Production

I’ll use one of the poems that I just finished working on called Strada si noaptea to give a detailed account of my production process.

I start by loading the vocal track in my sequencer and start time stamping events on it. I then open Kontakt and load Playbox into it, an amazing Kontakt library that offers to play a sequence of eight chords as opposed to individual notes. I know it has some very interesting bass presets that I want to experiment with. I settle on a preset and start playing around with velocity, chord arrangements, and built-in effects.

Once I’m happy with what I have, I clone it to start working on a bridge-type pattern of chord progressions within the same plugin. I prefer cloning the channel instead of just automating the parameters simply because it keeps the clutter in my automation track group to a minimum.

Then I open yet another instance of Playbox and look for some bells. I find what I’m looking for and copy the chord progression from bass to bells. I place the bell and bass patterns all along my vocal track.

For drums I open two instances of XO, one of my favorite plugins, hit play, and start hunting for patterns, once I find what I’m looking for I start looking for the kind of drum samples that I believe help the pattern breathe life into the track. XO contains an ocean of samples so it takes a while. I find my kick, hats, and snare, and I adjust a few things like swing, pan, and volume as well as compression and reverb. I give the whole track a listen and find myself satisfied with how the bells, bass, and drums complement each other and the vocals. At this point, I realize it’s starting to emerge as a hip-hop instrumental track so moving on I do my best to be mindful of where the song wants to go.

I identify a couple of spots on the track where I could cut the drums to underline Mr. Zloteanu’s message, as well as act as sonic paragraphs. After the second short break of snare and hats, when they start playing again I realize there’s something missing, like the drums should bring something with them upon their return. So I try to come up with something in the background, some sort of pad or choir. I spent hours experimenting with plugins like Serum, Abyss, and Pigments, I even give Omnisphere (which sounds great, but not a big fan of) a go, but I can’t seem to find what’s missing. Then an idea reveals itself: I record the bell track into a .wav file (to save CPU mainly), turn it down 12 octaves, then assign it to a separate mixer channel where I load Love by Dawsome, which with the help of a few faders can turn anything into a pad. I play around with the plugin for a bit until I’m happy with what I’m hearing. I play it with the whole track and it sounds great. Before moving on I also tried to load the recorded bells track into Edison and use the Blur function just to see how it sounds. It was pretty close but Love sounds way better for my purposes.

I then carefully started experimenting with the vocal track, subtly playing with time, pitch, cutting, and moving around pieces, trying to manipulate cadence to better serve the track while staying as close as possible to the original recording. I load Manipulator and Neoverb on its assigned mixer track and play around with Manipulator until Mr. Zloteanu’s vocals sound like a possessed robot. I turn the effect volume on the mixer channel all the way down for both Manipulator and Neoverb and create an automation track for both volumes which I use to turn them up whenever Mr. Zloteanu quotes the drug enforcement agents in his story. Now in order to create some space for the vocal tracks in the mix I send every mixer track to a bus channel, and then I sidechain the vocal track to the aforementioned bus channel. I load FabFilter Pro-Q3 on the bus channel, and while playing the song I use Pro-Q3’s analyzer to detect the vocal that I need to create room for. I set up a few dynamic points, have a listen, and being happy with the results I proceed to finally mastering the whole thing.

Now I’m very happy with the mix so I only have to load two plugins on my mastering chain. The first one is FabFilter Pro-MB which I use to dynamically separate the low ends of my track (unglue the kick’s low end from the bass). The second one is The God Particle which I mainly use as a limiter. I listened to the final track and satisfied with my results I sent it to Mr. Zloteanu for feedback. He was very happy with this particular track so I’m free to move on to the next track.