Overall, this week has seen a huge change in the song simply from adding the flute part that I received at the end of last week. Lex gave me both the draft piece, the final take and a sub-bass part. I have been working on cutting and looking through the draft piece first, then I will go onto the final take, then finally implement the sub-bass track. I need to still work on the delay effect for the flute, and then add the effects I need like an EQ and compressor to all the tracks. However, I don’t have a rapper yet and I think this idea would be too much to do now as I only have a couple of weeks left before the tracks have to be finished for the showcase. I haven’t heard anything from the advert I put out on the Discord server I joined and I also posted a similar thing into some music collaboration Facebook groups this week but got no replies. However, I don’t think this is a make or break situation as the song still sounds great without a rapper.
Progressions And Strengths
The most important thing I did this week was adding the flute tracks into the song. I have been wanting to do this ever since we thought of the idea so being able to have it there and in front of me to work on feels great, and I feel like I’ve taken a huge leap in terms of the song’s progress. I had a little problem with the files at first as when I added them, it said ‘clip deactivated’ and I had never come across this before. But, with a little research, I found out that I just needed to right-click the track and press ‘activate clip’ for it to play. Deactivating a clip can be great when you want to save your CPU power, but for this I actually needed it to be activated so it would play. I have started work on slicing up the different parts of the daft take that I might want to keep in, and also the same with the delay. I think I am going to take out the delay when the flute is playing, then bring it in when the flute is not playing so the delay is not making the flute track too cluttered.
As well as adding the flute, I also have been doing some general admin work on the song when I was at home, like how I did on my other single. I have 17 tracks in total, and even more to come, so I decided that it would be the right time to name everything and sort different instruments into groups. This will also make next week easier for when I plan to start mixing this. As I said, everything is in groups, so the melodies, for example, has the triplet piano pattern, an untuned piano melody, the bass-line and the sub-bass in the break. I realised that you can also send whole groups to sends so when I start mixing, I will definitely take advantage of this if I wanted to add the same effect to all the flute tracks, for instance.
Improvements
Even though I have added these flutes and have been working on them lots this past week, they still definitely still aren’t finished; I have a lot of work to do with them! This work would consist of arranging and slicing the draft flute and the delay for that, and then going through the final take and doing the same thing, but this might take a little longer as I have both the right and left tracks to arrange. After this, I need to add effects like an EQ to change some frequencies, and perhaps add other things like a small amount of reverb and even use the Izotope vinyl plugin to make it more lo-fi and warped sounding. I want some peer and tutor feedback on the flute before I go ahead to the mixing stage, just to make sure it sounds right and well-edited. As I have just been slicing up them in the arrangement view, I could use a simpler to chop up the flute into smaller parts and map these to an Ableton Push so I can play them where I want as samples; this could work really well in the break for example.
I mentioned before that Lex also recorded a sub-bass part for me. I haven’t added this yet, but I plan to after I have sorted the flute. I think adding this will really help push the track in the lower frequencies as I don’t have a lot of that except for the bassline and the rare sub-bass part I already had in the break, which I plan to keep. Also, the song has a lot of mid and high frequencies going on, especially after adding the flute, so I think adding another bass will help balance these out. I will make sure to not overlap the two sub-basses, though. I want to go through it and slice up the different parts I want to keep, like how I have done with my other recorded things. I will then go in and add effects to this and making sure it doesn’t make the song too muddy-sounding by perhaps lowering it in the mix and adding an EQ that can remove some of those really low frequencies a little.
Targets For Next Week
-Finish working on the flute tracks.
-Get to a point where I can start the mixing stage next week.
-Add sub bass part that Lex made for me.