Song#2 All on this farm - Mastering Stage

Let's get down to business with part 4 of 5 today, the Mastering Stage.

1. Idea Stage
2. Composing and Arranging Stage
3. Recording Stage
4. Mastering Stage aka apply-some-magic-time
5. Final Product

As always, please visit this project's intro blog. 

Mastering

I divided the tracks into groups for easy editing. The groups are:

• Instrument
• Animals sound
• Vocal

 For the instrument part, each instrument has its own track, as described in the previous post. Additional processing was added for some instruments like the bass - EQ was added. An overall
chain-linked compressor was added to limit music volume during the intro and outro parts, where the animal & farmer entry scene was occuring. In the same device chain, a glue compressor was added. The harmonica recording was processed with a gate, Amp boost and reverb device chain for the desired sound.

The next group Animals also had some processing. For those recording live with my girlfriend's toy sheep, an autofilter was added, to cut out the lower frequencies and rumble from the background noise. The other animal sample recordings from freesound.org were reasonably well with minimum background noise hiss and required no additional processing. The overall group was also processed with a compressor -glue compressor device chain as well.

Lastly, the Vocal group was split into several tracks like:

• Main vocal
• Vocal thickening
• Harmony 1
• Harmony 2
• Extra

The vocal thickening track was a trick learned from master Warren Huart's video, where I chained up to 8 pairs of vocals with different pannings and tuning with the grain delay device and finished with a limiter. This track was then made softer by -35dB against the Main vocal track to give that final thickening sound.

Harmonies 1 & 2 were solely for the chorus purposes and were individually recorded and processed through Melodyne. The device chain for them included gate, compressor and EQ8 with different EQ frequency high-pass & low-pass envelopes. The Extra track was mainly for those exclaimations of "Hey!" and other minor sound snippets.

Overall, the Vocal group was processed through another chain of EQ8, glue compressor, Amp Clean and a Abletunes Easy Deesser devices.

Finally, for the Master channel another glue compressor and limiter was added to the chain.

Aaaand that's all folks! A simple setup for a simple song (disclaimer - this was mastered before I watched Wicklemedia's awesome mastering tutorial on Youtube, a big recommend!)


Stay tuned for the final Part V of  V for this song!

Song#2 All on this farm - Recording Stage

Yawns, yet another post, but this one is the hardest so far.

1. Idea Stage
2. Composing and Arranging Stage
3. Recording Stage
4. Mastering Stage aka apply-some-magic-time
5. Final Product

In case you are new here, here's the intro blog. 

Recording

For this song, I used my newly bought USB Blue Yeti microphone (around RM500+) for the recording.

Since the song involved singing and playing the harmonica, I tried my best in noise reduction for my home setup as you can see below, which is pretty hilarious to speak.

 Putting the actual singing aside (just an amateur singer), I used Melodyne to fix certain notes and timing due to delay latency during recording. It looks like this:

The same was done with the harmonica recording. The harmonica was a cheap China-knockoff brand tuned in D and missing some chromatic notes, so I needed to adjust the pitch using the software where necessary.

Stay tuned for Part IV of  V for this song!

Song#2 All on this Farm - Composing and Arranging Stage

And so here's the next part. Minor update, GF loves the song #1 Missing Piece :)

1. Idea Stage
2. Composing and Arranging Stage
3. Recording Stage
4. Mastering Stage aka apply-some-magic-time
5. Final Product

In case you are new here, here's the intro blog.

Setting up

Using the Loopmaster Bluegrass pack loaded up in Kontakt, I hooked it up (I used Kontakt 5 16 out for more channels) in the MIDI channel called Acoustic Guitar.

Then, I wired each stereo channel pair to each instrument. For example, Acoustic Guitar takes channel 1/2 and Banjo takes channel 3/4

all up until I used up all the 16 channels. Then I made sure that the channels were routing correctly out of Kontakt...Acoustic Guitar> st. 1 and Banjo st.2

Which then routes to a External  Instrument (under Instruments) per MIDI Instrument (i.e. Banjo) with the following settings

Arranging

The loops come with a standard set of intro, verse, chorus and outro based on the parent key (which can be modulated on the fly). I chose the Bb set due to its recommended faster tempo of 125 bpm.

The next part is assembling the sound effects and sculpting the final music to fit the genre. Repetition is going to bore the listeners, so every time the listeners encounter the same line, I added something different to the mix.

The additional instruments I added were:

• Animal sounds - cow, pigs, screaming goat, chicken, dog and the recording of the toy sheep
• Pure Vibes from the Ableton library
• Harmonica - recorded live
• Vibraslap and slide whistle

Simple arranging was applied here, such as I removed the fiddle riff when the harmonica recaps the chorus and a rhythmic arrangement of the animal sounds was made.

I made a sample of the song before I added all the other stuffs for my arranger friends to evaluate:

Lyrics

Some musicians typically write/sing lyrics with the melody before composing the music, and some do it the opposite way. In this case, the music was recorded as samples beforehand, so the process of putting lyrics to the music is somewhat easier. In this instance, I took the fiddle riffs for every part as inspiration for the lyrics melody, albeit with some variations.

To write the lyrics, I had in mind a sense of writing some poetic lyrics (think Hotel California) with some witty metaphors in it. The idea of singing about the city girl far removed from the countryside life where she was once in during her childhood provided sufficient lyric-writing material for me. So, I thought about some 'witty metaphors' like electric beasts symbolising the computers, and capitalism being symbolised as people who control all the riches and treat us like hicks. And lastly, I tried to convey a sense of telling the girl to just be herself, and remove herself from the stress of modern life in the city.

Here's the lyrics:

Ohhhhh come back my sweetheart,
The city life's a l'll hard, and you're
Toiling away on those 'lectric beasts,
Staaayin' up all night, just to
Get by in life, but you
Spend more on things that you don't need

The riches that you seek,
In the city ever so big,
Are booound by the people making-us-feel-liiiiike hicks,

Me cows and me sheep,
Me chickens and them pigs, they ain't gonna
Judge yooooou-at-all, my lovely queen

Hey, hey, come on my love,
I've got me farm and we'll do things like
Live ouuuuut the farmer's life, just you and me,
We'll feed the hen and milk the cow
We'll pluck the corn and herd the lambs - now
All oooon this farm just you and me
Hey!

you-tell-me ooof the-stories,
Of people kiiillin' each other , but they
Got noooo weapon and no iiiinjuries, so I
Caaaall yoooou at night, just to
Make suuuuure you're fine, and to
Hear yooooour voice-ring-in my head

The riches that you seek,
In the city ever so big,
Are booound by the people making-us-feel-liiiiike hicks,

Me cows and me sheep,
Me chickens and them pigs, they ain't gonna
Juuudge you-at-all, my lovely queen

Hey, hey, come on my love,
I've got me farm and we'll do things like,
Live ouuuuut the farmer's life, just you and me,
We'll feed the hen and milk the cow,
We'll pluck the corn and herd the lambs - now
All oooon this farm just you and me
Hey!

To write the chorus, I decided to use harmonisation like those Barbershop Harmony singing. To do that, I needed to identify the chords in the chorus, which turns out to be the typical 8-bar Bluegrass chord progression (I-IV-I-V; I-IV-I-V-I). In Finale, after the chord symbols have been entered into the score, creating a 3-voice harmony is easy, using the Band-in-a-box Auto-Harmonising plugin:

The final score:

The 3-voice singing thus followed this arrangement.

For the harmonica refrain part, I just doubled the chorus melody of bar 1-4 twice for the whole chorus. Nothing special about that part.


Stay tuned for Part III of  V for this song!