Part of this Ohrwurm blog is to document the processes that I encounter in producing a track. Not so much the technical side, like how to get that monster kick drum sound; these things are interesting but are covered by other people’s blogs. Rather, I’m interested in teasing out the memetic processes.
A recent track I’m working on, although being slightly more conventional than an Ohrwurm, typifies the approach to work. It’s one of those tunes that was inspired by a dream many years ago and stuck in my mind. I had tried to progress the song a few times, but nothing was happening. In a journey to the United States last year, while on a road trip, I was inspired to start a new song, but that also got stuck. It occurred to me, on my return home, that the chorus from the dream song and the verse from the road trip song were ideal for each other, but that too mumbled around in my mind waiting for its time.
At a visit to Sheffield Synth Fest, I met a friend who was talking about his lap steel guitar and this reminded me that it was about a year since my trip to the States, and also reminded me of that song possibility. As I had just completed a track, I was ready to commence another, and so this seemed like the ideal time to do so.
So, how has it gone so far?
Well, I had a general feel and theme and some lyrics in my head. The first thing to do was to open a new project in Cubase.
Normally, I work on the chorus first: the rest of the song seems to hinge around that. I first, then, put down a simple drum track and then a vocal emulation line on piano, and maybe some other very basic backbones such as base, that helps me to think about where it is going.
With a basis for the chorus in place, I then move onto a bare verse using the same tracklisting. I now have the core of the song that I can loop and sing along too.
I then set about putting these two templates into a longer structure using copy and paste, such as Verse, Verse, Chorus, Verse Chorus, Chorus. With this, I can introduce additional structural elements such as an Intro, Outro, Bridge and so on, and modify the structure to what feels right.
Now, I move onto the first recording of a guide vocal track. This is truly raw recorded sat down without headphones. It carries all the noise and I don’t bother with much processing, possibly some basic fx. It’s common to have just the chorus and the first verse done, so the overall structure is simply repeats of those I record. Here, at least, with the overall song structure, I know where the tune is going and can save writing the lyrics properly for later on.
I now start tinkering with the music tracks, making the drums more interesting, putting slight flourishes on the instrumentation, adding additional tracks and gimmicky sound fx, things like that, to get some impression of how the resulting track might sound. I tend to do an audio mix down and play it on my car sterio while driving or on my phone through headphones while walking around.
With this, I can then begin to work on the lyrics and this process is best left to another blog entry.
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