Who am I

My name is Laura Cruz, I am a music production student from Mexico City and at the moment I am studying abroad in Edge Hill University in Ormskirk, England. For my Music Production Module, I was given the assessment to produce (organise, record, mix, and master) an original song, not necessarily mine.

The assessment

At the beginning I didn’t know which song I was going to produce and I think that me and the other international students had an extra challenge because we didn’t know any musicians and we are not in our homeschool to know every rule or procedure for our assessments.
After thinking a lot about it I thought I could produce a song I wrote on my own since it already had lyrics and melody. The song is called Eventually.

The song

On November 2018 I had an inspiration moment in my life and though I wrote several songs during that time, the song Eventually came out of me just in a few minutes. I usually write songs in Spanish since it is my first language but I still don’t know why this one came out in english and when I made it, in that moment every word on it made sense. This is a very personal song that mainly talks about me and my not very good behavior with my personal relationships. And I really wanted someone else to sing it because I can sing enough to write songs but not to actually record a song.
I knew this was the song I wanted to produce for my Music Production module this semester because it didn’t need a lot of instruments. After having established the song I wanted to produce, I thought that I could also use it for my ensemble performance module in which the assessment was to perform a song, so I asked my ensemble if we could play my song and if they could also be part of the recorded song. This ensemble is made of a guitarist called Thomas Armstrong, who is a very good musician and also music production student in Edge Hill and a theatre singer called Caroline Didelot, an international student like me but from the United States.

The song

Eventually at the beginning had only melody and lyrics, that’s why I had to find the proper harmony to make it sound the right way, to do that I had to spend some time at the Arts Centre building in Edge Hill University playing piano and singing my song in order to finish all the music.

After this, the song ended up looking like this:

The rehearsals

For the rehearsals we managed to meet every week at least half an hour to work on the song, Caroline and me made a good team by arranging the melody to her kind of voice and to help her perform it the best possible way. Tom the guitarist was very good at listening what I wanted for the song. On the rehearsals I always played the piano.

The Recording

The song was recorded on May 10th on the Creative Edge building inside Edge Hill University, I arrived before the musicians in order to make sure everything was set and ready to record for the moment they arrived. The used DAW for this session was Pro Tools. At the beginning I had some trouble with the audio because the software was not receiving signal from the microphones, but I just restarted everything and at the end it worked.
The microphones i used were the following:
For the voice I used the Neumann TLM 67 and it was positioned according to the height of my singer.
The guitar was recorded with two microphones, for the neck I used a Neumann KM184 and for the bout, an AKG C414 Both approximately 6 inches from the sound source I wanted to record.
For the piano I used the piano stereo technique I learned on class and I used a pair of AKG C414 to record it.
The process was to record first a complete track only with piano, and over it we recorded the voice, and then added guitar. After this we recorded again the piano including the piano solo this was played by the singer since I couldn’t record myself. I made sure that the input levels were appropriate for each recorded instrument and that the musicians were on tempo.

The mix

For the mix I started by picking the final take for each instrument, then editing them in order to have a in tempo song, I continued to clean the sound the finest as possible. Then I adjusted the levels of each element, added an Aux Input to send a reverb to the vocals and the guitar and tried to add an appropriate equalizer for each and finally a compressor to get good levels.
This process was for me the most difficult since I’ve never mixed a complete song before and I really don’t know how to do it. But I tried to make it the most informed way I could.

The master

For the mastering I went to a personal meeting with my tutor and he gave me a lot of tips for the master, and the one that impressed me the most was the EQ one, instead of increasing the volume for certain frequencies as I did, he taught me to first take out frequencies I don’t need in my song, also I learned a lot about the organisation of the session and ways to make Pro Tools the most efficient for the mix. After that he also taught me the mastering process and the reasons why it has to be done.

What I learned

I really learned a lot from this assessment, I think I am much more confident in the process of talking to musicians and organising the rehearsal and most of all I think I learned about leadership and that I can actually bring great projects to life, even if I have a lot of things to learn from mixing and mastering.