I've been working on a new song using Luna,
Universal Audio's recording system and for this song.
Amazingly I've used sounds from just one of the included instruments called
Shape. All the instruments pads, keys, drums,
everything, except my vocals of course. Today I'll walk you through
the entire process of how I layered all the sounds to produce
this song. (Sanjay C singing his song)
For those of you who don't know, Luna is the free recording system software that
works with Universal Audio interfaces only it's a complete recording solution
It's got exclusive Universal Audio instruments and effects included
and some special tape and summing processing
that you can't get anywhere else I'll show you how I used everything
in this song so I started with this synth pad from the Shape plugin it's a
combination of triangle poly and swirling waves which are two presets
included with Shape.
The nice thing about it is you can set the levels differently
so that's just triangle poly and swirling waves
so that gave the song a nice movement already to start with now I needed
something to contrast that with so I needed something kind of like a
pluck or some kind of keys or something so I actually used this
time sound which is kind of a Rhodes
sound to that I added a delay using the Cooper
Time Cube I'm using mostly Universal Audio
plugins here I do use a couple others here and there I'll show you those as
well.
So those two instruments really got the song going and there's enough space for
me to add vocals and I wanted to make sure I kept that space there as well
so with those two going all I needed to do next is start to build kind of a
rhythm with a with the drums and shape actually
includes a lot of cool drum sounds so of course I started with
a kick just to keep the rhythm of the song
so that gets things going I added a little bit more percussion
as the song progresses I add some more sounds to the percussion let's just hear
those
one of the most prominent instruments you're going to hear is the Cello.
Shape has a beautiful Cello sound that's actually made by Spitfire Audio
many of you know Spitfire Audio they make beautiful orchestral type of sounds
let's listen to that alone because it's so good.
It sounds so natural I love that they included
Spitfire orchestral sounds in shape it makes such a huge difference to have
really nice orchestral sounds when you're producing. All right,
then I wanted something to contrast it was sounding very orchestral
and I wanted something that made it sound a little bit more
personal a little bit more intimate so I chose this Melotron
instrument sound and it's a Flute you know the old Melotron instrument
well this is the type of Flute sound that it created it's very
made very famous by The Beatles and 'Strawberry fields'. Here's what I did with
it.
You hear how those Flutes sound much closer than the strings.
It just seems like I'm sitting and playing that while I'm singing to the
Melotron Flute sound I use the Moog filter that's also a UAD plugin
and I also EQ'd it with the Sonex Oxford EQ
so you can hear now that all I've got going is the pad,
the Cello, and that Melotron Flute and then and then that electric Piano
sound comes back in every now and then. There's one other thing you'll hear in
the background of the music and it's the sound of these little crystal kind of
sounds and all I did for that is I copied the
same thing that I was playing with the tine sound and copied it over
to a new track and then used Soundtoys Crystallizer
to give it those crystal sounds.
Crystallizer by Soundtoys is like a granular echo thing and it just keeps
echoing in different ways and different pitches to make this
crystal like sound it's really cool and it adds a nice ambiance to the sound
as the song progresses I want it to get a little bit bigger
and wider and more dramatic when the second verse comes up I added this drone
sound from Shape it's uh the WAV Rider preset
not much by itself it's just a very simple
synth holding one note and I sent that to some Reverb
but then what I did is I used the Moog filter and
the SPL twin tube to add some harmonics to it and some distortion
turned the drive up a little bit and I used some of the
LFO on the Moog filter and with the saturation and harmonics using the SPL
twin tube more like an electric Guitar right now
you hear on the pad and the drone and even the bass I'll show you the bass
in a second um it's got this pumping effect to it I'm using the LFO tool
by expert records for that let's hear that electric Guitar
synth along with the other instruments
you hear it come in and out
there it is now at this point in the song I also
bring in the base for the bass I'm using Driven
bass which is a preset as well as from Orange Tree samples
really good quality samples included in here.
It's not doing much it's just kind of holding one note and has a pumping
effect as well.
okay that's great at that point I knew I was ready to bring in my vocals
and you see all the blue tracks here are my vocals and some ad-lib effect type of
vocal sounds in there when I recorded the vocalsI used the Neve Unison preamp
for my voice and the mic that I use is the Earthworks
SV 33 which is an excellent mic. It's expensive but it
sounds amazing and I'm still getting used to singing
with it but it's pretty sensitive which picks up the
nicest nuances of my vocals in this song let's listen
to just the lead vocals with the music
the mic really picked up that D sound at the end so well didn't it for the lead
vocals I processed it using got auto-tune going first got a
little bit of the waves R box and the vocal rider in there
and then I put it through the Distressor and a little De-esser and EQ'd it
there were some sharp sounds in there that I needed to get rid of that's about
it oh I did send all of this to a reverb and a compressor as well
I'm sending my vocals to this compressor and adding the Neve summing on it as
well I added also some background vocals and
some little ad-libs these little vocal sounds from some
samples I have there you go.
(Sanjay C singing his song)
I really wanted to leave some open space in the song so you'll hear that there
are spaces where I'm not singing it's just silence
but it just creates this nice space in the music.
All right
I'm still working on the song, it needs a little chorus section but as i progress
with it i'll show you even more of what I do to
develop it fully in Luna. I was actually pretty surprised in
my experience with Luna this is the first time I did a start
to finish using the instruments in Luna and the full
production in Luna and I've learned a lot out as I was doing
it one of my favorite features that I'd never realized was in here before
is version so you can do versions of tracks and I never used this before
so you'll see on my vocals here i've actually got several versions
that I recorded so this is version one version two I ended up using this
version three and you can create as many versions as
you want and easily switch between them it's
so convenient that's it for the breakdown.
Keep Making The Music YOU Love
and hey watch one of these videos
next
(fading out with SanjayC's beautiful song....)