Producing If I Could

Producers Masterclass
o Pop producer Reuben takes you into realms of producing commercial sounding pieces. Pop is undoubtedly the biggest genre in the industry and is what being played on radios & media while everyone accepts it. Im always keen on producing music which will be able to connect with people and the community. Pop music is still the biggest industry driven genre but you must be silly not to appreciate disco. Truth is, making music isnt complicated and we produced If I Could using minimal gears.

Gear List
I favour gears from M-Audio. Not only they are affordable, yet easy to operate! Combined with Logic 9, be ready to take upon the world.

HARDWARE
Apple Imac 21.5 M-Audio Profire 2626 Audio Interface M-Audio Keyrig 49 Tapco s-8 monitors Rode NT1-A Condenser Mic

SOFTWARE
Apple Logic 9 iZotope Ozone 4 iZotope Alloy Adobe Audition 3

Breaking down the producing stages

If I Could a song by Daniel, which he composed some time ago. Un-recorded, the song was only played during gigs with a guitar and voice. We heard potential when we heard Daniel play his composed song and decided to choose his song for VividProject.org

1.1 | Recording
The first step of the song itself was the guitar track and Dans vocals. We set a click track with a tempo of 118bpm and got Daniel to record the guitar tracks. We chose an easier way of recording the guitar by lining in the guitar to the M-Audio Profire 2626. Using this method we were able to get a clean guitar sound.

Three track recording in adobe audition 3. One guitar, vocal melody and harmony

Once that was done, Daniels vocals were next. After a couple of vox takes through the song we settled for the third recording through. A harmony track was also sung, improvising every best little way Dan was able to come up with. All seem well and we now have our guitar and two vocal tracks ready.

Using auditions stock audio restoration worked well on our tracks. All we had to do is to select a noise profile and process the entire audio track to remove unwanted noise. For our case here, we had a low humming noise and some room noise in the vocal track removed.

Sound restoration to cleanup dirty audio. With that we have a guitar and vocal only mixdown of If I Could. Listen to Recording Mix 1.mp3

1.2 |The Mixing > Arranging Notion!

Taking a break from the recording session, we played what seems to be the rough mix, listened to it again and couldnt help to notice that the song was flat! Way really flat! We wondered what sort of music arrangements should be made for the song. And were about to use samples and loops to fill the song up!

Step 1

The first thing to be balanced is the guitar and the vocals. So we put in a compressor to with a moderate threshold but no gain. We used a separate gain for the guitar and we are just taming the peak levels here. A slow attack as we didnt want a too punchy feel in the guitar and we rolled off the EQ from 80hz and below with a slight dip at 200hz killing the muddiness.

Step 2 Fixing them Vocals!

Two vocal tracks now, the lead and a harmony. Daniels vocal wasnt perfect on spot, though good, had some minor pitching errors. Firing up the pitch correction plug-in setting the key to a G major scale with a moderate response of 247ms. Not to hasty, or well have that T-Pain vocals. Not for this round, please. Again, compressors with little gain to balance the two vocal tracks. On the lead vocal I used a plug-in by Izotope, the Alloy adding some exciter and EQ to the track. I made the harmony vocals come in only during the chorus creating more variety in the song. The harmony vocals were mixed rather subtle and we cut some low end but boosted the highs on the EQs for the harmony vocals.

iZotope Alloy plug-in on lead vocals. Listen to Vocals without edit.mp3 & Vocals with edit.mp3

Step 3 Bass-ing & Drumming

Having a pre balance of the guitar and vocals, heres where the extra arrangements starts. Using Logics Muted Electric Bass we recorded a simple bass line. Coupled with a bass amp plugin, compressor, goldverb and EQ we achieved a rather warm sounding bass to backbone the song.

Using the lower end keys, we also added in a bass slide at the end of the final chorus. Once we go that down, we look into the drums and percussion arrangements of the music. The drums (in pink) we programmed on If I Could were straight out from Logics samples. We didnt use other patches from anywhere else.

 Heres a Tip: Using the hyper editor in Logic, editing the programmed drums can be a lot simpler. Use the line tool in hyper editor and bring the velocity of the midi to be a constant for the drums for instance the kick or snare. Alternatively use compressors to tame your sounds Or use the velocity sensitivity function on your midi controller if it allows

The hyper editor in action. You can get real creative with it if you know how to utilize it well!

We made different tracks for each parts of the drumset; snare, hi hat, crash, kick and so on, so we can tweak and pan every parts to our liking. Main effects used here are Compressors, Equalizers, Panning and Reverbs. We didnt want our percussion kicking and punching through the music, so we kept them tame by using a decent compressor attack speed and decent threshold levels. A sweet music flowing music were after! A little reverb to the percussions, so it sits behind the main melody and clog the whole mix. Also some EQ for all the tracks. A safe thumb rule; rolling of frequencies below 60Hz. In this round of mixing I didnt group the instruments together in buses nor the effects. So to keep things constant I copied and paste the effects settings like the reverbs and such.

Decent attack speed on compressors. Keep your EQ cut!

Step 4 Piano & Pads!

Coming up to this point of arrangement, I muted the percussions, played the sequencer and played a piano along to it. Then we thought the song sounded very lounge-styled out of a sudden! Anyway, youll notice the piano is soft in the mix and only prominent in fill-ins. The piano and pad came after the 1st chorus making the song fuller. Using some bigger reverbs on the pad where some basic chords and movement were recorded it holds the song making it warm. Quantizing the notes to a swing mode made our piano sound a little robotic. But with the whole song put together, having a little overly perfect timed piano sounded fine. Again all our patches are straight right out from Logic. Listen to Quantized Pianos

Step 5 Supporting Plucked Strings

In my years of arranging, I often find guitars to be the hardest to fake. Err, I mean imitate; using virtual guitars & making them sound real. The case was similiar for If I Could, but we took up the challenge. We used three types of guitars here. The 12 string acoustic chord, twangy electric & dobro slide.

The 12 strings acoustic will strum a guitar chord when you hit a key on the keyboard. Top octaves minor and bottom octaves major. Sounds good. But to fake a real guitar? Sucks, if you asked The guitar chord strums comes in only during the final chorus to fatten. Mixed softly and panned left in the mix it sounded fine. The twangy electric was also panned left supporting the lead vocals with some melody riffs and a slight delay effect on it. Nothing too bright here, EQ was cut at the top and bottom of the spectrum. Initially I heard a glass guitar slide playing in this arrangement. Well I mean I didnt hear it. I imagined it. But up to this point, I didnt have someone to record it so I substitute it with the Dobro Slide, which has the slide effect if you hit the keys hard enough.

Sounded a little too bright so an EQ was added to slice the brightness. To balance with the other guitars, the dobro was panned right. Subtle chorus and delay effects were used to fatten up the guitar. Note again, every effect and sound for the guitars are all stock in Logic. Hear the fake guitars at its best; Fake Guitars.mp3

Step 6 - Squeezing all the loudness!

Yes mixing and soft mastering. We took a few days to come out with a mix that we would like having all the arrangements together now. That includes volume balancing, panning and some cuts here and there. We pictured a pop country styled song, so we made sure the song wasnt too punchy but yet not too weak sounding by not overdoing the compressors. But, truth to be told. When we were done with our mix the next anybody would want to do is to maximize the loudness! Yeah you would want to make your music the loudest ever possible and win the loudness war. After all, for those of you that does not know, louder music always sound better! We did not use a separate arrange window to master the track for its loudness, opposed to what many other producers would do. Then again, theres no said rule that you must. We made sure our mix does not clip and then we just used some plugins on the master track.

What we used: o Compressor o iZotope Ozone

o Adaptive Limiter o Channel EQ

On the master track, we used a compressor to compress and make the music louder. We used very low attack speed and release speed to avoid coloring the song. Gaining about +3db, with threshold set about -6db & we had a low ratio of 1:8:1.

Next up we used Ozone 4 and did much effect processing here. We added some brightness on the equalizer, very slight mastering reverb and boost the song louder with the loudness maximizer. We only used a little of the exciters and expand stereo image for the top frequencies.

The Channel Equalizer were also added to basically roll off the lower end rumble below 50hz and again we added a pinch of brightness here.

Lastly to keep the music unclipped, we added an Adaptive Limiter at the end of the chain. Listen to Main Mix without Soft Master.mp3 And Main Mix with Soft Master.mp3

1.3 | Conclusion
Using simple recording, editing, arranging and mixing using the very minimal gear list is not an obstacle. Weve created a piece ready for the commercial world; being loud enough & mastered correctly whereby our listeners can accept. However having to look and study the source files are even more enriching and everybody will learn and discover more! (Thats why they give you the textbooks in school!) Learn how we do the arrangements, what we played, what effects we used, techniques and many more.

Buy the source files for If I Could Daniel C now. Included with the download source pack is everything we used to produce the song. Whats Included in the Download Pack? 1. Logic Project File 2. Audio & MP3 Files (From early mixes to final mixes) 3. Loops & Samples used 4. Tutorials & Source Files

Buy the Download

Pack for only $19.99 now.