Production Notes

Delivery notes:

Some ideas I had about the song, to begin with, were that I wanted my friend Josh Eastlake to work with, so I kept that in mind when picking out reference material.  I went to YouTube and found a Tribe Called Quest song that fit the vibe of a group performance called Steve Biko (Stir it Up).  Tribe Called Quest has always been a favorite of mine, and I felt I could learn a lot from this track.  Then I tried to think of the rap songs I know with two people rapping and decided on Young Jesus by Logic and Big Lenbo.  Logic has also been a big inspiration in pursuing a music career and this track was a very good example of how to have two rappers together on a song.  I converted both videos to mp3, then into .wav to bring them into Pro Tools easier.

I then created my Battery 4 tracks and set them up.  Battery 4 is my favorite virtual drum machine with a ton of live and digital sounds of classic hip-hop drums and effects.  I route a Battery 4 instrument track with Battery 4 in insert 1 to the drum bus and 5 other instrument tracks.  I will have a tutorial on how to route all of Battery 4 easily on YouTube.

I am going to make a drum beat in battery with similar sounds and style to the Tribe Called Quest reference I have.  I am also going to set the bpm to the Tribe reference (95bpm) as I think it will be a good speed to go for especially referencing their drums. I am also muting the Logic reference for now while I pick out the drums I want.  I am going to record one-shots in the near future to replace the main drum sounds so it doesn’t matter too much what it sounds like now.  I will be adding a lot of sound effects in the future digitally as well to fill the gaps in the sound.

I made the basic drum beat with a kick snare and tambourine, so I am going to start adding other elements.  I tried to make the drums sound like the drums on the Tribe reference and I think they turned out well.  I am going to write another part myself in midi with a midi sax for now to create the song structure.

Now I want to add a bass so I am going to look through Xpand2 at their bass sounds to see if any would fit this song.  I ended up using a saw-tooth bass synth wave that was the perfect sound I was looking for. 

I then recorded my trombone to add some more detail.  I followed the bass pattern in key and tried to attack the first note, back off, and then swell through the rest of the measure.  This created the effect I wanted where the trombone dips in and out of the audible range during the swells. 

At this point, I felt the beat was ready to record lyrics, so I texted Josh to see if he was free to record.  Unfortunately, he was not available so I was going to have to do it myself.

After arranging the pieces together, I had the beat mostly made so I wrote and recorded my own lyrics.  I used the Behringer TM1 large diaphragm condenser mic as it is known to have very clear audio and wide dynamic range to record my vocals and I used the same mic on recording my drum one shots.  I layered my drum one-shots with virtual drums to make them sound a bit bigger.

Now that I was mostly done with tracking, I started working on the mix.  I mixed the volume so everything fit together nicely, then I sub-mixed the groups of tracks I had to balance everything nicely.  I put an EQ on every track and did subtractive EQing for each track to eliminate any background noise or buzz.  After making each track sound good I threw the Pro Limiter onto my master bus, bypassed it, and then used it to match my true peak to -1 and my integrated LUFS at -16.8.

Sleep notes:

For this song, I wanted to make a cool dark beat, so I used an Earl Sweatshirt song as a reference.  I started with the drums the same way I did for the first production but used different drums that sounded more like Earl than Tribe. 

I wanted to do something interesting with the high hats, so I put a roto pan plugin on it to make it go back and forth around your ears.  It was a bit too much so I made a second high hat track that fills in any notes that wouldn’t be audible because of pan shifting. 

After that, I needed a cool bassline with a dark and gritty bass, so I went to expand and found a bass to use.  I EQ’d it and made it sound how I wanted with a few other minor effects. 

The Earl Sweatshirt reference I used did not have a lead melody part and I felt that was a good decision for the song, so I wanted to do the same. 

I added a synth violin to add some detail to the background in certain sections of the song instead.

 Now that I was done with the beat, I had to write lyrics and record them. 

I used the same mic to record vocals as I recorded them in the same sitting (Behringer TM1 Carotid Condenser mic).  I also used this mic to record one-shots for drums to mix into the virtual drums I made.  I also recorded the trombone and played the bass pattern to add more background variation.