We arranged for a recording session together at my place with my trusty Blue Yeti microphone. Clement did up to three takes and a final take for the bridge and final chorus. LCG on the other hand recorded his rhythm guitar strumming and solo later on with the help of his mini amplifier and a mic-in cable direct to my PC.
I later found out that direct connection often cause cable and electrical noise problems, not to mention that my guitar pre-amp failed in the last minute recording of the solo (LCG had to go outstation immediately). I then opted for recording directly using my Blue Yeti instead of direct cable input and sounds just as good.
To find out more about audio cables, balanced and unbalanced input, I visited this site to learn all about it.
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| Clement at work and LCC observing |
Mastering
With regards to the audio recording, I came across the term called 'comping' audio, which basically means 'compositing' the various takes of the vocal recording. You can learn more about the process through this link here.
The comping for my mixing went something like this:
Verse 1 >Take 2
Verse 2> Take 1
Chorus> take 3
Verse1> take 2
Verse 2>take 2
Chorus > take 2
Bridge > take 3
Final chorus - take 2 under FC
In fact, I planned to have a sing-over the final chorus by the vocalist, which is not possible in one take. This requires layering several takes to be possible.
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| Layering - the second track is harmony, third is sing-over |
I did the same thing to the guitar recordings of the strumming and solo, where LCG had to do up to 5 takes just to get it right.
And so, I ran through the composited audio and exported it to Melodyne for post-processing, before exporting the final result back to Ableton.
Here's a rundown of the tracks on Ableton:
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| Track view |
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| Arrangement view |
As you can see the latest plugin I used for the vocal track was iZotope Nectar, which was recommended by the Red means Recording YouTube channel. Using the VST/plugin was really easy, because they supply you with tons of presets. This round, I used the Basic Enhancement preset, but adjusted for the harmony voices and the reverb amount as you can see from the screenshot below.
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| Main Vocals |
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| Harmony settings |
For the intro before the whole song itself, I thought of scripting it like a typical mandopop love ballad MV opening like this and this.Here, I planned for a scene where the singer/main character is singing his song in a the public square for no particular reason before cutting to a scene where he's writing a letter to the girl describing him sending a copy of this song to her as a memento of their love.
To make the effect of recording a performance in the park, I downloaded royalty free background noise of an actual park from here. Then, I used an EQ with a high-pass filter for the chorus music and vocal tracks to cut out the lower frequencies which typically won't be recorded in an open air environment. For the writing effect, I used the metal bit of the USB connector to scratch on the back of a matte plastic iPad case with my voice over.
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| Sends to Outdoor Reverb device with EQ8 with highpass |
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| EQ with highpass filter |
There's nothing much I can elaborate about the mastering and mixing that wasn't covered in previous songs, as you can see in the master screenshot above. I guess that's all for now!
Stay tuned for Part IV of IV for this song!
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