Composition For Dummies Pt. 4 – The Recording (2nd Part)

Let's begin this month's post with a quick recap. Your guide is down, drums and bass are recorded and now your next job is building the track up with guitars and keyboards.

First thing to be aware of – the vocal melody. EVERYTHING you do is in support of this. You need to be aware of the notes, the rhythmic placement, the frequencies and the placing in the stereo spectrum and reverb levels. So you really need to ensure that you're working with a guide track.

Consider chord voicings that “frame” the melody rather than encroach on it's space – for example, classic rock tunes tend to have higher pitched vocals, so chugging power chords will sit nicely underneath them, but the Smith's King Of Jangle Johnny Marr has often talked about capoing his guitar parts to sit above Morrissey's distinctive lower pitched vocals.

Consider dynamics – how to build a rhythm part for a verse that develops. A good trick is to keep the first half of the verse sparse and gently weave in another layer behind the vocals in the second half. A great example of this is in the classic “Sweet Child O' Mine” - whilst Izzy strums the D, Cadd9 and G chords, during the first half Slash hits a higher chord voicing at the 10^th, 8^th and 3^rd frets, holding it for a bar before doubling Izzy's open chord voicings but picking through them as arpeggios.

Consider tones and texture – do you want an “in your face” hard distorted sound for something like grunge, punk or thrash metal? Or are you looking for something gentler, perhaps blending acoustic sounds highlighted by clean (or clean-ish) electric single notes and chord fragments, as exemplified by bands like the Rolling Stones?

Once you've made your choices and worked up the guitar parts, it's time to track them. Every studio I've ever recorded at has always doubled the basic electric rhythm track, one hard left, one hard right. This gives a nice fat sound that leaves plenty of room for the vocals in the centre. Additional texture parts can be brought in towards the centre slightly, but always ensure that the centre is for the vocal line. Just as the singer always gets centre stage, the vocals always get the centre of the stereo spectrum.

EQ is a powerful tool here, and one of the key reasons for having a guide track – although most audio software has EQ plugins for “Male Rock Vocals”, “Female R&B Vocals” etc, the simple fact is that every voice is unique and you're going to need to tailor the EQ to your singer. Solo the vocal track (ie mute all the other stuff) and boost a frequency. Change that frequency until you find a sweet spot that boosts the vocal in the way you like and start cutting stuff that is too tinny and too boomy. Then, make sure you're cutting that frequency (not necessarily completely, but at least slightly) from any guitar parts that are playing alongside the vocals. You might lose something from the guitar sound, but the overall mix will be better – sometimes a really good, full, rich guitar sound actually works against you in a mix by covering frequencies needed by the vocals. Don't worry. When the guitar solo comes in, you won't have to share those frequencies.

Speaking of solos (assuming you have one) I tend to put them in the centre where the vocals would be, with ambience levels (reverb, delay) to taste. If you have a particular song in mind as a model for production values, this is a good place to reference it – something like AC/DC will have solos very upfront with little reverb and no delay, whereas a Pink Floyd solo will often have a hefty chunk of reverb and delay synchronised to the song's tempo.

Turning our attention to keyboards.... oh boy. You see, the problem here is that keyboards can mean damn near anything. Splodgy synths, piano, strings, brass... each one of these presents a different problem. So we'll limit our focus to what are probably the two most common sounds – piano and strings.

Now, far and away the easiest and most flexible way to go is not to record the sound of the keyboard at all, but to use the MIDI output to trigger the samples stored in your computer's audio software (if that doesn't make sense, then Google “MIDI” as this is a topic far too big to be addressed in a single blog post.. I'll get to it in time!). If you have the capability on your audio software (I use Cubase, but popular packages include Logic, Ableton and Pro Tools which all have this function), designate your track as “stereo”

For most piano-led songs, I find that emphasising the low end, the no-man's land between guitar and bass, works a treat in filling out a song's production without stepping on the toes of the guitar and vocals, and the now familiar EQ approach can be applied too – find which frequencies are emphasised in the vocals and cut them from the piano. If it's a guitar-based song with piano, cut the emphasised guitar frequencies too – if it's piano led, cut the frequencies from the guitar.

For strings and pads it's the same approach, although for actual melodic string parts I find that placing them above the vocals in terms of pitch works very well to help a chorus ring out, and a healthy dump of reverb can provide that Phil Spector-style ambience. A trick I use when I want a pad to be present but barely noticeable – felt, rather than heard, so to speak – is to set the reverb level to 100%, meaning that only the reveberated signal is heard, none of the “dry” signal. This provides a ghostly background wash of sound which can be very effective.

So ends this month's info dump! I hope this is of use to some of you out there – remember, TUNEICEF 2019 is alive and kicking and any contributed tracks will be welcome, and we'll be rocking the Cask Bah on Sunday December 15^th to launch this year's album!