WP2: The Process
In the first couple months of quarantine, I, like many others, desperately need some sort of outlet. Mine was a collaboration between me and one of my good friends, January. J was a bedroom producer I met while doing musical theatre work in my freshman year, and we immediately had a connection through our shared appreciation and love for music production. We would show each other the beats that we make, and check-in with each other if we had music questions. We kept up this relationship for a couple of years until I started a discussion last July about working as her mix engineer/manager. January never had an official release on Apple Music or Spotify and we both undertook the journey to release her first song.
Before going through my process as an engineer, I should first describe the journey that a song undergoes from conception to completion. (this is a traditional system, not every song strictly adheres to this structure; as well as being very simplified)
- Writing
Chords, melodies, structure, and lyrics. This is where the identity of the song is realized
2. Recording/Tracking
Here, the songwriter/artist will sit down with producers and recording engineers and record their ideas in some “physical form”, whether recorded onto vinyl, tape, or software/code.
3. Mixing
Very comparable to mixing when cooking, mixing music is all about putting the right amount of each ingredient in the songs. Except instead of salt and pepper, you’re combining the right amount of bass and vocals. Instead of grams or ounces, you’re tuning the loudness and frequencies of each element.
Important Terms:
Gain/Db
- Gain is just a fancy term for how loud something is, and is measured in Decibels
EQ
- Equalization (EQ) refers to the spectrum of frequencies that the human ear can perceive. Using gain, it can lower or increase specific frequencies. I.e. lows and highs.
4. Mastering
The final process before a song is released, Mastering is all about making the listening experience as smooth as possible and accessible on multiple systems and devices. Typically changes made at this stage are very subtle and specific to finely tune the listening experience.
The following is an overview of a typical process that the songs that I work on go through. I’ll be using January’s song Obsessed as an example, that we released last October. The process started with January sending over the multitrack from her Logic Session. And I got a folder that looked a lot like this:
This contains every individual audio file that layers together to create the full song. Once I have these I then export these into Ableton to mix.
I then create groupings of the tracks to stay organized, typically I separate the bass tracks, Vocals, Instruments, Leads, and Drums.
Before the mixing process even begins, you need to understand your objectives/goals for your stage of development of the song. For this song specifically, J expressed that they wanted to make the drums ‘fuller’. To achieve this, I replaced the kick drum they originally had with a new sample that was much deeper and more full than before.
Also a large part of what I did was working with an EQ, emphasising the desired frequencies on the vocal track, while subtracting the unnecessary low frequencies.
This process continued for every track on this song, and with a lot of back and forth and 7 mixes later, we were left with a mix that we were both satisfied with.
Once my job was finished, I sent over the stems/multitracks to our mastering engineer, who finalizes the “Master” mix that we deliver to Apple Music and Spotify.
But to get there we needed to find a distributor. There are a lot of distribution platforms that cater to independent artists, but the one that we liked the most was Distrokid. This allowed us to deliver the song on a release date to Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Pandora, Youtube Music, Social Media libraries like Instagram and Tiktok, and more.
Now, as of June of 2021, about one full year later than when we started working. our first ever song has amassed over 10,000 streams, thanks to the continued promotion and highlights on multiple playlists on Spotify. I am beyond proud of the work we’ve done, and we’re using this as the necessary momentum to finish the album that we’ve been working on.
