We made great progress this week by making use of starting to record things professionally and getting them onto Reaper, so I can start the producing element of the song. Even though the song is mostly just guitar for now, we plan to put the other instruments like vocals and the other keys parts in later, meaning they can both take their time with recording and getting it to a good standard before we put it in the song. As well as that, we also started to work on the song’s artwork (see https://digitalspace.bradfordcollege.ac.uk/10626680/artwork/ for this). We have been researching different album covers, styles and typography we might like to use and we will keep these in mind for the official artwork.
Progressions And Strengths
This week, I began working on putting the song together by recording the main chord progression of the whole song on guitar through Reaper using my audio interface. I think this was very important to do this week because we now have the whole structure finished (including the intro/outro) and recording it professionally will mean we can work from that recording and we won’t forget the song’s structure. Starting the production early also means we will have time at the end to make it sound as professional and high quality as we can by adding effects like EQ and reverb.
As well as recording the main structure and chord progressions on guitar, I also had time this week to record other parts on guitar as well. These parts were not exactly planned; they just came to my head as I was listening back to the song. All of these layered up guitar parts means the song has a thicker texture and were are already quite a few polyrhythms going on, especially in the choruses. As well as the guitar, I also added some piano from Tia, specifically the chorus chords, which I manually quantized once I got a hold of the recording and put it into Reaper, as I don’t know how to do automatic quantization on this.
After adding piano in some parts and the guitar parts, I wanted to put a little bit of percussion in the song. This came in the form of a gravy granule tub being used as a shaker, as I don’t own any percussion that would make such a sound. I recorded it into Reaper using a condenser microphone and I plan to EQ it when it gets further into production, and I also want to add some reverb to it so it sounds more airy and smooth. As well as this shaker, I plan to record actual drums over the song if I have time at the end, and the shaker will become lower in the mix when this happens as I don’t want the percussion to take over too much.
Improvements
I mentioned this during the strengths but we need to make the song sounds overall more professional and of a high-quality standard. This means doing things like editing out different frequencies we don’t want to hear using the EQ, making sure all the parts are correct and making sure everything is in time with each other, as if things go in and out of time, it will not keep a steady pace and could be uncomfortable to listen to. We could also add things like reverb on the vocals and a chorus to the guitar to improve the tone and production quality. edit and put effects on the guitar and shaker. I can do all of these quite easily on Reaper and it would have a huge effect on the overall sound, but this depends if I have enough time to complete it all.
I made the mistake of forgetting to make sure my guitar was in tune before I started to record my parts, and I only noticed it was out of tune slightly when a tutor pointed it out when we were listening over it. In particular, the B string was fairly out of tune, especially when I went further up the fretboard. This suggests that the intonation needs some fixing as it becomes more out of tune the more I go up the fretboard; I could learn to fix this myself as I feel it is a good skill to have. If I have time, I could go through and do another take of the guitar parts when my guitar is more in tune so the song will sound more professional. Because of this mistake, I now know I need to remember to tune my guitar before every recording, no matter if it sounds in tune with my ear.
For the guitar and keys I put in this week, I manually quantized the keys by splitting the regions and moving them to the right beat, but this took quite a while. For recording guitar, I simply tried to play the guitar as close to the metronome as possible during the recording process, in the hopes I wouldn’t have to quantize it. This is because I don’t actually know how to quantize audio on Reaper, and the process is quite long and confusing; I watched a video before this project started on how to quantize audio but it was extremely complicated and would take too much time out of the producing process. Because of this, some guitar parts are a little out of time. I could fix this by manually quantizing some bits or learning a quicker and more efficient way to quantize on Reaper (but this might take a while and given the time we have, I don’t want the spend all of my time learning extensive and new things that would only make a small difference).
Targets For Next Week
-Add the rest of the piano and manually quantize it.
-Add the vocals if they are ready and recorded.
-Do some more takes of some guitar parts as some of them weren’t perfectly in tune and in time.