Post Mortem Relection (DODGE)

I am happy to announce that my second project is now complete and I'm very proud of the results. As mentioned in my last post mortem reflection - it's important to reflect on how the project went (whether good or bad), as I can use this to document and improve on my practice in the future.

I had originally intended to create a single Indie Pop song with a Brisbane Artist using Ableton Live 9. Although I initially set out to find an artist on my own, I was having a lot of trouble of getting one that would communicate back with me effectively. I asked for some feedback from a classmate, Zac, and he said that he would be happy to do the vocals himself. I saw that this could potentially limit my experience of the project as I'm working with someone that is already in my class, however the main purpose for me doing another pop song for my second project was to correct my mistakes that I had made the first time, and try to approach the task in another way. I figured since I have heard plenty of Zac's work and can trust his vocal style, I'd work with him and approach the project in a way to better my practices in regards to production. now that I had a professional vocal performance, I could then work on how to process these effectively.

The project went pretty much exactly to how I had planned it so theres not really any important events that happened in the production process. Some things that I can still take into account from last time is that to produce pop records more efficiently, it really helps to have a good computer in your hands. My laptop is really slow and can't handle much going on at a time. That made it so that in this production it was a goal of mine to just get the stems off of the laptop and onto a hard drive as soon as possible, so that I could work on it on the computers on campus. Unfortunately, the computers on campus don't have all of the same plugins that I used to create the track, which meant I had to bounce everything out and work with the audio stems rather than having access to the MIDI, which is definitely not my favourite workflow.

The entire process of creating and recording the song was actually really easy and fun, there weren't really any problems at all. I'd say that most of my work went into the mixing stages of the song and making it sound professional and full, especially in the vocal elements. My song did go through some changes in terms of the reference track, with the reference going from the song "Sometimes" By Miami Horror to sounding more like "On What You're On" By Busted. Although there are still some elements that are inspired from Sometimes in the track, I'd say the overall sound was leaning more towards the On What You're On, which changed my perspective on how I would mix the song. Something I definitely learnt A LOT about was how to get my vocals to sound like pop vocals through the use of the Waves collection. I had learnt most of this with the help of Zac, who strongly recommended that I use the Waves collection to get the pop sound that I was looking for. When I researched online by looking at tutorials (and artists going through how they mixed their tracks) on Youtube, I found that many of the artists that I use for inspiration are also using the Waves collection. I then applied some of the tips from various tutorials which is how I ended up processing my vocals for the final mix.

One thing that was an issue (although it didn't take too long to fix) was that when I had bounced all of my stems into Ableton, I started to notice that there was a relatively loud noise floor overall in the mix. I had to research how to get rid of this noise and found out that the way Ableton automatically exports is with a triangular dither, which adds a tiny bit of noise to the exported file. However, when there is a tiny bit of noise on each individual track of the song, it starts to build up in volume when you stack them on top of each other. I fixed this by re-exporting my stems and putting them back into the Ableton session.

So the current situation with the track is that its not going to be released to the public, but it's still a great piece of work to showcase on my portfolio. If Zac and I did decide to release the track, there would be some changes - For instance we'd work more on the lyrical content of the track, as this situation was really just Zac, Carissa (Who helped write and give a second opinion on the lyrics) and I having some fun in the studio to create an overall fun track. I'd also next time like to be able to record some more acoustic elements, just to give myself more of a challenge. There were some spots in the song were perhaps I could next time record a live bass rather than using a virtual instrument.

In the end, Zac and I are both really happy with the turn out of the song, I think that we work very well together and I'd love to work with him again sometime. I am looking to do something a little different for my next projects in my Bachelor Of Audio course, just to push myself to learn new things.