Audio Recording and Sequencing Skills

I'm going to do Hey Jude by the Beatles as it's one of my favourite songs. It might be difficult as it's a long song but I feel capable of doing it.

Original:

 

Rendition:

https://soundcloud.com/lloy2-908796191/hey-jude-rendition-1

Planning

I found the personnel online and hope to match it with the following:

Piano - Me (melody and accompaniment)

Guitar - Classmate (Rhema/Alex/Abbey/Simeon)

Drums - Classmate (Cameron/Dinesh)

Tambourine - Me

Violin - Santini

Dhanish - Bass Guitar

All those listed were able to do it.

I got the tempo for Hey Jude, which was 76bpm. The tempo track on the Logic file has been set to this. Getting the tempo right first is paramount to making everything else sound right as it gives a beat for things to follow. I also looked up good ways of recording piano. Due to limitations I'm just going to use a condenser mic which is simple but effective for piano.

Recording

With this setup I recorded the piano backing for a verse, a chorus, and the coda; the verse and chorus recordings will be loop and manipulated to create variations. I used headphones so I could hear the 76bpm metronome without it interfering with the recording. Later I recorded drums and tambourine. I also got Santini in with her violin for the coda and we used a Shure SM57 dynamic mic. The recordings were surprisingly clear and had a good tone to it, part of which I put down to location; we used a small room with ridged wooden walls. 

There wasn't much time left by this point so I chose not to record Dhanish on bass.

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Editing

Capturing and Editing Audio Data

Using the copy/paste function I repeated the verses and choruses accordingly along with the bridge’s chord progression, an example of loop manipulation. This process was much quicker than it would have been to play the whole thing. Using loop manipulation too liberally, though, can be a risky idea when making music as it could easily lead to repetitiveness and an overly artificial sound. I think it sounds fairly natural in this rendition however as the loops are fairly long— it would have been more noticeable had I looped each bar of the song, territory of which the coda veers into.

Automation

I also automated the volume on the master track to fade out at the end of the song. The way this song ends has no defined conclusion, instead just ending, has this feel that the song never does end, we just stop hearing it; the final cyclical chord progression could extend to infinity.

In the coda, I put the melody on two octaves with the pitch shift tool and automated the upper octave's volume to come in slowly, escalating tension a little as the section progresses. Meanwhile the piano accompaniment's reverb is automated to increase as the song reaches a close to make things sound quite warm and cosy, leaving the listener on a positive note.

Software Sampling


To make somewhat of an orchestral sound in the coda I used the EXS24 sampler to make chords out of Tini's violin. They're on two octaves to gain a richer, fuller sound. In the end this wasn't really working so instead I equalised in a way that sounds like an old mellotron. This coincides with the violins slowly swaying from left to right through panning so as to wash over the listener. 

Time Stretching

I just couldn’t seem to get the timing right for the piano melody, so I did time stretching using the flex function. I set all regions to a 1/8 quantisation which worked really well.

Time stretching was a good technique for this simple monophonic recording (as seen in the picture, the monophonic setting is selected), but it might not have sounded as natural had the recording been polyphonic.

Stylistic Interpretation


I did multiple takes of the piano part and spliced together the best bits, as seen in the example picture. The scissors tool was very helpful in this action because it can literally slice a region in half, allowing you top easily take a smaller part out of it and move it around or even omit it entirely. This provided the best possible overall sound and I think the overlapping of recordings is quite seamless. 

What didn’t go so well was an experiment gone awry: I destructively edited the piano track and it was left fragmented into weird bits that chop and reverse into each other… it wasn’t bad enough that I felt I had to re-record but it is a shame. I now know the dangers of destructive editing and next time I'll make a copy first.

Choosing and Combining Sounds
I played the piano part on a fairly old piano that’s seen some wear in the hopes of reproducing a classic sound, but it hasn’t aged as well as the original’s has! The kick of the drum meanwhile provides a nice solid backdrop to the otherwise quite peaceful sound of the recording. Together they most fill out the lower frequencies while the violin and guitar cover the higher ones. The texture of the piano, tambourine, guitar and violins are also quite soft and the drums keeps things together with a defined beat.


Obviously reproducing a string ensemble wasn’t an option so I vouched for 4 violins in harmony instead, which is definitely more subtle/humble than the original but in exchange for lacking strength. I combined layering and a pitch-shift insert to achieve harmonies with just one violin.

Filter Cut-Off
I also altered sounds through filter cut-off. The piano is generally the same as it already was except I attempted to alleviate the clicking sound generated by the keys (it’s a kind of old piano). Some of the mid frequencies are dulled as a result. I think I was quite successful in cleaning it up, but if I was doing it again I’d trade authenticity for clarity. Drums have lower frequencies higher and lower frequencies amplified to make the cymbals less prominent relative to the strength at which they were played. This also lends some weight to an otherwise light kit. The guitar has its high frequencies very amplified and its low frequencies deemphasised because I wanted to highlight the fun, clean sound of Rhema’s playing.

Arrangement

Time signatures were tricky business; the song on two occasions does a short-lived shift to 6/4. One of the limitations of Logic seems to be that time signatures, unlike automation, cannot move with regions when dragging things around. This meant I had to repeatedly replace the shift in time signature as I moved about the project’s regions.

The sections of the song are marked with markers which made it easier to navigate the project and move things around. The song has four verses, two choruses, a long coda.

Structure 
The song has no defined introduction, simply opening with a piano establishing the key with two notes. Instruments build up from a lone piano to an ensemble with drums, tambourine, and guitar. The choruses go to a much softer texture than the verses to provide contrast, maintaining interest.The guitar is later swapped out in the coda for violins that again build up in layers. This creates the effect of progression which makes up for the relative repetitiveness of the song. The coda is the climax of the song which is why I played the piano a bit louder and the drums are energetic, both of which you can see here in the waveforms.


Processing

Online processing runs through a file on a DAW in real time. This takes longer than offline processing (which is for if you want to do it quickly), but produces higher quality audio, so I did online processing.

If you want to see my MIDI sequencing work, click here: https://lrbmusictech.blogspot.com/2017/11/work-in-progress-midi-sequencing-skills.html