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Brighter Days
Date: May 2025
Style: Skippy Pop
Label: Skippy Music
ISRC: NL7PC2200011
Producer: Antoine van Kampen
Spotify: [here]
Lyrics, Composition and Arrangement
Composition and arrangement: Antoine van Kampen
Lyrics: Antoine van Kampen
Performance
Teda (North Macedonia). Lead & Backing vocals. [YouTube] [Instagram] [Facebook] [Fiverr]
Romina Barba (Argentina). Backing vocals. [YouTube] [Spotify] [Fiverr].
Bart Dietvorst (the Netherlands). Guitar. [Fiverr] [YouTube] [Spotify].
Joylin (Romania). Violin Solo, Violin 1, Violin 2, Viola. [Instagram] [Fiverr].
Antoine van Kampen. Piano and synth (played on the Roland XP80 and Komplete Kontrol S88).
All other instruments: Virtual Instruments (VSTi).
Image: the greatest artists ever. Teda (vocals), Bart Dietvorst (guitar), Joylin (violins), and Romina Barba (backing vocals)
Summary of the production
The description below explains the overall process, but a lot of iteration was involved to come to the final result.
This song was started in Dorico, the music notation program, with only the melody and chord progression. The different parts of the song basically follow a ‘period’ structure (see Wikipedia and Pugetsound) but various changes were made along the way. I also wanted to make a song with a more interesting chord progression than what you typically hear in pop music. Therefore, I paid a bit more attention to the voicing of the chords (dictating the bass line), I made a lot of use of secondary dominants, and transition chords. I also switch between the keys of Ab (intro, chorus, violin and guitar solo, outro) and C Dorian (verse, bridge). At a few places, I sneaked in a 1/4 measure to make the transition to the next part more natural. Despite all of the added complexity, I still find the song sounding quite ‘natural’. I next extended the piano/melody part to include flute, violin 1 and 2, viola, and violoncello. To some extend I tried to follow some basic rules of counterpoint. This ‘final’ composition is found at the bottom of this post. In the final song the flute was replaced with a horn while also reducing the number of notes to a certain extent.
Now having the basis of the composition, I exported everything as MIDI from Dorico to Cubase. For the Horn, violins/viola, and celli parts, I initially used the Spitfire BBCSO (Symphonic Orchestra) sample library. For the piano I used Eagle (Halion 7). In Cubase, I added the drum, percussion, and bass guitar for which I used Superior Drummer (Toontrack; Decades library), Session Percussionist (Native Instruments), and EZbass (Toontrack; Frettless bass) respectively. Next, I played the piano part and recorded this as MIDI. However, for the last two choruses and outro, I used EZkeys (Toontrack). At this stage, I made various edits to ensure that all parts nicely fitted together, and I optimized the ‘track delays’ for the BBCSO tracks to optimize the playback timing. At a later stage, I exported the drums and percussion as individual audio tracks (e.g., kick, snare, bongo, shaker, etc) into Cubase. The bass and EZkeys tracks were imported as midi and rendered to audio. All these audio tracks were unprocessed and without effects, which was taken care of during mixing in Cubase.
I have hesitated to have an actual drum recorded like I did for some of my other songs, but this time I very much liked the drum part that I made with superior drummer and, therefore, decided to keep it as is.
Next, I added the lead vocal (Teda) and guitar (Bart Dietvorst). The DI guitar parts I reamped using the Kemper Profiler. Teda also provided me with some background vocals (which are still in the song) but I decided to also ask Romina Barba to add additional background harmonies. I asked Joylin to play the string parts that I composed in Dorico to replace the BBCSO libraries. She played the two violin parts and the viola. In the final song the horns and celli are still played using the BBCSO. At this stage, I also decided to have a violin solo (instead of a piano solo that I initially had in mind), and to have the violin playing a solo during the outro. Both played by Joylin. Needless to say that all their contributions were great and really shaped the song.
With all these parts in place, I finally added various synthesizer parts that I played on my Roland XP80 or Komplete Kontrol S88 using synthesizer VSTi’s.
Image: A selection of virtual instruments that I used in Brighter Days: For the rhythm section, I used Superior Drummer 3 and EZbass from ToonTrack. Session Percussionist from Native Instruments. For the horns and celli I used Spitfire Symphonic Orchestra. For the piano, I used Eagle (HALion 7, Steinberg).
Image: Several screenshots of the Cubase Pro 14 Project showing the various tracks of the song, and some of the plugins that I used during mixing.
Image: Several screenshots of the WaveLab Pro 12 Project during mastering.
Mixing and Mastering
Mixing was done in Cubase Pro 14. A pre-master was done using WaveLab Pro 12 by Antoine van Kampen. The final master was produced by Jeffrey de Gans of Da Goose Mastering.
According to Jeffrey de Gans: “In the high it was a bit sharp and in the low it lacked some body and power. A bit of ying/yang balance as it were, but in the high on the vocals especially, I had to tackle some things. Now the balance is right and it is friendlier in the high. The v1 is a bit firmer, the v2 is a bit more dynamic and a bit more punchy in the low“.
Indeed, listen to the big difference between the vocal in my master and in the version mastered by Jeffrey. I have distributed the v2 version to Spotify and other streaming platforms.
Image: Jeffrey de Gans owner of Da Goose Mastering.
Chord progression + Lyrics
Spotify
Listen to full version on Spotify.
SoundCloud
The final mix (Antoine van Kampen, Skippy Studio)
Master 1 (Antoine van Kampen, Skippy Studio)
Master 2 (Full version V1; Mastered by Jeffrey de Gans at Da Goose Mastering).
Master 3 (Full (Spotify) version V2; Mastered by Jeffrey de Gans at Da Goose Mastering).
Multitrack
If you want to have a got at it, the multitrack is available via Dropbox.
