what is your producing,betaking,recording process?

dmajor100

New member
Just wanting to be noisy and get a feel how other seasoned producers create their works and develop it into a final product and what kinda rituals you go about making sure that each part of the song is in your own perfect way.For me lately i have been taking my time with my best work until i come to a brick wall and have to just take time off to freshen up my ears again and go back with a fresh mind to further add ideas and sounds.Ill also listen repetitively to instruments and make sure they are in harmony and each note complements the others and nothing is clashsing. As far as arrangement i usually am random about this and kinda start from the main melody and then if i feel brave enough ill decide if it needs a complete different intro or outdo that sets it apart from the main melody. i would love to know how pros arrange there songs especially scores how do they decide to arrange do they start from intro and progress or is it random creativity?
 
Actually this is an interesting subject. Every persons workflow is as unique as their music, but there are some matters of common sense, and its also helpful to question your creative process in terms of workflow when you are in a rut.
I usually start playing around with stuff, setting some simple goals and seeing where my mind takes me for a while, trying to find out what I want to hear. Let me explain with an example:


soundcloud .com/kalleenkelmann/in-over-my-head (you have to copy/paste it since I'm not allowed to post links yet)


On this song I started by producing that big explosion at 1:40. Somehow I had the picture of a huge spacecraft landing on earth in my head, and I felt like there should be awesome superheroes coming out of it, hence the massive synths. After I did that for a couple of hours I realized I had spent a lot of time on this, and instead of just letting it rot in my folder of eternal works in progress I wanted to make it a song. Since the section I had was so massive and huge (well, supposed to be, i did not get it to be as massive as I wanted because after all, I'm still learning...) I thought it needed some kind of verse, so I made a toned-down version of the synthesizers and made the beat it opens with. I used toms with changing pitch for something the Hi-Hats would usually do, because I am always trying to be special, and I had heard this done somewhere before and liked it. Then I wrote the lyrics ... I had some basic idea how they would go and figured them out as I went, I had a specific situation in my head that they would be about and I did my best to make them rhyme without being too cheesy (thats always hard).
After that it was just a matter of getting everything to sit right in the mix and make it coherent, delays and reverbs always help a lot with making things seem like they belong together. There comes a point when I decide to make a quick arrangement and a first mixdown to show to my friends because I'm always ecited to know what they think. After working on 3 minutes of music for 8 hours I usually crave some feedback and social interaction so I set aside my perfectionism for a while and just make a version that sort of works.
I always mix as I go along and have a pretty good idea how I want everything to sit in the mix when the arrangement takes shape, but I usually cant really do proper mixing on my own tracks without letting at least some days pass, because my ears have gotten so used to the way it sounds its really hard to be objective at that point. So this song hasn't gone through extensive mixing, it's basically a rough mix that I will get to when I need to or feel like it.
So yeah, that's one of my creative processes.

I sometimes arrange for Big Band, where I have to work in scores and dont have the luxury of instantly hearing every decision I make, it takes a lot of imagination and experience to be able to do that, but at the end of the day a great band will make a coherent arrangement sound great, with live musicians its more about letting the performers take care of making it "exciting" or "fresh" by giving them room to express their musical voice instead of trying to dictate everything ... scoring for real musicians and working with samples/synths on a computer are different beasts...
 
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