There’s a request I keep getting regularly. It comes in different shapes and forms but the gist is always the same. Here’s an example of an email I received:
“I began with the program Logic pro X. But i have a problem: I want to get some plug ins for this program, i’d like to get it for free, because buying it is too expensive for me at the moment, so i like to download it, but it’s so hard to find it…
I need the following plug ins:
[followed by a list of paid plugins]”
Now, ethics aside, there is something quite big at play here that I want to address. Something that is especially difficult to understand when you’re first starting out in music. (more…)
In the past couple of years I’ve been working on a lot of vocal tracks as part of our new project, The Levels.
I wanted to share with you something important I’ve learned while doing this.
In case you’re not familiar with The Levels yet, it’s a project with three people: me, my longstanding partner in crime Loxy and our vocalist Alia Fresco.
The Levels
We’ve been making music together for a couple of years by now, but we only recently came public with the project and started putting our music out there.
To read more about us and listen to our music, go to our official website at www.thelevelsmusic.com.
Now.
Shadow Fighter is our latest track (not only the latest release, but literally the newest thing we’ve done at the time of writing this).
It is a result of a long process and the song which, for us, took The Levels to the next level.
It also changed my approach to writing vocal music.
What makes Shadow Fighter different then?
We made one big realization.
You have to keep in mind here that Loxy and myself come from drum&bass background. We were always about the rhythm, the bass, the vibe – but we never wrote a lot of music for vocalists before The Levels. There’s been a lot of trial and error involved in this.
Our pre-Shadow Fighter creation process was simple: Loxy and myself took some bits and pieces we happened to have going and Alia started creating her parts around them.
We then took what she did and brought it all together.
Just before the time we started working on Shadow Fighter I heard some of Alia’s acoustic performances. It was just her singing, accompanied by a single acoustic guitar.
And there it hit me – it really was a revelation. I realized that in order to give Alia’s beautiful singing the attention it really deserves, we need to approach the music creation process from a different premise.
From the moment we begin, we needed to tailor the music for the vocal from the ground up.
Because if we didn’t we would lose some of the detail and character in her voice (and indeed we had with our previous tracks).
A vocal like this wants to be in the spotlight. And it takes more than simply slapping it over a beat and calling it a day.
So, what does that mean in practice?
First it means thinking about the character of the voice and the details that make it unique. Every voice is different!
You then take that information and think about what is the best way to convey the character of the voice via the production process.
In our case, Alia’s voice is very intimate and the precision and detail is great, so we wanted to make sure not to mask any of that. There is also a certain color that needs to come through.
What I would do with, let’s say a punk vocal, would be different of course. Never the less the process is the same:
Think about what makes the vocal unique.
Think about what you can do to convey that unique character in the best possible way.
This way of thinking affects everything – from the choice of instrumentation to arrangement and mixing. Everything needs to be sitting in the right place in terms of musical ideas, frequency, volume, stereo image and dynamics. It’s a lot of details to get right.
In the midst of it all one must not forget the most important thing: conveying the emotion.
So this is the path we took with Shadow Fighter. We’ve learned a lot and we will venture further on that path with the music we do in the future.
I’m looking forward to what we learn next. It’s always a mystery.
One thing I know for sure though is that if I ever stop learning I might as well stop making music.
This is a guest post by Kim Lajoie. I recently came across his blog and felt very much connected to his way of thinking. So I invited him to write a little something for me and here we go! I’ll let Kim take it from here. Why should breaking workflow become a part of your workflow?
You probably get stuck sometimes.
I know the feeling. I’ll be looking at a half-finished song and my brain is fixated on the next step. But the solution isn’t coming to me.
As you probably know, I tend to be pretty organised in my workflow. Step 1 is followed by Step 2, which is then followed by Step 3. Kick and snare and hats. Then background percussion. Then bass. Then chords or arps. Then melody. Then repeat for B-section. Then arrangement. Then automation. And on and on it goes.
‘Organised’, however, can sometimes look like ‘rigid’. And when it’s time to write a melody but no melody is coming to me, ‘rigid’ tends to look more like ‘uncooperative’. Sometimes the solution is to take a break and let it stew in my subconscious for a day or two. Sometimes the solution is to take inspiration from something outside the genre I’m working in. Sometimes the solution is to start with something exceedingly simple and build on it.
But sometimes the solution is to break workflow.
Maybe I can’t solve the bassline because it can’t be solved yet – it needs the chords and the melody before it will emerge. Maybe I can’t solve the background percussion because it’s can’t be solved yet – the drums are already too full or complex.
Sometimes it makes sense to do things in a different order. Route around the problem.
More broadly, I worked on a collaboration a few years ago where the singer had recorded scratch vocals but was having difficulty scheduling time to record the final vocals. Rather than stall the project, I actually went ahead with the mix using the scratch vocals, knowing we could record the final vocals later and it wouldn’t be much work to fit them in.
If you’re getting stuck, it’s probably because you’re trying to solve the wrong problem. Rather than beating yourself up and/or slowing things down, sometimes it makes sense to move on. Tackle things slightly out of order.
The great thing about plans is that you can always change them.
Kim Lajoie is a Melbourne music producer specialising in composition, project management and digital audio technology.
