Overall, this week, I made a lot of improvements to the song’s production, and Lucy is working on the lyrics to the song so they can be finished by next week. In the picture above, you can see that I made some coordination improvements which has increased my workflow, and more piano parts have been added. I also put in an extra layer of percussion which will most likely act as a substitute for when I add the actual and final drums next week. Our communication as a group has been great this week; we have decided on some cover art and we are all working together and helping each other to make sure this song gets finished in time for the deadline.
Progressions And Strengths
This week, I made some general improvements and admin work to the song in terms of its looks on Reaper. After working on it since last week, everything became an extremely jumbled up, uncoordinated mess. To help this, I spent some time working on organising my work. I did this by sorting tracks into groups and giving them certain names that explain what the track is playing. I also learnt how to colour the look of the tracks and regions in Reaper, which helps me find which group I need to be looking at if I want to find a certain guitar track, for example. I found that doing this has increased my workflow a lot and also my general motivation to work on the song. I plan to carry on organising my work like this as the song progresses.
As I was doing some admin work on Reaper, Tia was recording the rest of her piano parts. So, I spent a lot of this week adding these in and making sure they were the best they could be. This meant making sure the piano was as in time to the metronome as I could get it. Overall, I added the piano melody for the verses and the chords for the chorus, but I am still yet to add the bridge part as I didn’t have time to do that this week. Next week, I plan to get all of the piano parts in onto Reaper and quantized, and I also want to add things like an EQ to get rid of the unwanted noises and frequencies you can hear in the background, and also some reverb to make it sound like the piano was played in a bigger room, giving the sound space.
I mentioned last week that I wanted to add some more percussive elements to the song after adding the shaker; this week I did just that. It might not be a full drum kit yet but I put in some sampled claps and other forms of body percussion (titled as ‘Knees’ on the screenshot) to gather some ideas about how I want the actual drums to sound and to generally fill out the song’s rhythm parts. I recorded them in a similar way I did with the shaker last week; with a condenser microphone and put it in the right position to pick up all of the sounds. These sounds will act as a substitute for the drums for now until I get to recording the actual drums, and they might stay in the final product depending on how it all sounds together next week.
Improvements
To make the song sound more complete, we need to work on finalising the vocal lyrics and melodies so that we can have it recorded and in the song. The end of the project is next week and I will still need to add other things like the rest of the piano as well as the vocals, EQ everything, and put effects on things that need it. So, depending on when the vocals are finished, we won’t have a huge amount of time left. To ensure the vocals get finished, we could all help each other with tasks. For example, because a lot of Tia’s work is finished now, she could help Lucy with the lyrics so she has time to record them in a professional way and send the file to me in time.
I said last week that I could find a better way to quantize audio, but I still haven’t done this yet. Learning how to automatically quantize will help lots for the future of this project if I learn how to do this in my spare time, and it will increase the professionalism and quality of the song in general. This will also help lots for future works where I use Reaper, or if someone else needs help doing the same thing. However, I plan to get Ableton this week, so perhaps quantizing the piano on there might be easier as after watching a short video on how to quantize, the process seems much shorter and easier to remember for the future.
If I plan to add actual drums to the song, I will also most likely need to add a bass part as well because the two go together and you can’t really have one without the other. The bassline will help drive the song and add some lower frequencies to more thin textured parts like the break. I have been thinking about getting my own midi keyboard this week, mostly to help with my final project if we are still working from home, but I think this would also help me program a bass part into the song, so the song is more independent as we don’t have to ask other people to play bass for us. Adding a bassline using a midi keyboard would also me help gain confidence in using such hardware and it could be interesting adding a midi instrument alongside so many recorded ones.
Targets For Next Week
-Put in some drums and bass part to drive the song and give it a thicker texture.
-Finish putting in an quantizing the keys.
-Add in the recorded vocals.