to put this song 2nd as I wanted to kick off the album in a upbeat fashion; even though this song has quite a slow BPM it has a lot of energy to it. This is the only track on the album which I did not produce; Amzo came to me with the beat and the verses already written and we recorded it on top of the 2-track stereo mix, which made it one of the trickier songs to mix on the album as I had to put a lot of work into getting everything to "fit" together how I wanted. Lots of compression, particularly on the low-end as I didn't feel it was strong enough as it was given to me. Also because it was sent as a stereo WAV file I wasn't able to turn down individual elements in the mix to make space for the vocals, so I had to lower the overall volume and add a notch cut in the mid-range frequencies, and then used parallel compression and tube distortion on the sub-200Hz region in order to bring the low-end back without just using EQ boosts(which can produce artifacts and phasing).
Track came together pretty easily aside from that, I used my standard recording chain which is Waves V-Comp into the REQ4, cutting the lows below 100Hz and a slight boost in the higher frequencies, followed by some aggressive de-essing. Reverb sends I usually use Waves RVerb.
3. Man On The Moon
This is a really old beat of mine that I did about 2 years ago; the version that made it to the album is a really stripped back version of the song that I originally created, which had a lot more melodic elements like electric guitar, strings and some pad synths.
This track was very important to get the mix between the synth bass and the kick drum right as with such a minimal arrangement the way these two elements sat together would be crucial to the overall tone of the song. To achieve this I used my parallel compression technique with VComp and a tube distortion plugin in order to thicken the kick up; this processing is why the kick has such a strong presence across the frequency range.
To match this I made a -3db cut in the 50-100Hz region of the bass, with a slight resonant boost going on in the region below and above this. I then did a similar roll-off in the sub 50Hz region on the kick drum to allow the bass and kick to each have their own respective place in the frequency spectrum.
Vocals for this track went through my usual processing chain, except on this track I made pretty heavy use of a delay send on the bridge and chorus vocals. This was automated so that it could have a fairly high feedback without impeding with the original phrase too much. The chorus vocals were also processed using Cubase's VariAudio and PitchCorrect in order to provide the "auto-tune" sound by using a quick attack. VariAudio was used to make sure there were no missed notes and the PitchCorrect engaged where I wanted it to. The second phrase of the chorus was also the recipient of some UltraPitch+ Cubase Pitch Shift in order to give it the "deep" sound.
There is a video of me making the beat here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1i7jxCqVQ8&feature=channel_video_title
4. Voila
This is one of my favorite songs on the album; this beat was one of those that just comes together. I was messing around with some drums, putting an 808 kit together(I love to build drum kits out of my own sounds btw), Amzo came over to record Man On The Moon. But we ended up just jamming around for awhile, eventually stumbling into a file on one-shot guitar samples which ended up being the backbone of the song. After that the 808 drum pattern went down, and I went back to the sample library and grabbed another drumloop to mix in with our programmed parts, and then cut the low and high frequencies plus ran it through a distortion unit to give it a "Lo-fi" feel. I sent Amzo home with the beat after we added the other melodic instruments and had finished a basic arrangement.
About 6 weeks later we ended up actually recording the song. The vocals had the usual processing on them; although for some of the key phrases I used a delay+ Guitar Rig amp simulation to accentuate certain phrases and make them carry into the next line of the song. The chorus was processed using Waves UltraPitch in order to give it some artificial harmony. I then took this and used the Cubase Pitch Shift function to lower the vocal to where I wanted it to be pitch-wise, using the helpful Cubase feature of being able to reduce the pitch of the song without effecting the timing and vice-versa. After that it was simply a case of chopping the vocals slightly to mix up the rhythm of this section.
5. Fly Life
This is my second favorite song on the album, I listen to this all the time when I am just relaxing and need something to chill to. It was heavily inspired by my addiction to Kendrick Lamar's "Good Kid Mad City" and in particular the song "Bitch Don't Kill My Vibe".
The piano part in this song was not played in, I pulled it out of a Kontakt sample library and played in the chopped notes. Even just when I had this on loop I new I had a banger, just had to finish it off right. I didn't want to make it a slow song though, which is why I added the high-energy drum part to the bridge sections just to get things going a little bit.
For this song a bit part of it was the bassline I played in; I wanted it to be an acoustic sounding bass to stick with the "real" instrument vibe of the track with the piano, brass and strings. I used similar processing between kick and bass as in Man on The Moon, cutting the bassline where the "thump" of the kick is, while still leaving subs so that it would boom on a big club speaker system, without really overwhelming the mix.
The mixing between the brass, strings, piano and vocals was also very important as when I first went to mix the song these areas were clashing very heavily. To sort this out I put a general cut on the 500-800Hz region to let the vocal really cut through, then panned the brass and strings out to the sides of the mix so that they didn't interfere with each other or the vocals. After this it was a case of sending brass, strings and piano to a bus and putting in some mild compression to really "glue" them together. In the end I was very happy with the result, as the brass part is not readily apparent in the mix but provides some much-needed mid-range weight to the song, while letting the strings and vocals really bring the chorus to life!
6. Tonight
This song was basically made out of the ashes of "Fly Life". I think I even produced these 2 records on the same day(talk about a hot streak).
For this track I was really inspired by Frank Ocean's "Channel Orange" and in general the Odd Future production in general, I really love all the funky 7th and 9th chords on EP's they use, although I went for a more positive vibe as I wanted to go for a chilled out, old school 90s R&B vibe for this record.
For the most part the beat is just a sequence of Maj7/min7 chords played on different patches in different octaves in order to create that "huge" feeling. This also allowed me to strip back various parts of the song in order to create a sense of transition without needing to switch up the melody or change the vibe of the song very much.
I think the key driving point of this song aside from the catchy, sing-a-long hook is the groove of the drums and the bass. To create this I played the drum part in, then went back and quantized it on sub-100% strength, so that the beat sounds "in-time" but also has a slight off-beat groove. I then played in a MIDI electric bass courtesy of the fantastic collection from Kontakt 5. After these two parts were laid down, I edited them to add a ton of swing to the parts to get them sounding just how I wanted them.
The big challenge of this song was that I was having a lot of trouble getting the strings and the various layers of EP to sit well together, as the EP generally just dominated the strings and the two were clashing quite a bit. My solution to this was a combination of clever panning, very harsh selective EQ on the strings so that only the frequencies I needed came through, and finally by dropping various parts of the EP synth sounds when I wanted the strings to really punch through the mix. The same applies to the brass sounds which I processed similarly.
7. New Crazy Swing
This is undoubtably my favorite track on the album, probably just because of the sheer effort I put into this beat! The chorus vocal and the main melody were sampled from New Orleans Jazz Vipers "Blue Drag". I pitchshifted this sample up a few semi tones to speed it up; this also changed the manly voice from the original into a nice female sounding voice, amazing what technology can do huh? To change the verses from the chorus section I manipulated the audio in order to make it more choppy by chopping and re-arranging. I also used a different section of the sample at the end of each verse as a sort of "bridge that's not a bridge because it's still part of the verse", just to give the listener a switch-up and increase the energy before dropping into the chorus.
The drums were also sampled from multiple sources, the base layer of the drum track comes from an hip-hop inspired afrobeat track that I can't recall the name of at the moment. I took a 4 bar loop out of this and high-passed it at around 150-200Hz because I only wanted the groove of this drum part and the low end of it was quite weak. To add to this I grabbed the kick/snare out of one sample loop, chopped it and fit it to the timing of the original sample drums. Then I added a layer of sampled hi-hats on top of that, ran them all into a group bus for some light compression while also doing a heavy parallel compression(if you read this whole blog, you'll realize this is one of my most used engineer tricks, because it's damn effective and lets you push your drums into distortion while still being able to control how loud they are and being able to have an un-effected version to blend with).
Once the drums and the main melody were laid down, the next step was perfecting the sample vocal. To do this I chopped up the individual words I wanted them to do and added a sidechain compressor to this part. Why you may ask, would you want to side-chain this part? Well the reason was because I wanted to re-create the hip-hop style of scratching in vocals on turntables without actually having any turntables. So I chopped and arranged the vocal sample how I wanted it to come across, then sidechained it to a scratch sample obtained courtesy of a generous poster in the www.gearslutz.com Hip-Hop forum. Arranged the scratches to come before and in the middle of the vocal sample chops, so that the scratches would "duck" the vocal sample. This allowed me to re-create the dynamics of a turntablist performance with my mouse and keyboard!
Then came the live instrumentation you hear to finish off the track. Both parts were played in on my Electric guitar and bass, DI'ed through my audio interface an run through patches from Guitar Rig 5. I then EQed and compressed the bassline quite heavily to give it a lot of repore in the bass regions without muddying up the mid-range too much, as straight electric bass can have a tendency to do if left unchecked. The guitar part just sat in the mix pretty easily with some panning and a roll-off in the low frequencies, as there isn't much playing in the part of the spectrum.
8. Whispers
Last song on the album! It all seems like it happened so quick!
This tune was a sample of Ahmad Jamal's "The Awakening". Just want to give a shout-out here to the www.futureproducers.com "Flip This" section, if you guys like fresh music especially sampled hip hop, or maybe you do it yourself, you need to get in there. Guys are always posting samples they've dug up and flipped, and if I can't find a sample to use myself I will usually just go over there and have a browse, cause there's a ton of really talented, underground guys on there which have been a huge inspiration for the album. I would advise anyone interested in production as a beginner to get on there and start flipping tracks, because the guys there are really helpful critique's and will actually listen to you with a constructive eye, which is perfect in this game, too many yes man out there peeps!
The drums were created using a combination of different sources(has to be to be true hip-hop!). The first layer was from Synthetic Substitution, again I high-passed it slightly to take out the thump of the kick(it didn't have much anyway) to make room for something else. I then added the kick and snare from Billy Squier's "Big Beat"(any of you Dizzee Rascal fans, thats the sample from "Fix Up Look Sharp"), chopped it up to match the kick and snare from the original. To finish it off I took a the kick and snare from Labrinth's "Earthquake", which he was nice enough to post the stems of on SoundCloud. Then using a combination of EQ and compression it ended up sounding like it does on the record!
The other samples on this song come from an old vinyl rip I had of an old Pope's speech, which is the intro speech. The bridge between the first and second verses has some war samples I got from "Rome: Total War", and if your a history head you should recognize the famous Winston Churchill speech at the end of the song. I put this song at the end of the album because I thought it was the perfect way to end it, the part about "we will never surrender" just really flowed well with the concept of the "still living" idea. Obviously I had to manipulate these samples pretty extensively to get them to sit right with the music.
Last sample on this record comes from a Notorious B.I.G record, if you can tell me which one via Twitter(@BENVCR) or FB(http://www.facebook.com/pages/EaSTMaN/200684296642637?fref=ts) , I will give you insta-kudos as having a sharp ear!
The piano part came together pretty naturally; I imported them into Battery(my sampler of choice ATM), assigned the various chops to keys and what came out is what you hear. EZPZ! After that I took the chops which contained bass notes(which I had originally high-passed), then did an old-school hiphop trick of low-passing the hell out of this new channel, and compressing/saturating these chops and using this to write my bassline in.
Anyways guys, I hope you enjoyed my write-up, be sure to let me know what you think and get at me!
