Tri 4 Major Project: CMNSNS - Proof of Concept

During Tri 4 at SAE, we took on yet another major project. This time, instead of working on my own I decided to collaborate with one of my peers, Daniel Cross. Due to us both being from a "live band" background and usually listening to music styles varying from indie rock to metal, neither of us had much knowledge about more electronic music styles such as hip-hop, nor had we any idea how to write, produce and mix this style of music. Though it's not our usual listening preference, there were a select number of hip-hop artists that we were both into, and Daniel had an aspiring artist that was keen to lay down some tracks and get his name out there, so we gave ourselves the challenge of leaving our comfort zone and producing and mixing a 4 track EP for Clayton Shepherd aka CMNSNS. For each song we chose a different style or subgenre of hip-hop and aimed to capture that style. Daniel chose to produce two songs; one inspired by oldschool boom-bap artists, and a more modern slow chilled out song heavily influenced by drake. I produced the other two; one heavily influenced by vince staples using a very stripped back beat with lots of random percussion hits and dark sounding synth and bass, and one inspired by modern trap, embracing bright synths, bells and over the top kick drum patterns as well as the super obnoxious lyrics that seem to be the norm in this style of music. We met up often to give feedback on each others tracks and make sure we were both happy, then booked some time for our artist to record vocals over the tracks. We then sat down in the studio together to mix and bounce out the tracks.

(Cover artwork for the CMNSNS - Proof of Concept EP.)

We were successful in keeping up with the scope of our project. Our scope outline was to deliver four mixed tracks and we accomplished that. We aimed to have a session in the studio every Saturday after week 7, until the EP was completed. While we managed to finish the EP in time, we didn't manage to make it into the studio every week, as we did have a couple of small problems.

While we had most of the songs finished pretty early in the production stage, our artist didn't have all of his lyrics sorted out by the time he made it into the studio. Each session, a lot of the time was spent writing lyrics and trying to perfect the flow and pronunciation of certain words and lines. While this cost us some valuable recording time, I think this challenged us to really embrace the role of being a producer rather than just an engineer. Daniel and I really had a large influence on the lyric writing and would quite often change the beat up to fit certain phrases. It also didn't help that Clay couldn't usually make it into the studio on Saturdays until 1-1:30. We ended up skipping a couple of Saturday sessions because the lyrics weren't ready yet.

Another small problem was on my behalf. While the obnoxious trap style song was basically finished before we even gave our project pitch, I spent way too much time working on my other song. It wasn't till about week 10 or 11 that I decided I wasn't happy with the song at all and scrapped it completely. This meant that it was quite hard for clay to write lyrics for this one, as he didn't get the new song until very late in the trimester. However, even though this slowed us down quite a lot in the recording stage, I do believe this problem worked in our favour, as Clay was very excited about the new beat I had produced for him. This was the only song on the EP that actually had a solid verse/chorus/verse/chorus arrangement and it definitely ended up being my favourite song on the record. This is probably due to the fact that the song was inspired by one of my favourite hip-hop artists, Vince Staples.

I wouldn't really consider this a problem, but after recording was all wrapped up, Daniel and I were left quite clueless about how we should mix these songs. We both had lots of experience mixing typical guitar/bass/drums/vocals/rock music, but had never tried our hand in mixing hip-hop. My songs especially; they were produced in Ableton Live, where I had already applied reverb, delay, and some creative EQ. Not to mention I used good quality paid drum samples and 808 basses. So once I had exported the stems from Ableton and imported them into Protools, there really wasn't much mixing to do. Once we compressed the vocal (we used the outboard WA76 compressor on all the vocal tracks on the EP), applied some very minimal corrective and creative EQ, and got a good overall balance of volume between tracks, there really wasn't much more we could do it and we were pretty happy with how it sounded. Daniel's songs were produced in Protools, so a lot of the mixing was done in the production stage, as he was writing the songs. Again, a lot of the tracks in these songs were made using good quality paid samples as well as synths and basses. While the boom-bap song did feature real guitar and bass, Daniel had already applied the correct EQ, compression, and effects before the final mix took place.

In future projects similar to this one, Daniel and I will ensure we keep constant communication and give helpful feedback on each other's songs. We quite often chat on facebook and at SAE anyway so this was pretty easy, however next time we will try harder to keep the artist in the loop, and constantly send him ideas and beats. To prevent time management problems, we will aim to have beats finished earlier, so that the artist has plenty of time to have lyrics sorted. We will continue to discuss with the artist about the styles of music they want to be present in their record, and their influences, so that we can continue to produce music that the artist is happy with. Overall, I think this project was a great success. We did have a couple of minor hiccups but we allocated ourselves plenty of spare time in our scope document to plan for this, and we still managed to have the project completed to a standard that both we and the artist were happy with, about a week ahead of our deadline. The EP can be streamed and downloaded at www.cmnsns.bandcamp.com.

You can also find CMNSNS and check out some studio antics on Facebook here.