Task 1: Three Minute Song Production (70%)

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

Pre-Production

For my three-minute song production, I decided to take on the task of producing Mollie’s track ‘Birds’. This started with Mollie sending me a demo track of her playing guitar and singing, after this I started to work on expanding on this track, writing a piano accompaniment and a bass line. My next task was to recruit another musician as I cannot play keys very consistently so I asked Ryan to be a part of the project.

To ensure the best result for this track, we did a live performance with no edits as we felt this served the song as it is a ‘folk-pop’ track, so I booked 422 as I knew it had a big live room. I then planned to have a spacey and atmospheric live space for the musicians to play in, so we moved the drum kit and dimmed the lights and lit the space with a singular lamp, this was to induce a calm atmosphere. Mollie preferred to sit on the floor so we had very short stands for all of the guitar and vocal mics, the mic list is as follows:

Vox	Shure SM7B
Guitar DI	DI Box
Guitar Ribbon	SE Electronics X1R
Piano Left	AKG C414
Piano Right	AKG C414
Room Mic	Sontronics Orpheus

We used the SM7B as we were doing a live recording and didn’t want too much bleed from the other audio sources.

For guitar we used a DI as well as a ribbon mic placed toward the body of the guitar, I chose this as I wanted a lot more ‘warmth’ and bottom end from the guitar for a folkier sound.

For the piano I utilised two C414s in stereo for a very wide sound, and to capture the sustain of the keys and to sound very wide.

And lastly the room mic was picked as I wanted something to naturally capture the room sound and act as a sort of ‘glue’ for all the tracks, and just to make the track come to life and sound as real as possible.

Recording

Mollie opted to sit as she wanted to feel comfortable during the whole recording process. I feel as though this lended itself to the final take we ended up using as it was a great sounding performance that required no editing.

You can see here that I used the ribbon on the body of the guitar. This was to capture a lot more warmth and bottom end from the guitar as there was space for that on this track due to there only really being three instruments and vocals.

I aimed for more of a beater sound with the C414s.

The Sontronics Orpheus was pointed mainly at Mollie on the cardioid setting as the piano was a significantly louder source of sound than Mollie and the guitar. This microphone ended up being very useful as a ‘glue’ for the piano, vox, and guitar because as previously mentioned it captured the live room sound of all the instruments acting as a sort of natural reverb.

We ended up doing three takes, in the first take I felt that Ryan’s keys part had notes that clashed with the chords Mollie, so I told him that in the right hand he should drone the upper two strings that Mollie was playing with her open chord shapes.

In the second take, I felt that the keys part was too rhythmically complex and it was stomping on the vocals slightly, so I asked him to sustain his chords for way longer.

The third take was the take we ended up using as everyone was happy with it.

I later on my own overdubbed a bass part in the studio with a DI box.

Post-Production

Vocals:

For the vocals I cut alot of the low end and quite significantly cut a resonant frequency around 4k, while boosting some of the highs for more presence in the track. This helped it nestle more on the track without sounding muddy.

As for compression, I had quite a high threshold with a low ratio of 2:1 as I wanted to preserve the dynamics on this track, all I aimed to accomplish was tame some of the peaks, I used a higher knee as well for more of a natural transition between the compressed and uncompressed signal. I opted for a vintage FET for more colour on the track.

I further sculpted the tone post-compression with a vintage graphic EQ as i just felt it need a bit more saturation so I opted for the ‘Silky’ output which just means it’s meant to resemble a tube circuit.

I also added a bit of slapback delay in order to make the vocal sound slightly bigger and even more present in the mix, with a fast delay time of 85ms. The flutter intensity was also turned up slightly to resemble a vintage tape delay.

This was then sent to an auxiliary reverb channel, I wanted the reverb to sound quite large as the keys were also being sent through this aux. I cut off quite a lot of the low end out as I didn’t want to introduce too much mud into the mix with this reverb.

For some of the very sibilant parts I’ve utilised a multipressor to squash some of the irritating frequencies, I automated the bypass on the multipressor to trigger only for the sibilant parts.

Guitar:

For the guitars I took off a lot of the low end as it was clashing with the low end of the bass and keys, while boosting around 3.5k for more of the ‘clack’ from the muted guitar parts. This was mainly the same for the DI track as well. I sent this through the previously mentioned bus reverb as well.

Keys:

The keys didn’t require much processing at all so I wanted to make it a slight bit brighter in the high end so I’ve just boosted as you can see above, I also sent this through the reverb bus.

Room Mic:

I didn’t touch this much at all, I turned it down and fed it back into the mix until I was happy with it, I also sent it through the reverb bus.

Birds Sample:

I used automation for the intro and outro and I cut a lot of the low end to not muddy the track.

For all of the tracks the aim was to get the mic placement perfect so I didn’t need to do as much work in post.