Weather [week 1]
Back in New York. The three weeks I planned to be in California ended up being 3 months. Felt like it was time to come home and also figure out some housing stuff. Also wanted to do three specific things:
Make some music in the privacy of my own home
Enjoy Autumn in New York
Go on dates
As of this writing the first has been accomplished. The second thing hasn’t even happened yet. It’s just barely starting to cool down and the weather is no longer unbearably humid/hot. The third thing kinda barely happened if you can count a single virtual date via Hinge as going on a date. Not as awkward as I thought and I even wanted to do it again and got her number but I think we mutually lost interest over the second week.
Anyways…
It’s my second week in New York. I spent the first week readjusting to quarantine and digging up an old song I’d made a few years ago. The second week was spent really getting into the thick of it and making progress on the production of the song.
Here’s the very first draft of this song from a couple of years ago:
This song was inspired by a few different things
1. A girl
Kept thinking about her. Couldn’t fall asleep.
2. Midsummer Night’s Dream
In my college acting class I was assigned to play Lysander in the Midsummer Night’s Dream scene where he says
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth;
And ere a man hath power to say "Behold!"
The jaws of darkness do devour it up:
So quick bright things come to confusion.
I just thought the language here was so damn cool. And it makes sense.
3. Weather
One night in college it started pouring like crazy. Like heavens-open-up kind of pouring like crazy. Went outside (couldn’t fall asleep anyways) and felt it fall down all around me and felt ALIVE! SO ALIVE! What a feeling.
In the few years since I finished the first draft of this song I’ve been learning how to mix and I like to think that knowledge has helped hone craft as a producer as well. I liked the base of the song but definitely needed a little bit of shaping up to be a real banger.
Most notably:
Too thin—not enough bass
Doesn’t make me want to move. A song like this should have some kind of head bobbing that feels entirely missing during some parts of the song
I wanted each section to feel more distinct. I wanted each section to have a distinct feel/environment and evoke different feelings from the listener. The way I organized it:
Intro (piano @ beginning)
A little haunting. Kinda sleepy vibe
Verse (“Hands tied no getting out of this one…”)
Sort of searching for something. Meandering
Prechorus (“What else could I do?”)
Starting to feel lifted. The rain really starting to pour
Rap verse (effectively acting as the chorus as the emotional crux)
Big space. In the heavens.
So this week I did the following:
Added bass (thinking back it’s crazy that I didn’t add bass in the first version). I distinctly remember thinking to myself “I’ll be a producer that doesn’t use bass.” I guess I just didn’t like songs that are too bass heavy. Even to this day I don’t love super bass heavy songs but it really adds a lot of fullness to the mix imo
Revamped the rhythm section. I love the sound of the snare I added. Drenched it in reverb (used Valhalla Vintage Verb’s Drum Plate preset). I also added some toms that I may remove because they seem to be swallowed by the bass—probably need something a bit higher pitched.
Revamped the start of the prechorus by adding some piano plucks (yes, simulating raindrops). I added some panning to the piano plucks via the Soundtoys Panman plugin because rain, after all, falls down all over the place.
Switched out the intro piano and the verse electric keys. Ended up using Serum for the new verse keys—man I didn’t use Serum that much but I recently found some great presets on Splice and I am LOVING them.
Anyways here’s this week’s updated song (left out the second verse because I didn’t get to work on it much). Definitely have a number of things left to work through but I’m pretty sure I know what I want out of the song and I have a decent idea of how to get it:
Next steps
Schedule wise—Week 1 was meant for Producing and Lyrics. I was considering rewriting the lyrics for the second verse but did not get time. I’ll aim to get to it next week. Week 2 is scheduled for Producing and Recording so I’ll squeeze in the lyrics before I start recording.
In terms of production moves:
Really accentuate the transition from the prechorus to the rap verse. I want to evoke the glory of rolling thunder and bright lightning hitting the listener so suddenly out of the blue. That is the basis of the lightning’s power. You can never expect it so when it does hit you’re caught off guard.
Add some movement to the verses
Add some garnish to the rap parts. Maybe an arp or something.
Fix of the Week
For the first part of the prechorus “What else could I do?” I wanted to evoke the feeling of being lifted. Kind of like you’re being lifted above the clouds (a sense of clarity/hopefulness). To that end I added a (custom!) pad with a bit of airiness.
I took a piano plugin (Spitfire Lab’s Soft Piano honestly I love this piano and use it a lot. It’s free too) and sent it to a huge reverb (Valhalla Supermassive’s Cygnus preset) and bounced it t audio. Once I had that I rolled off a lot of the bottom end using EQ (Fabfilter Pro Q3—seems like EVERYONE uses this and I personally love it as well). From there I compressed it a little bit so the tail could be heard a bit better since the sound naturally decays with the reverb. I also used Soundtoys Decapitator and Izotope Trash to give it a bit of saturation. Lastly I used the piano plucks as a sidechain to compress the pad to duck out whenever the plucks were playing.
I added the names of all the plugins I used because I definitely wish someone had told me when I first started producing. Obviously just knowing what plugins I used won’t get you that far but at least it’s a start.