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Time to Start
Date: July 2021
Style: Pop/Soul
Tempo: 100
Composition and arrangement
The chord progression was composed by Antoine van Kampen (AvK). Bass line was composed by AvK in Dorico. The vocal melody and lyrics were written by Ana Pshokina. The first part of the Hammond solo is improvised. The second part of the Hammond solo was composed in Dorico. The guitar solo on the earlier versions of the song was composed in Dorico and played by Bas van Kampen. Drums were composed and played by Glenn Welman. Guitar parts were composed and played by Wagner Silva.
Perhaps interesting to realize that after a first composition and recording of the song, I change (or add) parts of the compositions or recorded tracks. This is kind of an unusual approach but since I do all parts of the production process I can do this. The reasons are new ideas or to fit come up with parts that better fit the song. The drawback of this approach is that it takes a long time to finish a song (approximately 6 months in mainly the evenings and weekends for Time to Start).
Score and Lyrics
Time to Start (Dorico) 1.76 MB 92 downloads
This file can be opened with the Steinberg Dorico music notation software See also Time...
Performance
(Backing) Vocals and Bass guitar: Ana Pshokina (session vocalist; instagram; youtube; Ukraine)
Guitar: Wagner Silva (session guitarist; instagram; youtube; Brazil)
Drums: Glenn Welman (session drummer; YouTube; UK)
Fender Rhodes, Hammond XK5, and synthesizer (strings): Antoine van Kampen.
Hammond solo: Antoine van Kampen
Guitar solo on earlier mix versions only: Bas van Kampen.
Mixing and Mastering
Mixing was done in Cubase Pro 11 by Antoine van Kampen mainly using plugins from Waves, Steinberg, and Fabfilter. Mastering engineer was Tomasz Banyś.
Below an impression of the vocal and keyboard tracks in Cubase together with the automation I used (click to enlarge).
Mix choices and evaluation
Initial idea for the song
- The initial idea for this song was to have an ‘acoustic’ song with only Fender Rhodes and acoustic guitar (RealGuitar from MusicLab) together with vocals. I clearly didn’t succeed in that but I am happy with the result anyway. My songs always evolve to something completely different then the initial idea.
- I initially spend quite some time on getting the guitar parts (for which I used RealLPC and Amplitube 5 Max) to sound right but I never could get it like I wanted (both rhythmically and sound-wise). Moreover, I never came around recording guitar parts for the bridges and the Hammond solo. Therefore, at a certain stage, I decided to ask Wagener Silva to record the guitar parts for me. He also provided me with an alternative guitar solo that eventually ended up in the song instead of the solo from Bas van Kampen (which you can still hear on the early draft mixes below)
Concept
- Describe what the mix should radiate.
- I aimed to make a song with a prominent ‘vintage’ sound character by putting emphasis on the Fender Rhodes Mark II and the Hammond XK5. I tried to limited the amount of effects on the Rhodes. I ended up having a stereo mix of the Rhodes with distortion and a little bit of chorus. I used the Fender Twin Reverb amplifier (from Amplitube) with a little bit of overdrive.
- The rhythm section (drum, bass, guitar) should really drive the song. The vocals should have a prominent role also. All together I hope that the mix feels like having a ‘driving’ character.
- Which atmosphere do you want to evoke? I always aim to give the song some ‘live’ character instead have the ‘perfect’ CD production. I avoid, for example, (too much) autotuning and quantization and the parts don’t have to be perfect. Everything is recorded ‘live’ without further editing of the wave files (except for very few notes that were really not correct).
- What style(s) is the music related to? I consider this a pop song but with some funky elements in there.
- Is there a specific theme that the music is about? No
- What are the strong parts / properties in the music and recording? I really like the vocals and background vocals. These really define the song. These were also very well recorded although some small sections of the background vocals were little out of tune, which I (partially) corrected in Cubase using Variaudio and autotune.
- What are the weak spots in the music and recording? There are no real weak spots but perhaps the outro, which could have given some more thought. The only tracks that I didn’t use were the drum rooms (since I always prefer to use reverb) and the drum overheads. To my ears the drum overheads made the drums to spacey/thin while to make the cymbals audible it had to be turned up in volume to a level I didn’t like. Therefore, I decided to use cymbal samples (from the Cubase libraries) that I substitute at the right places, and then I removed the overhead track.
Performance
- Describe and justify your main balance choices. I wanted to have a clearly audible bass and drum. Similar for the Fender Rhodes. Consequently, the rhythm guitar and Hammond were put in the background although the guitar is still clearly audible for most of the song. Most of the backing vocals are also upfront in the mix.
- Describe and justify your main placement choices.
- Solo’s, drum, and bass were all at the center.
- Strings were panned to the left
- Lead vocal in the center. Background vocals were mostly panned to left and right.
- Fender Rhodes (stereo recording) was routed to a left and right Rhodes mix bus each with a different effects (see above)
- The rhythm guitar was panned to the center but with a sort of pingpong delay fed into a chorus. Delay was used to emphasize the higher frequencies (using EQ).
- Guitar riffs in the outro were panned to left or right.
- Instruments in the intro were panned to different locations with Fender Rhodes in center.
- Describe and justify your main sound choices (audible EQ, compression, effects).
- For many parts I used a high-pass filter to remove all not needed stuff.
- Added some ‘air’ to the vocals using EQ. Compression, delay and reverb on the (background) vocals.
- Some EQíng on the bass and kick-drum but the kick was also fed to the sidechain compressor of the bass.
- Vocals were fed to sidechain of guitar riff compressors. Snare fed into sidechain of rhythm guitar since frequencies were very much competing.
- Parallel compression and little reverb on the drum.
- Hammond was not much processed but lots of processing on the strings.
- The difficult part was the bass guitar. I wanted to have a strong bass without being overwhelmed. This turned out not to be easy. Moreover, for one of the draft mixes I received the comment that the bass was not audible on small speakers (i.e., iPhone). I solved this using the RBass plugin from Waves.
Reflection
- What went well? In this mix I really paid attention to gain staging which avoided many problems I had before, and automatically resulted in a mix of about -23LUFS and -6dBFS. My approach was not perfect and still had to fiddle around with the gain of individual tracks but learned a lot in the process. For this mix I also made lots of use of the ARC3 plugin on the main mix bus. This plugin not only ‘corrects’ the frequency response of my Yamaha monitors but also simulates different speakers including consumer hifi bookshelf, laptop, iPhone, etc. This allows to evaluate the mix for different listening environments. I also used Sonar Reference 4 (frequency response correction) together with Nx Ocean Way Nashville (studio acoustics replication on headphones) for monitoring and mixing on my headphones (Sennheiser HD650). Finally, I used Reference 2 to compare my (intermediate) mixes to a couple of reference tracks.
- What went less? If I had to redo the mix (perhaps in the future) I would try to better define the roles of the guitar and fender rhodes in the different parts of the song. Perhaps also give the Hammond a more prominent place (now it is really in the background) instead of the guitars.
Mastering
Mastering engineer: Tomasz Banyś
Mastering initially was about critical listening, which helped to discover a couple of minor issues that had to be fixed in the mix and also involved a decision whether to go for a more modern flavour or more towards the vintage sound; in the end, we chose the former. The final version of the mix was subjected to slight stereo field enhancement, allowing for a more live-stage sound. Minor EQ changes were introduced, cutting 1 dB around 200 Hz and 0.8 dB around 500 Hz, boosting 1.6 kHz by 0.5 dB and hi-shelving from 2 kHz by 1 dB for air/presence. Lower frequencies have been compressed and tightened separately from the rest, which went through an optical compressor. The sum was fed to a soft-knee compressor with a higher ratio and a slower attack time but with slightly faster release and then to a limiter capped at -0.2 dB. The end result has average RMS of -12 and mean dynamic range of 11.5, which is loud in line with current demands of the market, but retains the dynamics needed by funk/pop tracks.
Final mix and video
The final mix:
The final master (If you don’t know what you are doing, listen to this one):
Audio tracks and Cubase project
All files are available through Dropbox [here]
- Final mix (wav, mp3)
- Final master (wav, mp3)
- Video (mp4)
- Individual tracks from Cubase project
- Cubase project
Final mix: Loudness (normalized) ~-14.00 LUFS; Peaks ~-0.76dB; True Peaks: ~-0.29dBTP
Master: Loudness ~ -12.80 LUFS; Peaks ~-0.2 dB; True Peaks: ~+0.98dBTP
License
Time to start by Antoine van Kampen is licensed under Attribution 4.0 International
This license requires that reusers give credit to the creator. It allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, even for commercial purposes.
Draft mixes
Note that most of the early draft mixes are not real mixes but merely show the progress in the composition.
1: Draft 3 January 2021 (very rough sketch of song with melody line, which I quickly abandoned. Drums were BFD3; bass sound from Steinberg Halion; No vocals).
2: Draft 7 March 2021. (Guitar and Hammond solo added)
3: Draft 28 March 2021. (Experimenting with acoustic guitar using RealGuitar. I could not find a suitable acoustig guitar line/strumming that fitted the song. On April 5th, I replaced this with RealLPC and Amplitube 5)
4: Draft 2 April 2021 (Fragment; vocals, bass, and drums added. Played by session musicians)
6: Draft 11 June 2021. Probably last version with the RealLPC guitar.
7: Draft 29 June 2021. New guitar parts. Mix is slowly coming together.
Checkout these sites
Componeren
Books I use
Score Exchange
Software
- Cubase (Steinberg)
- Wavelab (Steinberg)
- Dorico (Steinberg)
- Spectralayers (Steinberg)
