Weekly Reflection (Week 6)

This week marks the completion of my track. I’ve probably spent more time on it this week than any other week in multiple recording and mixing sessions at SAE. I began by finishing the structure of the song and doing some additive synthesis to the bass patch. Adding a second saw-tooth wave oscillator an octave below gave the main hook/ bass line much more impact and filled out the lower frequencies that were missing.

DSP on synth bass patch showing oscillator two.

I wanted to add more singing parts to the song and make it more interesting with a female voice as well. So, I got my friend Alice Headlam to lay down some higher register vocal lines for the second singing part of the song. I added my own harmonies underneath and mixed it much the same as my first vocal part earlier in the song. After finalising the structure and adding the vocal parts I decided to focus on layering and adding more instruments to make the track more dynamic. A very straight down-stroked guitar at the beginning and a virtual glockenspiel melody throughout the track. LCD Soundsystem use glockenspiel throughout many of their tracks so I thought it would be fitting. I wanted to create some “wub-wub” synth like at the start of ‘Someone Great’ using side chain compression but before I did that I was playing around with my guitar track and tried reversing it to get a similar effect.

It immediately sounded cool and I wanted to go with that instead because it was quite different but still alluded to the same effect. I created an outro and recorded some over driven guitars and a new glockenspiel melody to wrap up the song and finish big.

Remembering that when I showed Pete my scratch track, he suggested that recording real drums would really add to the song I decided to go ahead and book the Neve Studio and see what I could do. Again, out of my comfort zone as I’ve never recorded drums before but was willing to give it my best.

Session images showing mic placement and padded snare drum.

I asked my friends Mike Allen and Alice Headlam to help me in the recording session. To get a warm sounding/ quite flat/ deep snare sound (like LCD) I loosened up the snare skin when tuning it and sticky taped a mouse pad on the edge. This worked a treat! Using corrective EQ and some pretty hard compression across the kit before pro tools gave me a pretty great sounding start. I’d later apply a little reverb on the snare/ hats and kick drum to give it some space.

Corrective EQ and compressing on the way in.

I spent some time on the pro tools session of the drum tracking, comping together the best take from all the playlists and doing a mix up against the bounce I imported from Ableton. Subtle panning of Hi Hats and Snare to give a bit of width. Compression and saturation on the snare and kick to thicken them up.

Pro Tools session of drum tracking/ showing beat detective editing.

Now that I’ve got my real drums recorded and mixed I added them back into Ableton to do a final mix of the track. Realising at this point that I am stuck with the mix I did in Pro Tools I thought about how I would go about this in the future… I could either learn how to mix better in Ableton and do all the mixing in there or (since I have more plugins in pro tools) take all my audio files out of Ableton and mix the entire track in Pro Tools. Some ‘printing’ would have to be done and it would be kind of risky but if done right it would sound a lot better since I’m used to mixing in Pro Tools.

Earlier this week I also touched base with Breanna on the cover art design. She sent through this more developed version of the draft I had picked. I would have taken it as is if I’m honest I think it looks so cool.

Developed draft + reference idea.

I’d mentioned that I would like some hiragana characters in the Tokyo setting and sent her the image on the right as an example. I also wanted a man standing in the foreground kind of like one of the Tycho art references I sent at the beginning. We hadn’t named the tracks yet in our group and this was obviously a problem for Breanna as she was waiting to hear from us what they were so she could add the track titles on the cover. She had also not heard the track yet which made me think that in the industry you’d probably want to have the song finished and named before you have someone do a design for it. It didn’t create too much tension but definitely made me think about how this could be done smoother in the future. Have a look at the final cover art and take a listen to the final mix here:

Final artwork for single.