[Music]
Hey I'm Laurel, I'm a musician and producer.
This song is called 'Life Worth Living' off my debut album 'Dogviolet'
and I'm going to show you now some of the production and mixing stuff
This song I wrote probably a year before I actually produced it
I had a real hard time doing the production because it was the first song
I produced for my album and I didn't know what style I wanted it to be in.
So originally it kind of started with this guitar and just the vocals
[Music]
and so I was kind of playing around with this guitar sound for a while it
changed a lot and then I just started building the track up really
after that I would have put a piano down just because I always put a piano down
to kind of build the rest of the track up anyway just because it's easier
to you know put it down, put all the guides over it, sing the whole song over it
and then build a track around it.
Some peopleI know start kind of producing and they do it in section by section by section
but for me I tend to write on the guitar or on the piano and then I produce around it
So there is a million guitars
in this track actually and I didn't record it through an amp which I normally do
just because I remember I started recording it out my mom's house in Southampton
just randomly one evening I just plugged my guitar into a really old
like speakers and interface and I was just jamming out on the first guitar I
ever bought which is a Gibson Epoch, it's the first electric guitar, it was so bad
so out of tune but somehow there was some magic that happened and it really
inspired the rest of the track to be made and so they were all re-recorded but
they've all been put through the Waves GTR amp which is one my personal favourites
and there's a lot of guitars that kind of overlapping
which is kind of what a lot of my album is really
it's the only way I produce is just play loads of guitar
so there's quite a lot going
on at the same time but they're all panned and all just put in different
places but they've all got the same sort of sound really it's kind of like that
it's a bit baritone a bit rough
and then this is the chorus
It's generally my way of producing, putting loads and reverb on things
but I also had quite a difficult time mixing it because of the nature of the songs
there's loads of reverb, loads of stuff going on which fills up a lot of space
meaning that sometimes the mix just sounds super murky and it's not defined
or at all that was a bit of a nightmare I don't know how it got round that
to be honest, I probably just put another compressor on
so that's the guitars really
and then after that the thing that I found that most difficult in this track
was the drums because I don't really write with a beat in mind sometimes it's
quite difficult for me to form something that I think is complementary to the
track that doesn't override what I'm doing
so that took a while
and I ended up with this random random beat which I actually made with...
this
I don't know if you've ever used drummer on Logic but it is pretty spectacular
when I got really stuck and my friend had told me about this thing and he said oh
don't just don't need to just make a beat from scratch like just use this
this software, I'd already kind of found drum sounds that I really liked and I
dragged this out between tracks and changed all of the you know the kick
drum, the snare, I didn't use what they'd used in here
and this is the beat we end up with in the end
and it's also got
a lot of breakbeat stuff which was an apple loop
classic good old Apple loops
and this was just
completely cut up like it didn't sound anything like that I've
cut it up loads and just moved it all over the place
and then just putting loads of effects on it
the main thing on this was just I
did so much automation on it with the EQ-ing and also the reverb that I think
that it really, I don't know, this is my favorite part the track to be honest
if we do this
cos the actual programmed drums are really simple
there's not much to them it's very like
sparse
and then the actual drums themselves I always layer things so I think there's a
there's quite a few different kicks in here I think there's like three kicks
we'll just play the kick quickly
and I do this just because I think it gives a really good texture
I think sometimes it just gives it a bit more oomph like there's
there's different parts of different kicks that I want to use
so actually I tried to use this kick formula and some of this kit on the rest of the other
tracks in the in the album just to give it a bit of continuity before I put live
drums on it because these are all underneath them just because I'd really
liked how this one came out and the same of the snare I sometimes I layer up a
lot of snares as well I layer up a lot of stuff I think that's
the way I produce when I don't know what else to do just layer
and that's the drums really
the bass is actually, the rest of the
bass is probably all real bass because I've got a nice new bass now but this
bass is just MIDI bass and it sounds really bad when you solo it
I'll play it to you
this is so classic MIDI bass
and it's just so random but you know what you put it in a track and it just works
Piano, I always use exactly the same piano, its on Kontakt
it's The Giant and it's all that jazz
I've never used a different one
You know what? If it isn't broken don't fix it
and then so that's all that with like the breakbeat
vocal stuff
because that's all there is left really, vocals
because a lot of my tracks there's not much to them
let's have a look
With the vocal I just experiment loads, that's the main thing that I'm doing with all of this
but especially the vocals
once I've got the main melody and the lyrics I'll put the guide in
and then everything else is just experimenting
and then just harmonies I love singing harmonies
but that's all experimentation really I mean there's no formula
you just start singing and see what works and that's mainly like
all of the production I do, all of the writing I do is just me feeling
around trying to figure out what I think sounds good.
For me with the mix
the one thing I found difficult was mixing the vocal because I'm a vocalist probably above
everything else I play so I tend to want to mix my vocals really loud and
mixing vocals is also it's very...
everyone has a different idea of how loud a vocal should be
I love the vocal being in the forefront
when you're mixing it yourself and it's you singing, I think it's really difficult not to
make it super loud and the vocals in my records are all, they are super loud
but I like the vocal being the main part in song that's just how I like it and I
know if I was in an indie band you might not have the vocals loud
but that was a challenge for me making sure the vocals fit in and were clear enough
I think sometimes if they're not EQ'd right or if they're not in
the right place you miss words, it's not as clear, I don't like that either
So that was difficult.
This is also probably the first song I've ever mixed
and the only reason I did originally mix the song was because I
didn't have any money to get it mixed and I didn't have any money to get it mastered
and I wanted to release the song, I'd just left a record label and I
was in a bit of a limbo time and I needed to put something out I wanted to show
some people my new music, so I was like well I guess I'm just gonna have to
learn how to do it, and so I was like watching YouTube videos and trying to
make this, which is I think a bit hard to make sometimes anyway due to like
you can hear how much reverb is everywhere and I want it to be a really
spacious track like that.
So it took a while to finish but I'm really glad that it got there in the end as this song has
shaped the whole sound of Dogviolet, my first album as it was the first one I did for it.