Recording the assets for my ‘Soundcloud Rap’ Track.

Over the second half of this trimester I had been wanting to create a hip hop or trap song by creating a backing track on my laptop and then recording a vocalist over it. I didn’t know if this was a possibility or not, due to the laptop incident that I wrote about in my last blog - but after it was fixed I decided to chase the idea down as a last minute side project outside of my major 'electronic indie rock' project. Recording live instruments is something that’s really outside of my comfort zone so I also wanted to practice and build on something else that I do a bit more often, an electronic production with some vocal overdubs.

I decided to take on a more Emo Soundcloud style rap approach to the task, which is a style of rap music that I wrote about this style a bit in my genre analysis blog. I was heavily inspired by rappers Yung Lean and Bladee and wanted to go for that style of heavily auto-tuned vocals with melodic trance style synths. Finding the right vocalist for this kind of task was really hard, I was looking through many local artists on Soundcloud but not many of them had songs or a vocal style that really fit the sound I was going for. I was finding many rappers that had similar sounds artists such as Lil Pump, but not many that had a more melancholic emotional sound that I could work with. On top of this, it was really hard to find an Artist who was professional and would make a commitment. The reference I was going for would be anything by Yung Lean or Bladee, but I found that the track most similar to what I was going for was ‘Pearl Fountain’ by Yung Lean.

Just when I thought the project wouldn’t be happening anymore, I received a last minute response from an Artist who said they were interested and would begin working on a demo to send over to me. Communication was pretty bad between us and responses would take a couple of days, but basically I never actually got a demo back and hadn’t heard anything he had written (this is due to not only communication but also the short amount of time we had to complete the project). At this point I had somebody I was talking to within the university say they were happy to write and perform on the track in case something happened with another artist cancelling on me this trimester, so if something didn’t go right with this project I’d try it again with them, as they were also available for a last minute call. I decided to record this in the MIDI studio as I find it to be the best studio to use for this kind of project, there's not much that can go wrong as the signal flow is basically a direct plug in and record kind of thing. It’s also really easy for me to connect my laptop into the monitors, and I’m standing next to the artist so we work together more easily. The only thing about the MIDI studio is that the acoustics are really bad and a lot of things can bleed through so it's all about the microphone you choose. I was planning on using an SM7B to record, which is a microphone that I love to use on vocals and is really good at cancelling out other sounds, I used this microphone on “Dodge” one of my previous projects that I recorded in the MIDI Studio and has been my best work at SAE so far.

I made plans to record with the artist and we talked about the setup and if there was anything they’d need in particular. He said that he records using a live autotune send of his vocals through the headphones, so that he could get an idea of how the outcome would sound to better the performance. This was a workflow that I hadn’t used in recording before, so I decided to have a look at the plugins available on the University computers and came across the M-autotune free plugin by MeldaProductions. I tested it out and decided it would work for the recording, and then I could swap the autotune to a better plugin in the post-production stages.

With the time we had left of the session I completely forgot to take any photos of the setup, but I found this weird low quality archived image that I had sent the artist of the set up

I got the session set up and grabbed an SM Pro Audio Mic Thing (which is essentially a Microphone Isolation Panel) to further block out any other sound that might enter the mic. Unfortunately the artist was running really late to the session, like 2 and a half hours late, which means we had less than half the time to record the track. Weirdly enough we actually got the recording done very easily due to how short the track is, which is about 2 minutes (it’s normal to see Soundcloud rap songs at about 2 minutes in length, so I didn’t extend the track any further than it needed to be as it felt like it would just be droning on). We recorded a hook and an extended verse, some ad libs, harmonies and of course a few takes of each of these. In the beginning of the recording I noticed some of the plosives were coming through pretty hard, so i grabbed a pop filter which fixed this issue as I was expecting there to be heaps in the verse. As this was the first time I’d ever heard their Interpretation of the song, I wasn’t really feeling the hook, and according to peer feedback that I received, not many other people thought it worked either. For now I think I’ll do 2 mixes, one with the hook (that I'll send to the artist), and one for my own portfolio where I replace the hook with ad libs and other vocal effects as I think the verses work well.

Many people that I've shown have disliked the vocal performance of the track in general, and although it gave me some second thoughts on it at first, I noticed how similar this sounded to the reference and most people that I've showed agreed that it definitely sounds like the reference. I think that the vocals in the Soundcloud or Emo rap genre can be seen as a bit off-kilter to those who aren't super familiar with it - but I don't find anything wrong with that.

I do have to say that I’m very surprised about how quick it takes to record a track like this as I was expecting it to take much more time, and I can see now how the Soundcloud rap genre has these 2 minute long tracks that are getting released every week by an artist since it didn’t really take that long to record. That being said, I’m expecting quite a lot of work in the post production phase so I guess we’ll see how long that takes and maybe thats where the genre mostly shines.

Thanks for listening!