Post 3

THE 2ND WAVE

I spent a while trying to weigh up wether or not I could submit this as music production degree level course work. I decided… I could not. For Maria it is a fantastic showcase of good songwriting and she has a product that she’s happy with. But for a producer… well it’s not great. 

So a new plan has developed. I’m doing a clear out. All the tracks that are beyond repair are getting the chop. The bass was poor from the first take: Gone. The guitar solo is just a little too bland and scatty. Fair play to Maria for taking on the role as songwriter, singer, rhythm guitarist and lead guitarist but the solo is kind of dragging the track down. 

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I started with quantising the drums properly. As it was the only acoustic sound source in the live room there is zero bleed from anything else (minus a little headphone noise). By creating a drum group, I could flex time a transient marker and every drum stem would follow suit, meaning everything stayed together and all wave lengths stayed at the exact relative position.

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I also quantised the MIDI piano that had been tracked for the previous version of “So Bad”. Irony is the timing on the original was so bad that my MIDI piano was basically in free time. So with my newly quantised drum and MIDI piano track the songs structure was taking shape again.

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I also managed to get a few takes from Maria during the recording session where she had sung without the guitar. So another isolated song source that I could layer onto the new version and mix up.

A demo for all the fixed up original content is at the bottom of this page. 

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I learnt the bass line for the original recording and performed a new, in time, in tune and generally cohesive track to layer on top.

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Like I said in post 1; I love the acoustic vibe which is very Katie Melua. But, as I am now the producer (for the sake of unit 8) I had a new idea. I’ve always loved Jeff Buckleys cover of Leonard Cohens “Hallelujah” and drew a little inspiration from it for the new guitar track. I love the vocals against an electric guitar with some spacious effect. I own and play a Epiphone Casino that sings amazingly when played open stringed (So Bad is in E major). My creative process is to create loops and then just jam to them. Changing amps, effects etc when and if I like.

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The tremolo heavy guitar I performed on the new version of So Bad completely changed the vibe and space. With that came new opportunities for instrumentation. I found that with the reverb heavy tremolo a new atmosphere developed, and I wanted to explore some new guitar techniques. I love guitar harmonics and thought that during the chilled out intro and outro… well they sounded amazing. I panned the tremolo guitar slightly to the left, left the vocals dead centre and panned the harmonics slightly right. What’s left is an amazing audio picture full of space, life and definition.

I found this amazing “sculptor” synth which had a ping pong delay across the stereo field. To empathise the fantastically eerie chord in the instrumental section I wrote a synth line that followed the chord progression and ended in the accidental note (a C). 

When all pieced to together the track was rich with flavours and with more defining features than the original production.