#instead of allowing their intricacies and messiness to shine through and create a really powerful and tragic story about love and grief?

[fallingbyjuleecruise]

genuinely feel that the drama happening in the amc iwtv fandom is what happens when fans promote a show bc it’s gay first and do not mention the plot/genre at all

[chordiacarrest]

Left Here Alone

This little song, which I made for a class about popular music and was greatly inspired by mid-2000s emo-rock (think My Chemical Romance), was a real delight to make. Through the process of listening to and learning from the music that already exists in these genres, I found it was really fun to just mess around with instruments, layers and sounds until I had something I liked.

It’s made me realise how easy and important it would be to learn basic audio mixing and production skills for many of the major popular music styles, and I’ve decided that’s a project I’d actually really like to partake in.

Some will definitely be easier than others, but I feel as a teacher it’s really important to speak the same musical language as your students. Learning the different intricacies that make a song really feel like a particular genre could make all the difference in the world to a student just starting out as a songwriter, and I already feel an immense amount of duty to encourage that spark within them.

Process of recording/mixing Left Here Alone below the cut!

The lyrics were inspired by a podcast (you’re probably seeing that kind of thing pop up a lot on this blog, huh. Real sorry about that. Write about what you know, huh?), and the genre especially was designed to reflect the character’s voice (a teenage boy currently going through big and dramatic changes in his life.)

I recorded the piano part first, knowing it would be the main harmonic instruments that played through the song, and therefore a strong foundation. Piano is not exactly a strong suit of mine, but using MIDI functions has really allowed me to write piano songs much more easily. One trick I like to do is to almost intentionally play notes a little more out of time than you otherwise would, and Quantise them to 16th or 32nd notes in big bits. It creates some, real zany rhythms that can add some nice flavour to a song.

The piano’s post production was fairly simple - I changes it to the Logic preset for “Grand Piano and Pad”, and panned the piano in one ear and the pad to the other, then added a fairly cruel low pass filter to take out quite a lot of the overpowering high frequencies.

[ID: A Logic screenshot depicting a track called “Grand Piano and Pad” as a folder, with the tracks “Grand Piano” and “Pad” inside. Grand piano is panned slightly to the left, and the Pad is panned at roughly 70% right. End ID]

Next I recorded the drums. These, I recorded on my laptop keyboard, taking it very slowly, on step at a time. If piano isn’t my strong suit, drums are basically my weakest suit. I have a really hard time with percussion, so I started very simple (just playing the hi-hats) and slowly built upon it until i had the confidence to tap out a decent rock beat on my keyboard. I added in all the fills afterwards, and quantised the heck out of them, putting on a swing on 16%, just to give it a little bit of a more natural feel.

The drums then had, honestly, a lot done to them. The kit preset I used was “Retro Rock”, which I then added some “BitCrusher” distortion of it, to make it sound a little less clean and automated, and pulled down 4 semitones with a pitch shifter, inspired by the song Sleep by My Chemical Romance. I really like the effect this gave the drums, making them more present, but mixing in to the overall messy, grunge sound of the song.

[ID: A screenshot of the effects on the drum track. The effects are, in order, “Channe EQ”, “PShft” (P-Shift), “Compressor” and “Bitcrusher”. End ID.]

Guitar, which followed, is much more of a strong suit of mine. Starting with the rhythm guitar, which was set to the distorted guitar preset “Eighties Goth” (I really went heavy-handed on that theme, huh?), I double tracked just some basic power chords, panning each track to different sides to fill out the space a bit more, then added two Lead Guitar tracks (set to the “Time To Shred” preset). I had a lot of trouble with this preset, as I really liked it, but it was really difficult to produce a listenable result with this preset, as it made SO much noise while handling. Still, I managed it, playing some higher power chords in the second verse, as well doubling the second chorus in two different octaves, and adding some arpeggios and random soloing to finish it off. I really like how these tracks turned out. I feel like they really added to the overall feel of the song, pushing this grittiness onto it.

I also added the BitCrusher preset to these guitars, wanting them to sound a similar way to the drums, and it worked! Other than that, and cutting out some of the high frequencies, there wasn’t a lot else I added to the Logic Presets for these.

Finally I added bass, which I wanted to keep fairly simple. I just played out the bass mote in various rhythms, with some octave leaps, then double tracked that and took one track down an octave. The presets for these are “Funkulator” (high one) and “Sub Station” (low one). Same BitCrusher distortion was added and I moved onto vocals.

The vocals for this song were, not complex necessarily, but exhausting. With 27 vocal tracks in total with melody and harmon, my voice was feeling a little bruised by the time I was done. But I was happy with them! One mistake I did make, in hindsight, was not recording the beginning of the final chorus (the soft, low one) first, and instead waiting until after I’d finished screaming out the bridge into my microphone. Ah well, you live and you learn.

I added the “Compressed vocals” preset to these, as well as some light autotune (although, heavy autotune on backing vocals. Its a style I’m a big fan of in general). I did and still do have a lot of trouble mixing vocals in a good way. I still worry they sound over-compressed, but I like to think that’s a stylistic choice. Apart from the autotune, I also changed the reverb a bit, and added that sam BitCrusher distortion (note, I didn’t add that to every track. The first verse and the beginning of the final chorus don’t have that) I get the feeling this is where everything went wrong, but admittedly I still love the effect. Eventually I’ll figure out a way to add distortion to vocals without messing them up. Who knows.

One other thing I like to do, especially in this style, is when I’m looking at a vocal harmony along a verse, that is at risk over overpowering or getting in the way of the main melody, I cut out the bottom end of it with a really quite prominent high pass filter. It allows the harmony to shine as a ‘colour’ to the melody without getting in the way, and adds a cool ‘telephone’ effect to the sound of the vocals.

I finished the vocals up by trying to cut out the obvious plosives, doing my best, and moving on.

[ID: A screenshot of three folders of vocal tracks, entitled “Lead Vocals”, “Harmony Vocals” and “Bridge Harmonies”. End ID.]

I cleaned everything up, changed around some volumes of things, and some of the orders of the effects on different tracks, and mastered the song, pulling the middle down a little and boosting the bass a tiny bit, and ended up with the song as it is now.

[ID: A screenshot of the Master EQ. The mid bass is boosted slightly, the middle is dropped slightly, the upper middle is boosted very slightly, and there is a small hi-cut filter on the very top. End ID.]

This process definitely requires some refining, but has left me, if nothing else, a little more confident in tackling this style of song next time.

I’m curious to see how this process differs with different style of music, so I’ll keep you all posted as I embark on a “learn to mix pop music styles” journey for the next few years!