| Recent Comments |
| Categories |
| Archives |
| Tags |
Fresh Start
Date: July 2020
Style: Pop
Composition and arrangement
An initial chord progression was composed by Aggie Hinskens, Jos de Jong and Antoine van Kampen (AvK) and, subsequently, extended, modified, and arranged by AvK.
Lyrics
English lyrics were written by Aggie Hinskens. The Japanense rap lyrics were written by Yo Zi (@Youtube, @Instagram)
Performance
English (background) vocals were performed by Karlijn de Vries (www.karlijndevries.com). Rap (background) vocals were performed by Yo Zi. All instruments (drums, bass, Fender Rhodes, synthesizer, guitar, strings) were (virtual) instruments played by AvK.
Recording
Vocals recorded by Karlijn de Vries and Yo Zi at their respective locations using a Fame Vintage F47 and a Bluebird respectively. Both are large-diaphragm condensor microphones.
Mixing and Mastering
Mixing was done in Cubase Pro 10.5. Mastering (only level normalization and rendering) was done using WaveLab Pro 10.0. By Antoine van Kampen
Composition notes The initial idea was to compose a song in the spirit of Hungry like the wolf (Duran Duran). However, after listening to this and some other songs of Duran Duran, I decided to start composing a bass line similar to their song Rio. I didn’t copy the original bass line but tried to have something with a similar feeling and fitting our chord progression and having sufficient variation. The different parts of the song (intro, verse, chorus, bridge, outro) have different bass lines but the Rio bass line was the inspiration. The chord progression and bass line were composed in Dorico 3:
Fresh Start - Chord progression - Bass line (pdf)
222.09 KB
166 downloads
See also
Fresh Start
...
Fresh Start Chord progression + bass line (Dorico)
999.18 KB
91 downloads
This file can be opened with the Steinberg Dorico music notation software
See also
Fresh...
Note that the Dorico/pdf files do not fully match the final composition/mix since at a late stage I decided to extend the outro in Cubase. Also note that the chord progression use a minor scale, while the intro and bridge use a major scale.
I exported the chords and bass line to Cubase 10.5 to add all other parts.
- The exported bass line (midi) was played back via the Scabee Jay Bass virtual instrument in Kontakt 5 (Native Instruments).
- Having the bass line in place I added a drum track which I composed using BFD3 (Acoustic drum software; FXpansion). I ensured that the drums matched the bass line, and added variations at various places in the composition. All individual drum tracks (kick, snare, hihat, etc) were exported to Cubase as dry wav files.
- Next I added the synthesizer part that starts the intro and comes back in the bridge.
- Subsequently, different guitar parts were added using the RealStrat 5 (MusicLab) virtual instrument and Amplitube 4 (amplifier/speaker simulator; IKmultimedia). Several of these parts were played on the Nord Stage 2 for midi recording, while for some other parts I used pre-defined patterns of RealStrat.
- With the guitars in place I added a Fender Rhodes Mark II part during the verse to interact with the guitar.
- Various other synthesizer parts (strings, lead) were added that were played on the Roland XP80 for audio or midi recording. The midi parts were subsequently played through the Halion 6 (Steinberg) virtual instrument.
- Finally, I added in the (background) vocals of Karlijn de Vries. Since it felt that the vocals needed some more power at the end, I asked Yo Zi to compose some rap lines to end the song. In fact, she provided me with 8 vocal tracks (lead, doubles, shouts, additional singing, and adlibs). My first I idea was to use this to end the song but then I decided to extend the outro by copying the vocal tracks of Yo Zi and combining it with the vocal tracks of Karlijn. I think this really sounds great. Here is how the outro vocal tracks look in Cubase:
Mix description
Mixing was done in Cubase Pro 10.5 using various virtual instruments and plugins (e.g., reverb, delay, eq, compressors). I normally use a standard way to setup the mix but in this case I decided to follow some organization tips from Chris Selim who has some very nice tutorial on Cubase. One major difficulty was to properly mix the lead vocal mix of Karlijn since the recordings were not dry and were sounding somewhat ‘hollow’ (room reflection). I tried to remove the reverb with a plugin but that did not give the desired result. Spectralayer (Steinberg) did a much greater job but prevented me to use Variaudio (Cubase) for autotuning. I could first have applied Spectralayer to the raw audio recordings, and then import in Cubase but i was too lazy to do this. Instead I added some more reverb to the lead vocal to better fit it in the mix. It kinds of covers up the room sound, but it is still audible. The second ‘problem’ was to balance all vocals with the instrumental parts. To some extend this is subjective but I think the volume is ok as it is now.
Final mix
The final mix (wav, mp3) and all 58 individual tracks are available through Dropbox.
SoundCloud
The first mix sounded like:
After feedback from several persons and from the Mixoff and SOS recording forum, I improved the mix:
Leave your comments
Go to Mixoff.org
Checkout these sites
Componeren
Books I use
Score Exchange
Software
- Cubase (Steinberg)
- Wavelab (Steinberg)
- Dorico (Steinberg)
- Spectralayers (Steinberg)
