Sometimes as a music student you can really hyper focus and become obsessed with a piece of work, working through the night without realising it, but sometimes it’s impossible to write a sentence without going off on at least 3 tangents. In fact, I’m meant to be working while writing this but I couldn’t stop thinking about this.
At the moment I’ve got 3 modules on the go at uni; Acoustics, Music Technology Research and Developing a Professional Profile. The first two involve a lot of reading about studio design, acoustics in materials, different types of technology developed for music etc. etc. and there’s ALWAYS some reference which takes you elsewhere. It could be argued this is a good thing but I often have about 20 tabs open because of it. It’ll reference and artist or a song and I’ll go and listen to that, then listen to loads of other similar stuff, which will give me loads of ideas and inspiration to go and write my own music, then I’ll start writing music, then get caught up perfecting guitar tones and the next thing you know 3 hours has passed and you haven’t really achieved anything.
I guess when you work/study in music it’s all part of the process. You can’t get anywhere without doing something else first, and you can’t write music without being inspired in some way by other music. I guess that means nothing’s truly original? who knows, it’s not time for a tangent now. Back to work for me.
Today is Tuesday 23rd March 2021. This marks exactly one year since the UK first went into national lockdown, and here we are in the third one. COVID-19 has changed all of our lives, and we’ve had to develop a new way of living – especially within the world of music. But what does this mean?
Firstly, we are all having to stay at home, and most of us are not fortunate enough to live in studios or with other musicians, I am one of that unlucky 99%. However, I am lucky in other respects. I have the necessary equipment to be able to make music from home, with a laptop with several DAWs installed (Pro Tools, Logic Pro X, Ableton Live, Cubase), a Focusrite Scarlett interface and Presonus mic given to me by Coventry University. Along with my Behringer monitors these items on my desk have become a makeshift studio for the past year, and its surprising how much you can achieve. I found myself very motivated sitting at home in the various lockdown and got down to writing a lot of instrumental music. There are 2 or 3 songs on my Soundcloud profile and I’m thinking about how to distribute the rest of them at a later date. I’m sat with 42 songs, with various levels of completion, from 5 or 6 basic ideas through to 6 or 7 completed instrumental pieces, and my hard drive is a mess of awful song titles (below)
However, after a year, writing the same sort of stuff over and over again with 40 odd guitar dominated songs can become frustrating, especially when barely anyone wants to listen to music without vocals these days.
This is why I’ve decided I want to learn to sing. I’ve never been able to and it’s always been frustrating while trying to get ideas across. I tried practicing a few times and could never really control my voice and the notes it was singing well enough so decided to take more of a scientific approach. I’ve been recording all the singing I’ve been doing recently, and always practicing with headphones and a mic rather than acoustically. I’ve found this helps, and the added help of being able to load my voice into a program like Melodyne and really see exactly what I’m doing and where improvement is needed is almost like having a singing teacher, which is fun. (Although I’m not convinced my housemates think it’s enjoyable.) I’m a long way from singing well in front of people or releasing anything but we’re closer than where I started… I even managed to sing a G for my housemate yesterday without any reference, like some discount version of perfect pitch with only one note (safe to say he didn’t seem impressed).
On a somewhat related note, my colleagues and I have been providing online sessions and content in the form of zoom calls and youtube videos for the children we work with, and I’m currently working on a video on how music is made, which I’m sure some of them will find interesting, in my spare time. In the video I’m making a cover of the song Real Gone from the soundtrack of the Pixar movie cars. I’m playing every instrument (except drums, I’m using MIDI drums) and also singing, so it’s great to have a purpose to all this, and I’m sure their feedback will be nothing if not honest! If anyone’s reading this and has any tips for me please DM me on twitter @adamheathmusic , it would be much appreciated!
I didn’t plan to write this post but was just finishing up some work on a song I’ve been writing for the day and saw the arrangement window of my session – thought this is something that I could write about that might be interesting.
In this instance, I’m writing in Logic Pro X. My go to DAW for recording or working on projects would usually be Pro Tools, because it’s vastly more powerful and just better, as well as being the standard DAW so projects can more easily be shared between people. However, Logic has a very intuitive UI, and although it is slightly limited in features, for writing I find it best, as its simple UI means that the writing process isn’t held back by trying to get certain things to be how you want, which can be a problem in Pro Tools due to its complexity.
With the amount of time I’ve spent writing during this lockdown period, I’ve worked on building a workflow, especially considering that I never had any sort of template before now for working in, and would spent loads of time setting up tracks, inputs/outputs and mix-buses in my session before I ever got anything done. Because of this I created a “Home Writing” template in Logic, which looks like this:
My Home Writing Template
What this essentially consists of is 4 track stacks, for Drums, Bass, Guitar and Synths. The drum stack is a stock logic one – using the “SoCal+” preset, which is essentially Logic’s standard drum kit sound but in the form of what Logic calls a “Producer Kit,” creating a track stack with separate tracks for each drum and various others like Room mics and a leak track. This just gives me a lot more control over the drum sound than one of the standard non-producer kits, which just sum all of this into one track and does all the processing for you using presets. The reason I use this is because I don’t play drums, nor own a MIDI controller or drum kit, so this is the best way for me to write drum parts, giving me the most control. I input notes in the piano roll after working out what I want essentially through air drumming at my desk.
Next is the Bass stack. This consists of just two tracks – the first of which is a software instrument of a bass guitar. I don’t really play bass nor do I own one, so this is the best way for me to get a bass sound and understand what it sounds like in the song. The second track is an Audio track with the input set to the mono output from my Line 6 Helix, which I get all of my guitar and bass sounds from. This means that once the bass part is written, there is a track ready for me or someone else to record the part on a real bass.
The guitar stack just has two audio tracks, one for the left output of my Helix, and one for the right meaning I can record stereo guitar parts. In most of my projects, this stack is duplicated a number of times because, with guitar as my primary instrument, music I write often has four or more guitar parts, all of which I’ll record in stereo.
Finally, there is a stack called Synths. This is just 2 empty software instrument channel strips, ready for me to choose a synth sound I like, or any other software for instrument for that matter. It means I can quickly get sounds to put in organ or piano parts, and I’ve put a string quartet in a recent composition in this part of the session.
This template rarely ever stays the same in structure – it evolves as I work through the song and becomes more suited to the composition. Below is an example, a screenshot from the end of my writing session tonight on an instrumental song which has the working title “Wind”.
The biggest difference between this particular project and the template is the quantity of guitar parts. The guitar stack has been duplicated a number of times, to a total of 6 guitar parts which are named as follows:
GUITAR 1
GUITAR 2 01C T
GUITAR 2 02D S
GUITAR 3.1
GUITAR 3.2
GUITAR 4
“GUITAR 1” is the lead guitar part, so takes the first spot and is situated uppermost out of the 6 parts.
“GUITAR 2” is split into 2 parts – both being called GUITAR 2 means to me that they are playing the same, or very similar, thing but with tonal difference. Here, the second part of the track name relates to a preset code on the Line 6 Helix, so I know which tone I am using for that part when I come back to it and the T and S relate to which of my guitars is being played for this part. T means Telecaster and S means Stratocaster.
“GUITAR 3” has a similar situation of 2 separate guitars playing the same part, so they are named 3.1 and 3.2, as I haven’t yet made the final decision on tonal aspects of the part.
“GUITAR 4” also lacks detail of which preset and guitar are being used, and this is the last part as it is mostly embellishments and harmonies, not really crucial to the song.
All of these track stacks are also summed into an additional mix bus to adjust the overall level of the guitars in relation to the rest of the mix and add any processing that I want to be consistent across all guitar parts.
Something which I find very useful and if very important to my process is the takes system. I’m not actually sure what Logic calls it but in Pro Tools it is called Playlists. Keeping several guitar takes in the same track makes it extremely easy to go between different takes to listen to variants of parts in order to finalise how the part is played, as well as choosing parts from different takes to make sure I get the best overall performance. This is most useful for recording guitar solos, which I always improvise. This means I can play the solo a number of times without stopping and go back and choose my favourite at a later point.
I hope this has been an interesting read, and do get in touch via twitter, @adamheathmusic or by emailing me – adamheathmusic@outlook.com
Being in lockdown for the past two months having nowhere to go has left me with a lot of time – especially with my workplace closed & the fact that I can’t work from home.
I’ve put a lot of this time towards taking care writing my own music – something I’ve never really done seriously on my own, having written in a band and always really focused on that. It’s been a very different experience coming up with everything myself and making all the decisions but has also felt liberating, being able to take the songs wherever I want and not have to worry about the playing styles or technical limitations of others – just my own boundaries which I can push with all this time.
Considering this, I’ve ended up writing things in styles and using techniques I wouldn’t have considered before. The first song I wrote was actually my first time ever writing outside of common time (4/4) and is mainly in 6/8 time, and slower than what I’d usually write, although the chorus is in 4/4. I don’t have a name for this song yet and also feel that I need to find a singer to add some vocals to it because, although I have written two guitar solos it doesn’t feel like an instrumental song to me. If you’re a singer reading this and interested in working with me, get in contact through the links at the top of the page!
The next composition was a track called Concrete. It is named after the genre which it is based around – Musique concrète. This is a genre based around using raw recorded sounds and modifying them to create a composition in the form of a sort of montage, these songs often have no consistent pulse so lack a real sense of tempo and just sound interesting. I kept mine short at just under a minute long and its certainly an interesting listen – I think it will be the intro to any compilation of these songs. It can be found on my website.
The third song I wrote is called Rain. It was also my final composition for my first year of uni and you can hear an early version of it on my main website. It originally only had MIDI instruments as this was the mandate for the composition and was written in Steinberg Cubase, a software I am not familiar with, nor did really enjoy using, but this presented an entertaining challenge and resulted in a different song than I perhaps would have written in more familiar software. I have now transferred it to Pro Tools, my preferred DAW and am going to re record the guitars and bass with real instruments to start then see where it goes.
The next song does not have a title yet, but I am using the working title “wind” just because I couldn’t think of anything and it keeps to a theme with Rain. It came about from a guitar loop I made while playing around with a looper and learning hybrid picking. Improvising over the loop I wrote a melody I quite like and have since expanded the song to around the 4 minute mark adding choruses and a couple of other different sections. I’m yet to decide whether to put vocals on it. The recording of the initial improvisation can be found on my website under “Idea 21-4-19 (Wind V1). This is currently my favourite of the songs I have written.
I have four more songs currently in the works, although these ones are much less complete than the songs I’ve written about above. The first is currently titled “Seven” simply because it is in 7/4 time. The drum part for this song is almost entirely written, but there are only ideas as far as melody and other parts go. This is a new approach for me as I’m not a drummer but using MIDI drums in a DAW is very fun and certainly a challenge to make them sound convincing. I have one more song out of common time, this is in 3/4 and has more of a ballad vibe, currently just bass drums and piano and just a verse so far.
The remaining two songs are the most rocky ones I am working on. “Beat” is the working title for a rock song based on a drum beat that popped into my head one night when I couldn’t sleep and I whispered into voice notes on my phone to work on the following day. The final song is a song based around bass and guitars moving in different directions melodically and tying to create interesting harmonies, which I’ve not really done too much of before.
If you’ve made it to here – thanks for reading 🙂 if you’re a musician and would be interested in collaborating or need someone to produce/engineer some songs then get in touch and we’ll see what happens.
Don’t forget to follow me on twitter – @adamheathmusic – I am going to try and be more active on there.
I hope everyone stays safe & happy during this difficult time.
