Task 1: Three Minute Song Production (70%)
Task 2: 1000 Word Write-Up (30%)
When presented with the assignment, I had decided to do the entire project on my own which came with some very heavy downsides such as my lack of songwriting experience and lack of contacts to perform for me. These limitations forced me to become a lot more creative with what i had worked on. To start i found my inspiration to start off with by the track Animal by Miike Snow, which starts off with just chords on their own in a syncopated rhythm, however it is unclear its syncopated until the rest of the track comes in. Furthermore when starting I didn’t have any specific key or chord structure in mind and just played different chords until i found a 4 chord pattern i thought sounded really good. This admittedly meant that the track on a whole had no clear starting direction melodically or harmonically, which was a detriment to the entire track as most melodies put in are just arpeggiated chords.
I chose to write the song into 86bpm because that tempo is downtempo, chill track which is the sort of feel I was going for when making the instrumental. This was inspired by a lot of trip hop like Massive Attack’s “Teardrop” being at 77bpm and other more atmospheric pop songs such as Lana Del Ray’s “Born to die” which sits at 86bpm as well. This is also the same bpm I had written my first single release in, making it a tempo I was familiar with and made it easier for me to work with.
I had made the backing instrumental track on FL Studio. This was done with a lot of sample instrument libraries. such as the electric piano which wasn’t recorded live but rather a sampled instrument from the built in FL Studio sampler.
Additionally i made a drum beat using one-shot samples built in to FL studio and layered that with a drum loop i had found. I did this to layer 2 different drum sounds that would enhance each other and create interesting effects with polyrhythms.
down below is the drum beat I had made with the collection of one-shot samples.
Seen below is the waveform view of the drum loop I added in and the audio of it on it’s own.
Another huge issue was finding a vocalist to sing lyrics i would write in the song, having already booked a studio session in some of the last couple weeks leading up to the deadline but no vocalist agreeing to take part in the project, I had to record the vocals myself. This caused a major issue because in the simplest terms, I am not a singer. I do not have the vocal talent of a singer and thus the singing was not what i wanted. however i had 3 hours of recording to try and get it as polished as possible and do each part line by line. These numerous attempts made the final vocal cut passable at best.
I had picked the AKG C414 for my vocal recording due to its sensitivity and detail in higher end which is what i wanted out of the vocal sound. However, since it was my own vocals and I also happened to get sick around the time I planned out to record vocals, the performance wasn’t as great as it probably could have been even with several takes and attempts. The vocals are easily the weakest part of the entire track. I had attempted to correct them digitally after recording with autotunes, EQs and lots of effects to get them to sound like they would fit in the rest of the track. The lack of time spent on the vocals in recording and not being a songwriter meant I had to repeat certain vocal lines to fill in gaps, making the track repetitive in places, but saving time and energy for other aspects of the track. Additionally i had to greatly reduce the low frequency of the vocal takes due to me not using a pop filter, something I realise I should have used upon retrospective analysis as the low end removed a lot of the body of my vocal takes.
I decided to mix the vocals into the full mixed instrumental backing track on logic due to my preference with logic’s audio processing compared to fl studio’s. This meant certain instruments wouldn’t have particular responses to the vocal which was a downside for choosing to do it this way, however to me it was a worthwhile trade-off as the reverbs, compressors and other processing on logic pro sounds much better on live recorded vocals. I added 2 bus channels to the vocal tracks, one for reverb which i used a plate emulator and shortened the decay time to have it fit nicely in with the rest of the track, the second bus channel used a distortion plugin to give the vocal a gritty texture that would be subtly implemented during the chorus.
To further use sampling in this track to meet the criteria for the assignment, I had used a sampler on the vocals to split each word/phrase into quick one-shot samples i would play over the final double chorus. I wanted it to be at the very end to change up the repetitive nature of the track to keep listeners interested in the track and give the ending some more flavour that wasn’t in previous choruses. I then played repeated sections of particular words throughout the chorus using the sampler’s high cut filter and pitching it up an octave to give it a shaky feel reminiscent to that of AJR’s “The Trick”
After playing in / writing in the sampler parts i then duplicated the track and panned them hard right and hard left to make it feel much wider and give space to the main vocal line to sit down the middle and take the stage as this element was to add interest and change the repetitve nature of it, but not to completely change the focus.
