SHR4C004M-003 Song Prod. & Write Up Template

Task 1: Three Minute Song Production (70%)

Task 2: 1000 Word Write-Up (30%)

Writing and Influences

At the outset of this assignment, I had a clear view of what style of song I wanted to make. As an electronic music producer, I rarely write a song, expecting there to be a full vocal track on it. As the vocals I include in my music are normally vocal phrases and chops, this made me think about the structure of the song. Taking influence from the structures of pop songs that I like, such as Taste by Sabrina Carpenter and Messy by Lola Young , which use verses and choruses, rather than builds and drops – something I’m used to using in my dance tracks. The obvious style of music that would bridge between pop and electronic dance music, to me, is liquid drum and bass and liquid garage. I experimented with both genres, taking influence from the likes of Break It Off by Pink Pantheress and On & On by Piri and Tommy.

I settled on making liquid garage, solely because I had more ideas when working in this genre than its drum and bass counterpart. The song I used as a reference track is Player 2 by the aforementioned Piri and Tommy. Usually, when I’m writing a song, I don’t follow a reference track especially closely, but for this project, I took a lot more information and ideas from the track. I think this is because I wasn’t as confident with what voices and embellishments I could include in a track that will eventually have vocals on top.

Sampling

As a producer in general, I used to heavily rely on samples in my music, especially because I started by making hip hop beats and jungle tracks, two quite heavily sample-based genres. However, in these genres it’s common to sample melodic and rhythmic ideas from tracks and build the rest of the melodic and harmonic qualities of the track around the sample. In this track, it’s quite the opposite – the sampling was one of the last things I did for this song. Rather than making a song around a sample, I used my sampling techniques to add another layer to the final track.

Using the sample alchemy VST on logic pro, I made a granular synth by playing two open D notes on my acoustic guitar, which I recorded on my phone. As you can see in the photo below, I made the synth by using the ‘bow mode’ on the instrument and having three sources play different parts of the sample. I designed this synth to add extra textures to the choruses and sit back in the mix with stereo delay and reverb.

Vocal Recording

As I don’t have much experience recording vocals in a studio setting, this was a new challenge, but one I really enjoyed. I used two microphones – a Sontronics Oprheus and an AKG c414, both on a cardioid polar pattern.

The vocalist I worked with was Suzi, my flatmate who is studying on the musical theatre course, which brought its own set of challenges with scheduling and the dynamic range of her vocals. In terms of scheduling issues, we left it late to record these vocals, having to write lyrics and record every part in a 3-hour studio session. Where her impressive dynamic vocal range brought issues is that even after I set the gain levels, so the input on the microphones was -15 dB, she could still make the input clip. This brought challenges mixing also, because I wanted to preserve the dynamics of her performance whilst also sticking to the style of the genre.

The performance of the vocals were sung in a more pop style, which I think complements the instrumental track, making it sound like a remix of a pre-existing song. The vocals slightly remind me of PJ Harvey’s on her 2000 album, ‘Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea’, specifically, ‘A Place Called Home.’

Commercial Potential

Using Spotify streaming statistics, which I acquired from a website called KeyboardKraze (Senner, 2025), the top three streamed genres are Hip-Hop/RnB with 30.7% of streams on Spotify, from 675 million users, and tied in second is Pop and Rock with 14.7% of the streams each.

Pop music is known for being lucrative and popular. Some of the most popular songs of last year made huge numbers on Spotify, with Espresso by Sabrina Carpenter racking up 2.19 billion streams, at the time of writing, and two other tracks from her album, ‘Short n Sweet’ released last year, ‘Please Please Please’ and ‘Taste’ having 1.4 and 1.1 billion streams respectively. Pop-influenced dance music is reaching similar levels of popularity with songs like ‘Strangers’ by Kenya Grace having 986 million streams and ‘Pain’ by Pink Pantheress having 881 million streams. These are some of the most popular songs in the world, and by no means do I expect my song to reach those heights, but I feel that it still has commercial potential. Looking at the reference track I used while writing the song, it currently has just over 1 million streams on Spotify. Which I would personally describe as commercially successful. Dance-influenced pop music is coming back into fashion with the previous examples showing that, but ‘classic’ pop music is still what people want to hear.

With figures I obtained from an article about the content of lyrics in US top 40 songs from the 1960s to the 2000s, it showed that by far the most popular topic for lyrics, with 67.3% of the 1040 songs they researched, was love and relationships, with sex and sexual desire behind accumulating 29.9% of lyrical content. The lyrics in this song were a mix between love, to get the popular music feel and dancing and clubbing to keep in touch with the backing instrumental. Dancing and Partying was fourth in the list of lyrical content, picking up 15.1%, with a gradual rise since the 1960s. (Christenson et al., 2018)

Conclusion

In conclusion, this was an exciting yet challenging project, but one I thoroughly enjoyed, and I’m proud of the song that was made because of it. Recording vocals on a dance track I made gave me a new perspective on how I’ll write songs in the future, with the potential to record a vocalist again. I believe through my research that this song has commercial potential, but whether it will be commercially successful is a completely different question, and potentially one with different answers.

Bibliography

and Tommy, P. (2022) On & on, Spotify. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/track/2fmtrXfvbN8xkHwE0zgTTc?si=769d9df2fe534b01 (Accessed: 07 May 2025).

Carpenter, S. (2024a) Espresso, Spotify. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/track/2qSkIjg1o9h3YT9RAgYN75?si=1d4ce87759884c7a (Accessed: 07 May 2025).

Carpenter, S. (2024b) Please please please, Spotify. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/track/5N3hjp1WNayUPZrA8kJmJP?si=6847e5e3a4ca41db (Accessed: 07 May 2025).

Carpenter, S. (2024c) Taste, Spotify. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/track/5G2f63n7IPVPPjfNIGih7Q?si=0e0fa83d17664846 (Accessed: 07 May 2025).

Christenson, P.G. et al. (2018) What has America been singing about? trends in themes in the U.S. top-40 songs: 1960–2010 – Peter G. Christenson, Silvia de Haan-Rietdijk, Donald F. Roberts, Tom F.M. Ter BOGT, 2019, Sage Journals. Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0305735617748205 (Accessed: 07 May 2025).

Grace, K. (2023) Strangers, Spotify. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/track/5mjYQaktjmjcMKcUIcqz4s?si=7cd45c6851a14fea (Accessed: 07 May 2025).

Harvey, P. (2000) Stories from the city, stories from the sea, Spotify. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/album/0cJAiqO1obIJQGf4YI31q4?si=sAJDBPIiSMqmap6WKa4OfQ (Accessed: 07 May 2025).

Pinkpantheress (2021a) Break it off – bonus, Spotify. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/track/78ul3D77noQsYjSwvwiPU1?si=2db6d16cde634749 (Accessed: 07 May 2025).

Pinkpantheress (2021b) Pain, Spotify. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/track/4S4QJfBGGrC8jRIjJHf1Ka?si=68ec5be8f7ba402e (Accessed: 07 May 2025).

Senner, C. (2025) Music Streaming Statistics 2025 – newest data + infographic, Keyboard Kraze. Available at: https://keyboardkraze.io/music-streaming-statistics/#:~:text=Spotify%20achieved%20its%20first%20full,most%20dominant%20genre%20in%202024. (Accessed: 07 May 2025).

Young, L. (2024) Messy, Spotify. Available at: https://open.spotify.com/track/3SKH53SPQbEnZR4cJPVaz2?si=33b51c9cdae44e83 (Accessed: 07 May 2025).